Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS
discuss.haiku-os.orgX512 is an amazing treasure in the Haiku community. Other than nVidia hardware accelerated drivers, he ported Haiku to RiscV, got sound through HDMI and DisplayPort working, he got AMD Vulkan drivers for Southern Islands chipsets also working, made break throughs in dozens of other porting projects, he’s an amazing Hacker par excellance virtually unknown outside the Haiku community.
Looks like this may have been based on the nillerusr Source engine, which is based on a 2020 leak of the Source sources. nillerusr's engine has also been used to port some Valve games to Android.
I wish Valve would take a cue from id and release the source code to Source and/or at least GoldSrc under an open license. Though I have a hard time imagining them opening up code to more lucrative games like Team Fortress Classic or Counter-Strike classic. Nice dream though...
Source uses licenced middleware such as Havok so SDKs are likely all we're going to get officially. Source 2 might be a different story if HL3 releases one day since Valve replaced audio and physics with in-house technologies.
Old-ish Source has a pretty generous license, no? https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/master... GoldSrc is there somewhere as well. I’m definitely grateful for it. I’ve read some of it myself and watched a bunch of Youtube about it.
That repository is not the engine, it's just the code for the client.dll/server.dll binaries that contain game-specific logic and some other tools.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife on the other hand is the full Half-Life (GoldSrc) engine, but it's not quite an open license.
That is just the SDK, but there is an unofficial open source implementation of goldsrc.
I'm pretty sure this is just the mod SDK as well.
Why should Valve give up their leverage. They actively pick and choose who they license the engine to.
Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...
Nifty to see... I always liked BeOS/Haiku from a tech perspective, but really don't care nearly as much for the UX or ergonomics... I really like a lot of the Windows 10 start menu and taskbar, but I do hate the MS search results/ads,etc so I switched to Linux for non-work and mostly Cosmic since later alphas.
The UX has always been my favorite part. It's like some mixup of OS/2 and Classic Mac OS
Reminds me a bit more of Amiga... that said, I just don't like the "handle" on the windows, and the launcher is a bit odd imo.
I half-jokingly thought to myself, "of course it's all software rendering, Haiku doesn't have GPU drivers", so imagine my amazement when I saw that this thread is about porting an NVidia GPU driver from Linux, and HL2 does, in fact, run with hardware acceleration.
As a long time BeOS fan (and user back in the day) I really enjoy reading about progress on Haiku. Similarly cool as the Half-Life 2 port is the work on the ARM platform. With early support for M1 Macs (https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-haiku-arm64-progress/19044...) and Raspberry Pi 500+ (https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-haiku-arm64-progress/19044...).
I think HL2 on portable 5W ARM linux is more interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1nrDvmiII
I wanted to say, 5 watts, doesn't HL2 already run on Raspberry Pi? But then I realized, this thing seems to be powered by some kind of rpi?
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/uconsole-kit-rpi-cm...
That's pretty cool though, do you have a video of it running on the device itself?
This is captured+streamed on the device with ffmpeg, but mobile phone video no.
Got a short of my own engine though: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LKYX7E3A0Dk
You can run HL2 at 1080p 60fps in 5W on Armada on the AYN Thor (on the Eco performance profile). That includes a screen and speakers.
I know it's not as cool but the Steam Deck can run HL2 at just as low power consumption with its AMD APU.
"A normal Steam Deck consumes about 4 to 7 watts of total system power when idling on the home screen with low screen brightness."
Maybe HL2 brings zero overhead to idle then?
Anyway X86 is the past, risc-v is so completely lost into eternal future... only ARM really works right now.
You can do less on the OLED with a few tweaks in the quick menu. Specifically the OLED because it has a more efficient APU. Limit APU to 3W, disable radio, maybe more.
> Anyway X86 is the past, risc-v is so completely lost into eternal future... only ARM really works right now.
I don't disagree but all of the recent Raspberry Pis have worse performance, cost more than x86, and barely use less power. There are so much better examples to showcase ARM.
> Maybe HL2 brings zero overhead to idle then?
It went like particularly dry shit off a teflon shovel on my Duron 700 when it was new so I can't imagine it would tax a nice modern chip much.
looking forward to see Action Retro's shenanigans on YouTube with this.
I've watched his previous videos on Haiku and haven't been impressed with him. He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work, which is especially important given how work-in-progress it all is, and that the lineage of Haiku goes back to BeOS. The community has done a lot of good work, and he doesn't grasp it fully.
> He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work
I don't really think the point of his videos is to go into that level of detail. I think I'm someone who could understand that level of detail but I still watch his videos anyway since they're fun and engaging (same with others like Michael MJD), and have other YouTube channels that I might watch for more technical dives.
It's genuinely possible to do informative, fun and engaging videos on a niche OS; it does require a lot of skill and effort to pull off he does not have. His content has been way too shallow. There's a lot more to an OS than just the Desktop Environment being different, and 'Can it run Minecraft' (with missing/broken drivers he doesn't understand).
Perhaps it’s too much of a reoccurring gimmick but his videos are squarely in the “tech-aware consumer” user profile, not a pro developer or editor. It’s like how LGR does retrospectives and deep-dives on hardware from a purely hobbyist-enthusiast customer perspective.
Yes, you have seen a video and you have seen them all. It can be resumed to "will it run minecrafts (or one of its clones)".
I guess he figured out the short 10-15min format is better for engagement bevause people brains have been destroyed by tiktok and instagram reels and barely anyone can concentrate for 30min on a subject but really it makes for very uninformative vids.
Sometimes there's just not more than 10-15min of content that even a (significant) niche audience would find interesting. There's also only so much time in a day / week to produce. The machine demands novelty.
But can it run Crysis?
Under Wine? Yes.
Dang. Half-Life 2 ruled my high school life. it is still insane.
Hats off to the folks behind this for keeping such a cool project alive! This, ReactOS, and TempleOS have been my answer to the question of: "what should I install if I'm looking for something interesting?" for at least a decade. Obviously for vastly different reasons.
This is great, but can we get a port to BeBox please. ;)
What I find depressing is because of idiotic Linux policies, it turns out nvidia hardware is easier to run on a 3rd party OS than hardware with otherwise fully open source drivers like Radeon.
This is just yet another example that you may think things in the hardware world have changed now that Linux "rules", but they have not.
Nvidia drivers being crap has nothing to do with Linux policies. It's entirely up to Nvidia to invest and improve their drivers but it's clearly not a priority. Their focus is AI. If you need a CUDA accelerator, they're great. Graphics or even display output? Better have a second AMD or Intel card for that.
What do you mean? BSDs have tons of code lifted from the Linux amdgpu driver.
They are literally the only one who has managed to do it,, and they do so by having a huge layer of compatibility that takes years to update to new versions and support newer generations. We do not know if it would be easier for BSD to support nvidia either ... because they already have nvidia drivers (released by nvidia itself).
On the other hand here we have a random guy that adds support for nvidia gpus, by himself, on a non-linux, non-bsd kernel. And specifically claims he will not do the radeon one because he finds it too much work.
Right, I thought you meant there was some GPL-caused license issue.
Are you talking about driver ABIs or something else?
What makes it easier?
See the first message of TFA. The author complains that amdgpu has way too many linuxisms that make it impractical to port it to non-Linux ( unless you are already emulating Linux). On the other hand, the nv kernel driver is portable, up to the point that it is easier to port that to Haiku and then change the entire Mesa to use it than it is to port amdgpu (which wouldn't need Mesa changes).
Of course a Linux driver is going to make use of Linuxims. That’s literally the point of a Linux device driver.
Given how performance-sensitive device like a graphics card is, you’d naturally want as few abstractions between your OS and your hardware as possible.
i wonder how many people are using haikuos enough to make frontpage of video game on that os ?
When people get doom running on a toaster, do you also ask how many people game on a toaster? It's more about the technical challenge of the whole deal.
I wonder how many people are flying to space in rockets for rocket launches to make the frontpage? It's just interesting. Haiku is cool, and getting relatively complex games to run on it is a good signal that it is making progress.
I love it, this is OG hacker news
.o/
But then what did you expect?
Add in the number of people who have fond memories of BeOS