We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Light Switch now works in "a1a0"
  
• Improved ladders in Industrial Arts.
  
• Improved autosaves in Industrial Arts.
  
• There's now doors in "a1a1c" to block the player from progressing in the map without turning on the Generator.
  
• Fixed a non-breakable pushable crate that could cause soft locks in "a1a1c"
  
• Improved autosaves in Security Complex.
  
• Fixed a box that can float in the air after breaking other crates in "a1a3"
  
• Added clipping around the desks in "a1a3b"
  
• Changed signs above power boxes in Fan Unit 2 in "a1a3a"
  
• Fixed miscellaneous texture errors in "a3a1"
  
• Barrels are now temporarily textured different in the sewer section of "a3a1"
  
• Temporary game text will appear on screen when talking to the Barney in the turret room in "a3a1a"
  
• There's now a sign that reads "Security Override" above the power box in "a3a1a"
  
• Satellite Dish in "a3a1b" should no longer have the chance of soft locking the player.

Things to note:
Please checkout the road map for the current plans for Half-Life: Absolute Zero here.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Removed "ammo_9mmbox" from "game_player_equip" in "a3a1" in hopes to fix an error that affects a small subset of players with precaching "w_chainammo.mdl" upon loading the level.

Things to note:
Please checkout the road map for the current plans for Half-Life: Absolute Zero here.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Post-Mortem Maps now available.

Things to note:
Please checkout the road map for the current plans for Half-Life: Absolute Zero here.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

Yes; in a way you could say it still is.

Back on October 11th, 2020, the mod's fate was sealed and Half-Life: Absolute Zero was no more. At least, as the story was told and I believed it! I had no intentions to return back to mod, but the itch would return. I personally started toying with the project files sometime in Spring of 2021 and started to attempt to finish up certain parts of the mod with the possible idea of releasing them as bite sized experiences. But, the odds of me fully committing to the idea was quite low. I would later find out that LeonelC (another HLAZ developer) was also toying around with the same exact idea. I floated the idea that we should collaborate again and he agreed. Since we were planning on doing something HLAZ related again, we asked ZedMarine610 (another HLAZ developer) to join in and he agreed. So from that point, we started working together again with no real end goal in mind besides the potential of some sort of HLAZ release; whether bite sized or full fledged. The internal name for this version of HLAZ was known as "Post-Mortem."

Then in June of 2021, the atom bomb was dropped.

Brett Johnson, one of the level designers for Half-Life, was showcasing his work on TikTok. This provided so many answers to questions we had and opened up even more questions in some regards. But one thing was for certain... Half-Life: Absolute Zero was back, in some regard.

We agreed upon that point that we should be finishing Half-Life: Absolute Zero as a full experience. We decided to keep it under wraps until we were ready to release it. I got a little cocky and decided to set the deadline for Half-Life's 25th anniversary.

Thus... Half-Life: Absolute Zero is releasing in an active development state on November 19th, 2023.

Yeah... As stated, I got cocky.

Keep in mind, we aren't teenagers in high school anymore. In fact, we're not even college aged anymore. In my mind, I was thinking we were working at a really good pace and that a November date was realistic. Forgetting that anything could stop our momentum.

Thus, our momentum was ruined. One of the chapters we've struggled with ever since the original Day One demo release, Screams and Whispers (Blast Pit,) stopped us dead in our tracks. Ruined our plans for an incognito demo release and stopped any real progress for a few months. Lucky for you, we started making good progress on the chapter again.

We at this time, have no idea what we will ship with the initial Early Access release as we currently have to finish up a few chapters (Screams and Whispers, On a Rail, Abandoned Silo, Cliff Hanger, and the unnamed chapters: a3a3 and a3a4) to get them into a playable state. Rest assured we intend to make it so you don't have to use the developer console to skip over what can't be completed. Right now, the only chapter that for certain won't be available with the release is On a Rail. We have a concrete plan for the chapter, but it was one of the largest chapters in the original Half-Life story.

Right now, the goal is to roll out what we can to the public for testing and keep using our "Post-Mortem" branch for the rougher bits so we can push out more definitive updates to the main branch. Currently the "Post-Mortem" branch is only available to a select number of testers, but could be subject to change in the future.

Well... for starters, the original team is back together unlike the original 2020 Active Development release. Plus with the break we took, we're no longer entirely burnt out and as long as we pace ourselves instead of pushing ourselves this should be a realistic goal.

But, you don't have to trust us! You can wait until we truly hit 1.0 or just watch us crash and burn into a ditch again. I can at least promise you that the build that is on Steam will be less busted after this.

Yes! But we aren't willing to discuss this right at this second. Expect a pinned thread to appear in the Steam Discussions to be created around the November 19th release.

Correct.

The "Post-Mortem" assets will be released under the "Creative Commons" license (where applicable, as you still have to respect Valve's copyright) when the mod is complete or if the mod dies again.

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Updated Glock View Model.
  
• Updated Shotgun View Model to introduce an updated pump animation to match a recently found older version of the animation.
  
• Updated RPG View Model.
  
• Updated Gauss Gun View Model.
  
• Human Assault now has properly defined hitboxes relating to what body part can take what type of damage. Was not defined in the base model Valve created.
  
• You can now only hold 150 bullets in reserve for 9mm Ammunition.
  
• You can now only hold 30 bullets in reserve for the Python.
  
• You can now only hold 10 Snarks.
  
• You can now only hold 10 Chumtoad.
  
• Fixed oversight where you would have 6 rockets for the RPG instead of 5.
  
• Certain weapons with no secondary attack will play the fidget animations.
  
• Fixed bug where Zombie had a chance to spit out no gibs.
  
• General improvements to Grenades.
  
• Chumtoads will now play their idle animations correctly.
  
• Gauss Gun now behaves differently.
  
• Map spawned dead security guards will no longer have their mouths open.
  
• Fixed beam animation on Egon’s secondary attack.
  
• Egon now makes scorch marks on walls when you fire it.
  
• Alien Slaves’ attacks will leave scorch marks on the ground.
  
• Human Assaults can now throw grenades.
  
• Added an advanced option for having an accurate to the E3 98 MP5 firing animation, off by default.
  
• Added an advanced option for having the MP5 grenade be the RPG rocket model, off by default.
  
• General changes for the Gargantua.
  
• Pathing improvements for the Panthereye.
  
• Build text should be off by default now, if it is not then set the console command “cl_earlyaccess” to zero.

Things to note:
We are aware of the broken transition from Screams & Whispers to Footfall and it has been addressed in our Chapter Guide since we had launched on Steam.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

Nope, no jokes here. It is completely true, Half-Life: Absolute Zero has ceased development, after almost a decade worth of development.

It has been nearly 10 years to the day since we started development on Half-Life: Absolute Zero and to be quite frank, we want to move on; passion only lasts for so long. If it didn’t work out for the past 10 years, I doubt it is going to work out for any more amount of time.

We were unable to secure any level designers since our search for one started back in December, 2018. So as a result, we were asking and relying on friends and friends of friends for help on the project, but ultimately most of them would only work on the project from a range of 3 days to 2 weeks until they would give up. As a result, not much really got done post-beta access release.

Realistically, we knew the project had been doomed since December of 2018. We had already missed our intended release date of November 26, 2018 (the 25th anniversary of Sonic Spinball’s European release, which was a week after Half-Life’s 20th anniversary, it is a in-joke among the team) and we had to delay to the 20th anniversary of Half-Life: Uplink’s release. A lot of us had been burnt out for working on the project for such a long time and we had a level designer who had vanished. We had put out a job listing on ModDB in hope we would be able to quickly find a replacement to be able to salvage the project, but that clearly didn’t happen.

We are currently actively working on getting the page delisted off of Steam around the 12th to prevent people from accidentally wandering into a barely functioning product. Despite being delisted from Steam, you should still be able to download the mod via “steam://install/<appid>.”

Why delist the store page opposed to condensing down the experience? Well, the mod only currently contains 2 chapters that we would consider mostly complete, which isn’t too exciting considering our 2017 demo contained 5 chapters. We had to deal with a surplus of people who didn’t read the store page or any pinned thread on the discussions and just assumed the product was 100% complete. If we had this problem during the public development phase, we’re going to have the problem tenfold when the mod is supposed to be “complete.” There’s also the fact we don’t want another unfinished product to clog up the Steam storefront, we would rather take responsibility and take down our product instead of letting it rot with every other abandoned project.

We only made a Steam release as our mod is not fully compatible with the 2013 updates to the GoldSource engine. Shadows cause the game to crash and various game behaviors would act sporadic. A Steam release allowed us to ship with a branch of the engine that we knew was fully compatible with Half-Life: Absolute Zero, but it still provided its own host of problems. Such as us changing the executable name which resulted in Windows 10’s internal compatibility hack for GoldSource games to not take effect, which resulted in the game’s window being extremely zoomed in. Luckily that was a fix as easy as just renaming the executable back to HL.exe, but there were still issues with the engine itself that were either fixed in the modern engine, were just things from Source that people expected to be in GoldSource, or were issues that affect most versions of the engine. Ultimately, there’s not a version of GoldSource out there that is perfect, they all have severe issues that hinder the experience some way or another and we had to pay the price for it. We did not and still do not have access to the engine code, so being able to fix anything with-in the engine would be impossible for us to do and if the engine was open source we could have at least attempted to but as it currently stands, GoldSource is closed source.

We will push out a final update for the mod on Steam, we held back on an update since August 14th in hope to be able to ship out a Milestone update in September, clearly that Milestone update did not work out.

Well, the Steam build will be posted to ModDB for those to download there (minus the engine, of course.) But more importantly, the entire development drive of Half-Life: Absolute Zero will be uploaded to the internet and will be licensed under Creative Commons. This will allow any developer or modder to be able to reuse our work and all you need to do is credit us for the work you’ve borrowed! This had been our plan for several years now, regardless of completion, releasing the full source tree on the 10th anniversary of the mod’s development beginnings. This allows us to be able to have the community learn from our work and for our work to live on beyond a beta mod.

We are currently actively sorting through our unsorted backups making sure as much of our content is backed up and available. This will release on the 12th, alongside the mod release on ModDB.

This does NOT mark the end of Cobalt-57 as a team, we have no plans to dissolve or disband! Little do many people know, Cobalt-57 was never created as a throwaway team to have a pseudonym for all of us as a team for our modding projects. We will be shifting our focus to game development after the 12th, in fact, we actually have some games and projects in the pipeline. Some relating to pre-existing IPs (some of which will likely never see the light of day) and some being completely original IPs. As you may expect, yes, we are still in fact looking for level designers and even more than that! We can’t promise that we’ll hire or even speak to everyone, but we will read every message.

While it is sad to see Half-Life: Absolute Zero go, we’re glad it is over. It is bittersweet, sure we didn’t get to complete the project that united us to begin with; but we will forever get to keep those memories and get to work together on things that don’t limit our creative direction.

Finally, we would like to thank you for supporting us til the very end. While we don’t know when the next time you’ll hear from us will be, we will still be creating things and when we stop creating we’ll let the world know. If you want to keep in-touch, please follow us on Twitter, as that’s currently our only social media presence where we can provide quick updates.

Until next time,
- Cobalt-57

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Certain debug tracers will no longer be visable

Things to note:
We are aware of the broken transition from Screams & Whispers to Footfall and it has been addressed in our Chapter Guide since we had launched on Steam.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Barneys are no longer trigger happy.
  
• Headcrabs will be more responsive in tighter areas.
  
• Timed damage will now conveniently stop at 1HP when difficulty is set to Easy.

Things to note:
We are aware of the broken transition from Screams & Whispers to Footfall and it has been addressed in our Chapter Guide since we had launched on Steam.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

• Renamed “HLAZ.exe” back to HL.exe” in hopes to circumvent incompatibilities with certain Windows 10 installs. This allows for Windows to detect that it is a Half-Life based game and enforce compatibility fixes that Microsoft provides for GoldSource.
  
• The Half-Life title in a1a0 will no longer reappear when loading a save from that map.
  
• Furtherly improved the use function.
  
• Crouching rapidly no longer puts the player in the air momentarily.
  
• Slightly decreased the speed of the alpha ladder.
  
• Movement over downward inclines and stairs is now smooth.
  
• Monsters will no longer snap into the player when the player is in the way of their scripted sequence.
  
• Improved pathfinding for monsters.
  
• Fixed stuttering on monsters shortly after touching the ground from a fall.
  
• Explosive damage will now cause knockback on monsters.
  
• AI is alerted by all weapons at greater ranges now.
  
• Improvements to monster talk.
  
• Green blood implemented.
  
• Improved blood particles.
  
• Snark’s death blood is no longer the retail particle, now uses the old style blood particle.
  
• Alien Grunts now won't aim extremely high/low when getting close while it range-attacks.
  
• Alien Grunts should no longer skip the sound-sentence-save system when playing some sounds.
  
• Improved armor bullet penetration on Human Grunts, Alien Grunts, and Barneys.
  
• Headcrabs will no longer spam jump.
  
• Sentries now make metal hit sounds.
  
• Pressing the right mouse button will now cancel out the weapon select when in the menu.
  
• Switching to the last weapon used via quick select and picking up new weapons will now holster the weapon you are actively holding. Can revert back to the broken behavior in Advanced Options.
  
• Fixed the Adrenaline canister breaking shortly on level change.
  
• Improved first-person animations.
  
• Issue fixed with deploy animation replaying if killed/revived while a holster was in progress.
  
• Animatimation timing for the Snark and Chumtoad throwing animations have been fixed and improved.
  
• Improved the Shotgun.
  
• Thrown Grenades will animate correctly.
  
• Improved the Satchel Charge.
  
• Improved the Tau Cannon.

Things to note:
We are aware of the broken transition from Screams & Whispers to Footfall and it has been addressed in our Chapter Guide since we had launched on Steam.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.