Update: Episode One didn’t have too many bugs and it mostly used HDR, but one of the more annoying things added in the 26th May update was that the vortex effect which was originally more subtle… now looks pretty bad. Filip has fixed this up too, believe it or not. Here’s the YouTube video, and here is the download link.

Way back in April of 2009, a Source modder named Filip Victor announced his plans to do what Valve hadn’t gotten around to doing yet and what people had been asking for since the launch of The Orange Box in October 2007: putting HL2 and Episode One on the Source 2007 engine, or Orange Box engine, if you prefer. The console ports of The Orange Box’s versions of HL2 and Ep1 ran on the Source 2007 engine, and as such they featured full HDR on all maps, a few other graphical additions and achievements.

On the 31st of December 2009, Filip Victor finally released his work under the form of the “Update” mod. While this initial release had a few issues, it did what it was supposed to do: add HDR in all maps, add achievements, and a host of new features. On the 26th of May of this year, Valve released HL2 and the Episodes on the Mac, and people wondered if this would finally be the long-awaited official Orange Box update, and, surprisingly, it was.

The problem is the new engine hadn’t been tested very well, as it was quite unstable. Many people experienced a lot of really weird glitches that hadn’t been in there in 2004, and many wanted the old engine and original game back. There was a lot of whining on the forums, and Sierra Oscar, a SPUF moderator created a bug report thread… and, well, it ain’t very pretty. In addition, not all of the maps had HDR, and the ones that did supposedly did not have full HDR.

Well, the time has come, and exactly one year later, almost to the day, Version 2.0 of the Update mod is out, and not only does it fix all the issues that were introduced – it makes HL2 two times as pretty. Take a look!