5 years of Black Mesa: Blue Shift & Upcoming Update!

Congrats to HECU Collective! 🎊🎉

It’s been 5 years since HECU Collective released the first chapter of their Black Mesa: Blue Shift mod. Watching their project (and team) grow over that time has been genuinely awesome, and the passion they’ve poured into bringing Barney Calhoun’s story to life continues to blow us away.

They’re celebrating the anniversary with two new videos, and you should absolutely give them a watch:

What we’re working on for Black Mesa 🛠️

On our side, we’ve also been heads-down on an upcoming Black Mesa update. Without turning this into a full patch breakdown just yet, here's what we’re actively working on:

• New Lighting Features

  • Fixed CSM lighting on static props

  • Fixed baked lighting orientation on static props

  • Improved bounce lighting

  • Implemented outdoor lighting from HDR cubemaps (image based lighting)

(From Blue Shift)

• Parallax Cube Maps

  • All cube maps can now be corrected for parallax

  • Instead of them floating in place, the appear to be grounded like a real reflection

(From Blue Shift)

• Optimization Updates

  • Added more robust culling of assets not in view of the player

  • This improves the performance of the engine, without having to re-compile maps or optimize are (though we are working on some of that anyway).

Check out the amazing news update from the Blue Shift team below for even more details on this new tech!

Also, Black Mesa is discounted for the Steam Spring sale! 🌼🌻

Perfect time to grab a copy, and dive into Black Mesa: Blue Shift if you haven't yet.

85% off until March 26th! Black Mesa

We’ll share more details as we get closer, but we wanted to give you a quick “what’s cooking” while we celebrate such a big community milestone! Thanks to the HECU Collective and the Black Mesa team (especially Oleksandr). More soon. Thanks!

— Crowbar Collective