Software developer Sultim Tsyrendashiev has released a teaser for his upcoming project Half-Life: Ray Traced. The project aims to bring ray-tracing graphics to the iconic FPS game Half-Life.

According to the recent announcement, Tsyrendashiev aims to eventually release the project and its source code on Github. The project currently does not have a release date.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can realistically simulate the lighting of a scene and its objects by rendering physically accurate reflections, refractions, shadows, and indirect lighting.

The technique has become popular in recent years because of hardware innovations and advances in computer graphics, making it possible to render scenes with increasingly realistic lighting and shadows in real-time where previously scenes had to be pre-rendered to avoid costly calculations.

Due to the increasing accessibility to ray-tracing capable hardware, various other classic titles have also seen similar efforts, including Super Mario 64 and Quake. This project is also not the first ray-tracing project Tsyrendashiev has worked on. He also released a Serious Sam port featuring ray-tracing and a Serious Engine 1 Vulkan port based on the freely available source code.