Black Mesa Gets Gyro Support for Steam Deck Along With Fantastic Performance Enhancements

Black Mesa is easily one of the best ways to experience the first Half-Life game. This fan reimagining overhauls the entire 1996 original with updated visuals, a reimagined campaign, a new soundtrack and voice acting, workshop support, and fantastic multiplayer integration. And yesterday, it got a brand new patch, dubbed the Necro Patch, that improved performance significantly and brought gyro controls to the Steam Deck!

There are a bunch of improvements here meant to make Black Mesa run significantly better in a Linux environment. The game has been ported to DXVK 2.3.1, and there have been performance enhancements implemented with the new renderer. This ends up helping the game significantly when it's using Vulkan, which is what is primarily used on Linux. We also have Steam Input support, which makes the game run significantly better with controllers as a whole, including the Steam Deck. On top of that, we officially have gyro support!

With all that, we have some UI improvements for a stable presentation throughout all three available modes. There's also some performance improvements with the UI thanks to an optimized texture lock implementation and alpha blending with a background map has been improved. This also fixes the past UI flickering and artifacting that was going on. There are also some bug fixes for the workshop client, crash fixes, reflection bugs, and transparency issues.

You can check out the full changelog for this awesome update on their Steam Community Post.

Black Mesa is currently 80% off for the Steam FPS Fest until April 22nd. It is $3.99, which is a fantastic price.

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