A separate effort, Project Lambda, is attempting to recreate Half-Life in the Unreal Engine, allowing the game to support more advanced graphic features. To experience firsthand the processes mod-makers would have to go through with the new engine, Valve ported Half-Life (dubbed Half-Life: Source) and. Black Mesa is also distributed via Steam the remake was among the first ten games whose release on the platform was approved using Valve's crowd voting service Steam Greenlight. The free 2007 Source SDK base is needed to run the game. The Xen portion was held back until December 2019 as the project team wanted to revamp this to try to address how the original Xen was poorly received compared to the rest of the game. Black Mesa, a fan-made remake of Half-Life utilizing the Source engine, began development in 2005 and was released as a free download on September 14, 2012, lacking only the final Xen chapter. In response to this, a third-party mod remake called Black Mesa was developed with Valve's approval. Skies from Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike and Deathmatch Classic are present in the game files. They are available in Half-Life: Source, Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, and mods utilizing the Half-Life: Source content.

Half-Life: Source had been criticized for not fully using many of the features of the Source engine found in Half-Life 2, as it still uses textures and models from the original game. These skyboxes exist in the Half-Life: Source game files but are unused in game.

Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, the multiplayer portion of the original game, much in the same fashion as the earlier released Half-Life: Source, was released in July 2005. Half-Life: Source is available with special editions of Half-Life 2, or separately on Steam. Later updates added a field of view option, support for OS X and Linux, an optional high-definition texture pack, among other improvements. The Half-Life port possesses many of the Source engine's graphical strengths as well as control weaknesses that have been noted in the Source engine. They also added several other features from Half-Life 2, including improved dynamic lightmaps, vertex maps, ragdolls, and a shadowmap system with cleaner, higher resolution, specular texture and normal maps, as well as utilization of the render-to-texture soft shadows found in Half-Life 2's Source engine, along with 3D skybox replacements in place of the old 16-bit color prerendered bitmap skies. However, it does take advantage of vertex and pixel shaders for more realistic water effects, as well as Half-Life 2's realistic physics engine. Half-Life Deathmatch: Source minimum requirements Memory: 1 GB Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 510 CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.70GHz File Size: 4 GB OS: Windows. Half-Life: Source is a straight port, lacking any new content or the Blue Shift High Definition pack. To experience firsthand the processes mod-makers would have to go through with the new engine, Valve ported Half-Life (dubbed Half-Life: Source) and Counter-Strike to their new Source engine.

Half life source