Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

The Half-Life remake Black Mesa from Crowbar Collective is about to get a patch to fix up lots of issues, and there's a public Beta available. This will be the first update the game has seen in quite a long time, so it's nice to see they're ensuring it's going to keep working smoothly.

Crowbar are calling it a rolling beta, as they will presumably keep adding to it. You can try it out on Steam via the Properties -> Betas -> select "public-beta" in the dropdown menu.

Info about the Beta:

We’ve pushed a patch to public beta. In this beta we are looking to confirm that:

  1. Nothing that was working before has broken.
  2. Save files are intact for all players.
  3. The Interloper A controller crash is fixed.
  4. Graphics options are set, and stay set in the options menu.
 

We’ve also:

  • Fixed Moss shaders and direction control for both vertex lit shader and skin shader (for props with/without phong).
  • Fixed halflambert/warp/specwarp related problems across all the shaders.
  • Unlocked the even higher graphics setting in options menu.
  • Fixed video settings not staying set.
  • SpotLight cookies should now work on any orientation. Cookie sprite sheet no longer needs to be square.
  • Local lights shadow sampling optimized. They now look better & should be faster on the highest settings.
  • Deferred lighting and NewPostProcess stability and support improved.
  • Lots of misc graphics fixes.
  • Updated translation files with community fixes.
  • Added missing Italian translators Riccardo Rapuano and Andrea Franceschi.

See more on the Steam page.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
14 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
10 comments

dpanter Mar 15
Would love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I bought the game a few months ago and every so often it would crash. Hopefully this will fix it.
whizse Mar 15
View PC info
  • Supporter
Not sure what version I would choose if I wanted to replay Half-Life. The original disc release? The 25th anniversary update? Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, fat chance!
dibz Mar 15
Nice to see. I hope some of this applies to the Linux version too, which I had a lot of trouble with -- in particular too many particle effects would cause the game to come to an absolute crawl on a GTX 1070, but it was fine if you ran the windows version via Proton instead. The last world in the game was also very buggy, and I even ran into a game-breaking bug I had to enable no-clip to escape.

All in all, I still greatly enjoyed Black Mesa, and still highly recommend it!
This is probably my 5th attempt at a play through over the years. There was some flashlight bug on AMD Graphics Cards & MESA in one of the last levels where you are going through these scientist tents or whatever.

It was pitch black.

Hopefully that is fixed on my next play-through.

The story is amazing, I would put it up there with Bioshock 1 in my top favorites of all time.
hardpenguin Mar 21
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.
hardpenguin Mar 21
Quoting: whizseNot sure what version I would choose if I wanted to replay Half-Life. The original disc release? The 25th anniversary update? Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, fat chance!
GlaDoS song aside, Black Mesa hands down. Worthy remake.


Last edited by hardpenguin on 21 March 2024 at 11:20 am UTC
dpanter Mar 21
Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.

It absolutely was not, prior to this patch. The Linux native version in particular has been cursed for years.
whizse Mar 21
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: hardpenguinGlaDoS song aside, Black Mesa hands down. Worthy remake.
I'm so glad someone finally got the joke

(No, I have nothing against Black Mesa, I'm sure it's a fine game!)
hardpenguin Mar 22
Quoting: dpanter
Quoting: hardpenguin
Quoting: dpanterWould love to see the project reach a reliably playable state.
I believe it is. I played through the entire campaign and a tiny bit of multiplayer, no issues encountered that I can remember.

It absolutely was not, prior to this patch. The Linux native version in particular has been cursed for years.
Then consider me extremely lucky!
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
Login / Register


Or login with...
Sign in with Steam Sign in with Google
Social logins require cookies to stay logged in.