Half-Life High Definition Pack for Steam Guide

This page is very outdated now. The information here is for the pre-Steam version of Half-Life 1.

You can get a custom HD Pack installer for Steam from FilePlanet:
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/130000/135089.shtml

From Planet Half-Life:

One of Half-Life: Blue Shift’s biggest selling points has to be the “High Definition Pack,” a graphics upgrade for Half-Life, which adds visually enhanced player and weapon models. The models, and their respective animations, contain double the amount of polygons over their original versions - and best of all, it’ll also upgrade all the weapons and models in Half-Life and Opposing Force too!

If you try to install the HD Pack, and don’t have Blue Shift or the legacy versions of Half-Life or Opposing Force installed, you will get this message:

The setup process will end right there.

If you copy and paste the text below into a new text file with the extension of REG, you can import the settings into your registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\bshift]
“directory”=”C:\\Sierra\\Blue-Shift”
“Full Name”=”Half-Life: Blue Shift”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\halflife]
“directory”=”C:\\Sierra\\Half-Life”
“Full Name”=”Half-Life”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\OPFORENG]
“directory”=”C:\\Sierra\\OpFor”
“Full Name”=”Half-Life: Opposing Force”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\BLUESHIFT]
“upgrade”=”no”
“shared”=”C:\\Sierra\\Blue-Shift\\bshift”
“installed”=”no”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\HALFLIFE]
“upgrade”=”no”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\OPFOR]
“upgrade”=”no”

That will place the default installation values in your registry - what the HD Pack installer is expecting to see.

What happens then when you run the HD Pack installer?

The games are found!

Once it allows you to continue the installtion, have it copy the files somewhere.

If you go with the default, the files will be copied into the C:\Sierra folder.

Now you need to download a PAK viewer. You can get one HERE.

If you like, you can follow the guide found HERE for extracting the correct files into your Steam installation.

Basically, you want to extract the files from the PAK1.PAK file from the “C:\Sierra\Half-Life\Valve” folder into the equivalent folder in your Steam installation of Half-Life.

For example:

C:\Program files\Steam\SteamApps\email@address.com\half-life\valve

Of course replacing email@address.com with the e-mail address your copy of Steam uses.

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