Hunt Down The Freeman 
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HDTF Isn't Dead Yet!Feb 20, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsHey everyone, Terrors here. I'm making this announcement because a lot of people don't know that work on the game is still ongoing. We unfortunately haven't been able to update the default version of the game for two and a half years due to all the big changes we've made to the game. We also have less people working on the game now than before so it's going to be a while before everything is polished up enough to push to the default version. In the meantime if you want to see what we've been up to with the game then to access the newest public version go to the games properties, betas and select the build called 'owf_staging_prep'. It has a ton of improvements and bug fixes that the default version simply lacks due to not being updated in a very long time, such as making holstering weapons to parkour optional and reducing the storage space down from 36 GB to only 16 GB! Also if you're looking to obtain all achievements then switching to the 'owf_staging_prep' build is currently required as some achievements were only added after the default version was last updated. I should however mention that this is a developer build. It's stable enough that there shouldn't be any game breaking issues and with all the patching that's been done it might even be less buggy than the default version, but you will still see the occasional visual glitch like the players arms not matching the act you're in. If you're ok with that then I cannot understate just how much I would highly recommend switching your version of the game over to 'owf_staging_prep' if you haven't done so already. In my opinion it's by far the best way to experience this masterpiece enjoy the game! We do also have a private developer build called 'owf_development_build' which is usually even more up to date than the other developer build. However it's more likely to have glitches and is only accessible by supporters for helping make these updates possible since the money from game sales don't go to us. If you are a supporter and can't access the build then join the hdtf discord server and check out the #faq channel on how to verify yourself. Speaking of the discord server; if you would like to ask the devs questions, keep up to date with the changes to the game or view all the current patch notes then feel free to join the hdtf discord server!HDTF Art livestream!Sep 14, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsIts another HDTF art stream! We'll be creating props for the game along with showing updates on the game along with chatting with the community and taking questions! As usual right now, the main 3D models we'll be working on today are simply environmental props HDTF Art livestream!Aug 16, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsIts another HDTF art stream! We'll be creating props for the game along with showing updates on the game along with chatting with the community and taking questions! HDTF Art livestream!Aug 11, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsA Hunt Down the Freeman art stream is currently live, where we'll be showing the production of game props, along with perhaps showing some progress on the game here-and-there! July blog: where we're at + looking for team members!Jul 3, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHey guys! Minerkey here again It's been a hot minute since our last blog post, so I’ll get on with it already. We’ve got some important news, along with a literally game-changing one! For those looking for a TL;DR I’ll list them at the top here but for those more interested in all the details, scroll down to find out more. We’re taking a step back and examining the game as a whole in preparation for continued work Metro/subway and canal maps during the 7hr war have gotten big changes with entirely new sections and entirely new music! Bink video is replaced with webm (like CSGO and Source 2) and has successfully freed up 5.7GB of space Work on the soundtrack is continuing, along with some videos to showcase it! PBR is being rewritten and improved, featuring bent normals for better shadowing, subsurface scattering for better skin, sheen for rendering leather and fabrics, and vector layers for dynamic snow coverage! Previews of some new firearm models and a bit of an explanation about our switch from v_arms to c_arms A new Combine Soldier model is in development We’re also looking for team members! Primarily 3D modelers, animators and texture artists, but also AI programmers, sound designers, and web developers Writing the bible As mentioned before, the work on HDTF has been fairly small for the past few years following its release - but within the past year the team has grown significantly and with that, there have been some growing pains. Improving HDTF is going to become difficult and vague when so many different team members have conflicting ideas on what needs to be improved and smoothed out - and so things need to be set in stone and made clear to prevent confusion. This might involve writing a GDD (Game Design Document) but as of now, we are still planning everything out. As an example we’ll be taking a look at how the game was released - its shortcomings in gameplay, story, and tech - and how we can improve on them. This is still very subject to change and there's nothing we can show for it at the moment, but it's going to be a decent amount of work and personally, I’m very excited to see how this talented team can execute a new vision. Changes to Metro After months of work comes a significant reworking of the metro levels! While some areas may seem familiar, they have received at least a bit of love from the mappers and developers on our team. The mappers currently working on these sections are Gregg and Ромус so I’ll let them explain “I'm redoing some levels from scratch, as well as improving and addressing optimization issues. I would like to talk about the metro_1 and metro_1a levels, which I recently finished working on. On the metro_1 map (originally designed by Kalcifer in 2021, with some assistance from FaberGirl for art-passing), I focused on enhancing the gameplay and visuals. Now, players need to utilize parkour in this map. Additionally, with the help of Dabzik, I created a brand new metro map. The most challenging aspect of work...December Blog: current progressDec 29, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHiya! Minerkey here for this update post! There's many things to jump into so I'll get straight into it. Over the past year the HDTF team has grown from about 5 people to 20 - including weapon animators, modelers, shader programmers, VFX artists and more. As such we can now afford to become more ambitious with our overhaul of Hunt Down the Freeman! As the team has grown, we’ve also ditched the old name: M3SA Team and the M3SA build are no more - Operation Whisky Freedom is ready to go! Something to note is that since I am on the art side of the team, this blog post will mainly focus on art/graphics-related content, but there is a ton of mapping and gameplay work being done still With our sweeping changes to the game, we’re adding a ton of new features we can’t wait to utilize, and for the TL;DR I’ll list them here, but if you want more detail its down below Physically-Based Rendering Updated VFX FMOD Studio for dynamic music Parallax-Corrected Cubemaps Depth Of Field Overhauled weapon animations Plans for overhauled Black Mesa section Reworks to Albuquerque New weapon models and materials Bullsquid & Houndeye Workshop support (note: all content shown may change during development, it's all work-in-progress) Shaders & visuals The source engine uses a specular setup for its materials, a method that isn’t often supported by newer software and hasn’t really been used in games for a decade. PBR (physically-based-rendering) is now the industry standard, utilizing metallic, roughness and ambient occlusion maps and gives a different look to metal surfaces compared to the typical specular shading system. PBR also simplifies our workflow and is the main rendering method of modern tools such as Substance - allowing our artists and modders to more-easily create content. Another benefit of PBR is that it only uses greyscale (black = off, white = on) allowing for more compression without drastic changes to visual quality Subsurface-scattering is also a feature of our PBR shader, allowing us to emulate the way light affects materials such as skin and plastic on NPCs and models. Along with that, PCC (parallax-corrected cubemaps) is integrated into our shader. Source engine cubemaps often do a good job but break-down in motion, they appear to move with the player and are very inaccurate in most situations. Using parallax-correction, cubemaps are able to take on the shape of a boxy room, allowing cubemaps to warp and distort according to the player’s location. While this system is implemented in the game, it has yet to be used in our maps. Theres also talk of implementing screen-space reflection as well to accommodate realtime effects and non-boxy areas which cannot use PCC - but thats just an idea. An excellent example of this PCC is showcased by Tripmine Studios and their implementation of it Something to note with our current PBR+SSS+PCC shader is that it is in the process of being rewritten, as it has some issues. Along with this, it is currently not functioni...Happy National Video Games Day Update!Sep 11, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHello all you avid Hunt Down the Freeman fans! We have some pretty exciting news for you all that you might like to hear. After the downpour of support that we had following the release of the sudden April 1st update, our little team expanded from about five people to over twenty. What does this mean? It means that we’ve been able to add a bunch of improvements to the code, game levels, overall performance, models, particles, rendering systems and whatever else I’m forgetting at the moment. We are releasing an update that’s going to fix some of the stuff we didn’t catch in the April 1st update, as well as add in a bunch of new map fixes, some performance boosts for Alaska maps, a few reworked maps like Ravenholm, fixes to the parkour system and just general issues like cubemaps cutting themselves off in some maps. Game tech was included but isn’t being used yet, for example PBR, Depth of Field, and FMOD Studio. We added both PBR and FMOD and have them working in game, but we only have one or two people that can make PBR textures and it’s a slow going process. Depth of field is giving us more of a headache then we thought it would, so we decided not to include it in this update. The game has switched to the multiplayer version of Source SDK 2013, which enables us to compress the game levels to take up less space, and we’ve also updated the project to Visual Studio 2022, which has the benefit of better performance in game due to a more recent compiler. We have plans to further expand on Black Mesa, expanding it from one level to about five or so, as well as redoing much of Act 3 so there’s more content to be had. It’s going to be awhile before any of this happens because we are working on redoing parts of Act 1 and another map in Act 3, but we only have a handful of level designers that can create a level from start to finish. I want to thank all the people that joined our discord to offer help, and I want to thank especially the busy people who have joined our dev team. There’s been a lot of time and effort expended into working on the source engine and getting it up to modern standards. If you want to support us and allow us to buy things for the project and/or support my Funko POP addiction, you can give money to our Patreon. Join our discord to see what we are working on. If you want to opt-in to our development build, select the weekly release in the Beta properties, just be warned that things will break from time to time. Fixed M3SA Build UpdateJun 1, 2022 - Community Announcementsthe source code was update to vs2022 and the default settings is debug and i forgot to change it, it's fixed now sorry. i keep forgetting that hdtf gained traction and there's more than five people on the m3sa branch uwu sorry lmaoApril Fool's Update!Apr 1, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsHey all, it's been awhile. It's me, the dude who has been managing the Twitter and the Steam Store page. I've been working with a number of new people and other former devs to make hunt down the freeman more playable. They, along with the community, have done truly amazing work, massively overhauling parts of the game in about four months. We hope you'll have fun playing it!Hunt Down the Freeman, the really bad Half-Life spinoff, gets some brutally funny achievementsSep 25, 2019 - PC GamerHunt Down the Freeman is an interesting idea—a member of the special forces team sent in to clean up the mess at Black Mesa in Half-Life swears revenge on Gordon Freeman for wiping out his pals—and a very bad game. Accusations of asset theft didn't seem to hold up, but it was broken, buggy, and poorly designed. But there is one good thing about it now: The achievements. Noticed yesterday by Twitter user Squibbus, they were recently added by M3sa, the one developer who hasn't washed his hands of the whole thing at this point, and they are doozies. M3sa said the achievements are based on suggestions from the Hunt Down the Freeman Discord, which themselves were largely drawn from inside jokes and memes about the game. "game SUCKS I go to BED," for instance, is a literal (and complete) Steam user review. They're mainly intended as a joke, but M3sa acknowledged that they also reflect frustration with the state of the game, and their role in it. Despite the surprise addition of achievements, M3sa said that no work has been done on the game itself in a long time, and expressed doubt that any more would occur. "I have a build I've worked on to replace weapon sounds and improve some maps' playability, but they aren't public right now," they said. "All my files are spaced out between two computers and it's kind of a pain in the ass to get them back together in one package, and then on top of that, uploading the build to Steam is messy. It's a lot of work for something that made my life hell for a year." On top of that, M3sa said they still haven't been paid for all their work. "I was paid about half of what I was owed. Some people weren't paid anything, including some of the voice actors," they said. "I was brought on like two or three months before it was released. I was only supposed to be on for two weeks, but it stretched out for months because the project had such a high turnover rate." M3sa doesn't expect that payment to ever come. The studio behind the game, Royal Rudius Entertainment, is gone, and the lead on the game, Berkan Denizyaran, is now employed at Activision. Because of that, they're not pursuing any kind of legal action to try to get what they're owed. "I've put it pretty much behind me," they said. "It was kind of a clusterfuck." The achievements are real, by the way, but not actually achievable within the game: M3sa said that the only way to get them right now is with third-party software. Important Update 002Mar 21, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello Everyone. We'd like to inform everyone that we lowered the price a few days ago in an effort to make our game more available to our global community. A lot of friends we've made couldn't play the game because of the price, and so we agreed for many reasons why it needed to go down. We've received a ton of feedback and advice both on our Discord, as well as the Steam Forums. RRE would like to personally thank everyone who has been trying to help us improve. It really means a lot to some of us on the team because we've given up other opportunities to work on Hunt Down The Freeman, working as hard as we could on it. You guys are awesome, thank you.Important Update 001Mar 14, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone. We pushed a pretty big update a few days ago to the game and made it playable. We've listened to all of you and we've reworked some of the combat on a few levels, improved loading times for 83% of the levels, and fixed a good deal of bugs. Stay tuned and expect more updates in the future.Why people are furious about that Hunt Down The Freeman game on SteamFeb 28, 2018 - PC GamerThere's a game on Steam called Hunt Down The Freeman , released on February 23 by developer Royal Rudius Entertainment. It's bound to cause a few double-takes for anyone browsing the Steam store because it's got Gordon Freeman's picture stuck right on it. This isn't some free Half-Life mod: it was made using a license for the Source engine , and it's being sold for about $25 (with a discount until March 2). If you go to its store page you'll immediately notice a few hundred extremely negative Steam reviews. Dig into the discussions page and you'll find more than just complaints of bugs and glitches, but also scores of accusations that the developers are using assets from other mods and games without permission. You'll also see a strange explanation from the developers who say the release was rushed in response to harassment from Half-Life fans—as well as a claim that the version of the game that was released isn't the version that was intended. Hunt Down the Freeman had a troubled start—a couple of years ago its Indiegogo campaign raised exactly $12 from a single backer—and now that it's been released (or some version of it has, anyway), the trouble continues. Along the way, it's managed to piss a hell of a lot of people off. I talked with the developers of Hunt Down The Freeman to try to unravel the drama. Did the creators of HDTF use assets from other mods without permission? This appears to be the reason for a lot of complaints in the forums, but according to the developers, including game director Berkan Denizyaran, who I spoke to on the phone, and a member of Royal Rudius Entertainment, who answered a few questions via email: no, there are no stolen assets in the game. An early demo of the HDTF did use assets from other mods, I was told, but they were used as placeholders during development. The developers say these placeholder assets are not present in the finished product. The Steam forums are filled with posts from users comparing various textures and assets to those from other games and mods, and it can be a bit of a nebulous process trying to verify their accuracy, what version of the game they're from, and if these assets are in fact taken from other mods or games. However, a member of the team of one of the mods in question, Holymac from Firearms: Source , posted in the Steam forums that the team had looked into it and didn't see any of their work being used. "Our art team determined that upon a cursory look of the content released with the demo," wrote Holymac, "and assets the HDTF team provided willingly, it appears no theft of intellectual property has taken place." I sent a follow-up email to the Firearms: Source team to ask if they had done any more investigation since January, and received a response from project coordinator Vincent Micelo, stating: "The source content in question was inspected by so...The Past, The Present, and The Future of HDTFFeb 25, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone, We want to talk about HDTF, what happened and what will happen. Two and a half years ago, Berkan had the idea to make a short film about HDTF, and after that idea, he chose to make it into a hl2 mod. After that, He started to make a small project which started to get attention. He pondered if he should make something bigger. The Indigogo campaign was started and raised nothing, but he didn't want to give up on it. He had to make his idea a reality. He went and found an investor, a company, and a team. That is when the actual project started. After a development of almost 2 years of an ambitious project, when we came close to the end, we started to get huge pressure and receive harassment from the community. We also had lies circulate from the old team, as well as various other sources about our game. This pushed us to release the game as soon as possible to prove our innocence. On the day of the release, it was a big shock for all of us when we saw the game on streams and realizing it wasn't the game that we had on our end. We may have failed on file organization, as we are still trying to figure out the best way to put everything together, and push a massive update. After the game is released, people started to harass us even more and generate more lies about us. No one has even contacted us to hear about our side of the story in a long time. To be honest, we don't actually think that people care about anything but the drama since none of the responses that we've given has been shared with the community. Now, what will happen is we will continue working on this project. We will release the actual version of the game we were supposed to release, and even after that, we will continue working on it with feedback from the community. At the end of the day, we are all Half-Life fans, and we all want to make a decent game. After we fix everything, we ask that you give us another chance. We cannot express how sorry we are, we will do our best to fix it and we will appreciate and take any help we can get from the community. We will not stop until HDTF is the game that is supposed to be and just like we did not give up at the beginning, we will not give up at the end. RRE Team.The Past, The Present, and The Future of HDTFFeb 25, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone, We want to talk about HDTF, what happened and what will happen. Two and a half years ago, Berkan had the idea to make a short film about HDTF, and after that idea, he chose to make it into a hl2 mod. After that, He started to make a small project which started to get attention. He pondered if he should make something bigger. The Indigogo campaign was started and raised nothing, but he didn't want to give up on it. He had to make his idea a reality. He went and found an investor, a company, and a team. That is when the actual project started. After a development of almost 2 years of an ambitious project, when we came close to the end, we started to get huge pressure and receive harassment from the community. We also had lies circulate from the old team, as well as various other sources about our game. This pushed us to release the game as soon as possible to prove our innocence. On the day of the release, it was a big shock for all of us when we saw the game on streams and realizing it wasn't the game that we had on our end. We may have failed on file organization, as we are still trying to figure out the best way to put everything together, and push a massive update. After the game is released, people started to harass us even more and generate more lies about us. No one has even contacted us to hear about our side of the story in a long time. To be honest, we don't actually think that people care about anything but the drama since none of the responses that we've given has been shared with the community. Now, what will happen is we will continue working on this project. We will release the actual version of the game we were supposed to release, and even after that, we will continue working on it with feedback from the community. At the end of the day, we are all Half-Life fans, and we all want to make a decent game. After we fix everything, we ask that you give us another chance. We cannot express how sorry we are, we will do our best to fix it and we will appreciate and take any help we can get from the community. We will not stop until HDTF is the game that is supposed to be and just like we did not give up at the beginning, we will not give up at the end. RRE Team.HDTF - DAY 1 PATCHFeb 24, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone, more updates are coming! Please, continue giving us feedback! Bug Fixes: -Cutscenes are now downloadable. -Dev texture brush on metro removed. -Alaska cubemaps fixed. -Missing textures fixed. -Missing ending levels are now downloadable. -Adam's mysterious twin brother is no more in the metro. -Missing keyboard texture -Flickering model textures in urban fight level fixed(for trucks and tents). Have fun!HDTF - DAY 1 PATCHFeb 24, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone, more updates are coming! Please, continue giving us feedback! Bug Fixes: -Cutscenes are now downloadable. -Dev texture brush on metro removed. -Alaska cubemaps fixed. -Missing textures fixed. -Missing ending levels are now downloadable. -Adam's mysterious twin brother is no more in the metro. -Missing keyboard texture -Flickering model textures in urban fight level fixed(for trucks and tents). Have fun!Update in less than 24 hours.Feb 23, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsWe are aware of the game breaking glitches, a fix will be applied in less than 24 hours. If you see any glitches, please report them in our forums, or in our discord. This is a massive embarrasment on our part. Thank you for your patience.Update in less than 24 hours.Feb 23, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsWe are aware of the game breaking glitches, a fix will be applied in less than 24 hours. If you see any glitches, please report them in our forums, or in our discord. This is a massive embarrasment on our part. Thank you for your patience.LET THE HUNT BEGIN!Feb 23, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsLadies and Gentelmen, Hunt Down The Freeman is out. Crowbar VS. Machete. Have fun.
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