Thanks to everyone for the kind words about Half-Life: Absolute Zero. We’ve been working hard for the last eight years to get this project done and in a playable, stable, and feature-complete state, and seeing the positive reaction to the progress we’ve made has been a huge morale boost.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, AZ will not make the release date of February 12th, 2019.

First and foremost, we need to apologize for setting the release date sooner than we could deliver. There are several different reasons why we have to announce this delay, and we’ll share some of them here in the hopes that you’ll understand.

The main reason is that a developer responsible for an important part of the project has gone silent, and we haven’t been able to reach them. He has a lot of files critical to the mod’s development, and his sudden disappearance has left us with only two active mappers on the project.

Multiple aspects of the mod still need finished or refining as well, and with this delay we can make sure that everyone gets a complete fun package once it’s released. We’re also still looking for experienced mappers to join us! You can read more about it at the listing below.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/jobs/level-designermapper3

Please keep in mind that the release date on Steam is nothing more than a placeholder and does not reflect the date we plan on releasing!

At the moment, AZ is playable from Anomalous Materials to Questionable Ethics. Some areas still need further polishing and are WIP as hell, however. The maps from the demo have been greatly improved since its release and are closer to the source material than ever.

Power Up has also been finished, polished, and tested, Apprehension has been completed and gained a new ending sequence, Questionable Ethics is nearly done, and multiple chapters have gone through major optimization overhauls and considerable re-balancing.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a1-footfall4
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a1-footfall5
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a1-footfall6
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a3-abandoned-silo2
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a3-abandoned-silo5
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a3-abandoned-silo9
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics1
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics3
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics6

On A Rail, however, has been a very interesting experience. Half of the chapter is missing in action, so we’ve decided to fill in the blanks with our own interpretation based on the little information we have now, as well as the beta/retail aesthetics of the chapter. In retail, it was essentially backwards!

What this means is that the chapter will start at the rocket labs, instead of ending there. We’ll also be including other cut areas of the alpha in the beta/retail style of On A Rail to fill in any other blanks as needed.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a2-on-a-rail1
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a2-on-a-rail7
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a2-on-a-rail6

Once again, we’re all sorry to hold it up even longer, but we promise you won’t be disappointed. We’ve made incredible progress on the mod, and we really want to share it with everyone as soon as possible. We’d like to thank everyone for the support that you’ve shown for Half-Life: Absolute Zero up to this point.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/812440/

Happy 20th anniversary Half-Life.

Release Dates, Information, Progress, and more are available in this breath-taking installment of the Half-Life Absolute Zero Updates.


Yes, it's true, Absolute Zero has a release date. It is February 12th, 2019, the 20th anniversary of Half-Life Uplink! We were going to release it on the 25th anniversary of Sonic Spinball's European Release for one big old in-joke, but we were not able to reach that deadline. So we chose the third best option to release on, which is Uplink's 20th anniversary.
However, that is not all she wrote...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70v-XTCmu9w

We really wanted to provide a link to our store page as we wanted to launch it on the 19th, but due to Valve taking their sweet old time, the store page is not verified despite being past Valve's threshold of how long it will take for review.
But I digress...
We chose to release on Steam due to our mod having major issues with live HL and us not wanting to make the install more complex than it is needed to be. Ease of use for all players! The mod will still support WON, if that's any concern.


Well, of course, a lot of things are different with the mod! I mean, it has been over a year since we've released the demo! We've enhanced various parts of the mod to be more polished and listened to several pieces of feedback in-order to make the experience better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t78e7IpBSZc

We have made progress with various NPCs, such as the Kingpin and Floater. They even have animations custom made for them!
We even have the German censorship originally planned for HL added in, don't worry, it can be toggled on and off for every region.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSXFWpQk6_c

If you were paying close attention to our media updates, you would of saw progress for Questionable Ethics, Boot Camp, and Down and Out! In case you didn't, I'm going to slap the highlights here!

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics3
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics4
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics8
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a5-boot-camp
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a5-boot-camp1
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a5-boot-camp4
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c3a2-down-and-out
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c3a2-down-and-out2
https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c3a2-down-and-out3

But that's not the end of our new content that we're going to have, but you'll just have to wait for future updates or the full release to find out more.


You know it! Just in-case you missed it, you can check out the Day One demo! It's super out of date compared to the current live build of AZ, but that isn't out yet!

https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-absolute-zero-day-one

Not an April Fools update! We just the bad luck of having to update around the same time as April Fools, along with bad timing with falling inline with other beta mod updates.

I mean, you guys should of realized this by now, we post updates when we feel ready to update you guys. It takes us months just to get to a point where we are happy with how a chapter is looking and playing and from there it takes a few weeks for us to decide to share the progress with the community. There's only one situation where we didn't follow this standard and that was the original Footfall (Power Up) screenshots. Which to this day, we regret sharing publicly. We plan on trying to make this better by having a Discord server in place to share our in-development progress.

With this Discord server, we can directly communicate with you guys and show off progress with the mod itself in a quick manner and receive direct feedback for our work. While it may still take us awhile to update our ModDB profile with more finalized work, Discord will allow us to get down and dirty and show you the rough edges of mod development.

Well, quite a bit. Questionable Ethic is mainly done geometry wise, we just have to texture one of the maps, add things to do, and link it up with other chapters. Cliff Hanger (Surface Tension) has a good portion of the desert and the opening of Military Camp done and playable, and we have Boot Camp in the works. On a Rail is still as painful as ever, but the opening is mostly completed! We have a working conversion of the retail Residue Processing with minor adjustments to match the footage and screenshots we do have of it, but it's not ready to demo off, we still have to make it so it isn't much of a clone of the retail chapter. Blast Pit is going through a major re-work currently, as the original maps we were working on during the demo release were quite broken. Of course, this isn't all of the progress we have done since we last updated you guys.

Screenshots:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a2-on-a-rail
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a2-on-a-rail1
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics1
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a4-questionable-ethics2
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a5-cliff-hanger
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/images/c2a5-cliff-hanger1

We adjusted and fixed the maps seen in the demo release thanks to your guys' feedback! We are listening, let us know on our Discord what your concerns or comments may be, we want to know!

But not only that, we were focusing on other projects since the demo release of Half-Life: Absolute Zero. We were also working on Fairfield Terror, which, trust us, we are going to release that really soon. But this isn't the Fairfield page, so I won't go much into details of it, if you're interested in Fairfield, check out that page.

Good question! Right here:
https://discord.gg/4EeRtEZ

We also now have an official Steam Group (but it's mainly just going to be these updates):
http://steamproxy.net/groups/Half-LifeAbsoluteZero

If you didn't get the chance to play our demo, I'm going to link it again!:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-absolute-zero-day-one

If you didn't get the chance to see our old abandoned content from years past, I'm going to link that again! Just remember, the builds folder is off limits to your mods, everything else is fair game if you credit us!:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-absolute-zero-absolutely-abandoned

and if you want to see where this all started back in October of 2010, then here's Half-Life E3 1998:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-e3-19981997-release
(no idea why you would want to torture yourselves with this?)

Originally Posted to ModDB on: May 23, 2017

This update only exists to give you some now open-sourced content of Half-Life: Absolute Zero's past.

These are a bunch of old abandoned content from development past, including content we said was completely lost when we released the first AZ Prototype from 2010 (it was found after we released the prototype). Everything that isn't a build in this archive is free to use in your Half-Life or even beta related mod, as long as you credit the original authors.

There is no catch. As long as you credit us, you can use it. These files provide no use to us now-a-days, they just sit around decaying on our development drives left to never see the light of day until we decide when we release them.

There's 2 Absolute Zero builds: the Pre-Demo and the April 2016 build.

The Pre-Demo is what we shipped to play-testers and members of the team to understand if Absolute Zero would of been even remotely fun to the public and to be sure Absolute Zero wouldn't catch on fire when we released a demo. There's an entire month gap between the release of the actual demo and the pre-demo and there are various major differences between the two demos.

The April 2016 build was leaked to the general public during November 2016. The April build shows the darkest era of Absolute Zero's development in recent times, but not even because of the leak. Nothing was going right or to plans during this point of development. Things that worked once and were good enough for release were now destroyed and broken. I wasn't going to have something that had been in-development for years just suddenly get downgraded and be even more delayed. So, I had held a team meeting and announced that we needed to get our ♥♥♥♥ together and fix our mistakes and do heavy re-works to the mod. Obviously, things went to plan and we were able to finally reach a point that we could release a demo... granted that was a year after our initial announcement of a demo release.

The other content is old model, material, and map content. All free to use in your Half-Life or beta related mods as long you credit us.

Right here:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-absolute-zero-absolutely-abandoned

Don't forget to check out the AZ Day One Demo:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-absolute-zero-day-one

and if for whatever reason you want to play the 2010/2011 build of Absolute Zero:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/downloads/half-life-e3-19981997-release
It's not good at all