Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It’s one of many, many branches of id-tech’s ancient technological tree. Indeed, you’ll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve’s modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2.
Now, nearly three decades on from Half-Life’s release, a modder has decided to put Quake back into Half-Life. Or maybe it’s Half-Life back into Quake? Honestly, it’s hard to tell.
The mod in question is called Libre-life, and it’s a total conversion mod that aims to port Half-Life’s key assets, like entities, weapons, monsters and mechanics, into Quake sourceports derived from DarkPlaces and FTEQW, with the primary target being the Zircon Engine. It’s the creation of modder KleskBY, who aims to “combine support for Half-Life, Quake 1 [and] Quake 3 brush entities standard” according to Libre-life’s ModDB page.
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Why is Klesk doing this? Well, contrary to appearances, it has more to do with looking forward than looking back. Old game engines like GoldSrc tend to have hard-coded limitations that can affect its capability in various ways, like the maximum size of a map you can create.
The way around these limitations is to create a sourceport, like GZDoom (or its newer equivalent UZDoom) for Doom 2, or QuakeSpasm or its fork Ironwail for Quake. Such sourceports are what make mods like Brutal Doom or Arcane Dimensions possible.
Half-Life already has such a sourceport in Xash3D. However, Klesk cites several reasons for not just using Xash. The modder points out that Libre-life is intended to be more than just a straight engine port. “It can run on multiple Quake engines and could even run on Xash with enough adaptation work,” Klesk writes. “There is no need for the project to be locked to a single Half-Life based engine”.
Klesk also claims that Xash’s Half-Life reimplementation of Half-Life is “not technically superior” and that the Quake source-ports he’s focussed on provide “many capabilities that Xash does not.”
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Currently, Libre-Life is still in its early stages, but a fair amount of work has already been done, like reimplementing all of Half-Life 1’s weapons. You can see the results of Klesk’s work so far in the video above. For the most part it looks and sounds like Half-Life, though there are some obvious differences, like the higher-contrast shadows and the softer blood decals.
I was curious about Klesk’s work and went to check out the demo. But it was upon doing so that I discovered Klesk has some, uh, interesting ideas about AI. In an FAQ about the demo, Klesk states unabashedly that he uses AI “a lot” and that “If you are anti-AI please just close this tab and move your focus to XashXT/FreeHL.”
Which, as someone who is highly sceptical of generative AI, is what I will probably do. But it wasn’t Klesk’s use of AI that caused me to raise my eyebrows. It’s what the modder said next:
“The Anti AI movement is just a hypocrisy and it does not provide any real solution. My opinion is that Anti-AI rhetoric is influenced by Chinese government and domestic terrorists who are competitors aiming to advance in AI development, as they never provide a solution, only complaints.”
Alrighty then! It isn’t clear what problem generative AI critics are supposed to be proposing a solution to. If the answer is “coding”, then you can do that without generative AI and have been able to since computers were invented.
As for the Chinese government/domestic terrorist stuff, I think it’s far more likely that people don’t like AI because the technology is built upon plagiarised work, is terrible for the environment, is ruining the PC hardware market, and causing people to lose their minds, among other things.
Given the above statements, it seems unlikely that Klesk will change their mind on using AI for Libre-life. But it’s not impossible. The recent Half-Life total conversion Diffusion, which funnily enough was built in Xash3D, used generative AI for its voices. But when criticised for this, creator Aynekko had a very different response, and replaced the AI voices with a cast of human actors to the delight of its fans.
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