{"id":1650670,"date":"2026-08-01T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Q62m6BzHr3qC24UDiEnbsJ"},"modified":"2026-08-01T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T11:00:00","slug":"i-was-excited-for-this-quake-port-of-half-life-until-i-discovered-the-creators-wild-ai-conspiracy-theories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/i-was-excited-for-this-quake-port-of-half-life-until-i-discovered-the-creators-wild-ai-conspiracy-theories\/","title":{"rendered":"I was excited for this Quake port of Half-Life until I discovered the creator’s wild AI conspiracy theories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life<\/a> runs on\u2014GoldSrc\u2014is a heavily modified version of the Quake<\/a> engine. It’s one of many, many <\/em>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\u2014Source 2.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The mod in question is called Libre-life<\/a>, 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<\/a> and FTEQW<\/a>, with the primary target being the Zircon Engine<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The way around these limitations is to create a sourceport, like GZDoom (or its newer equivalent UZDoom<\/a>) for Doom 2, or QuakeSpasm<\/a> or its fork Ironwail<\/a> for Quake. Such sourceports are what make mods like Brutal Doom<\/a> or Arcane Dimensions<\/a> possible.<\/p>\n

Half-Life already has such a sourceport in Xash3D<\/a>. 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”.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

\n