bxt-rs

Video recording, speedrunning and TAS tools for Half-Life and mods. Current features include:

• Video recording (video tutorial).
• Interactive editor for TASes—remade and improved version of the BXT TAS editor (video tutorial).
• Brute-force optimizer for TASes (video tutorial).
• bxt_hud_scale to upscale the HUD for high-resolution video recording.
• Commands to play many demos at once (bxt_play_run).
• bxt_force_fov to override FOV when default_fov doesn't work.
• Fixes for command buffer overflow on BXT demos and un-stuck non-determinism for TASes.
• A useful subset of bxt_tas_log, including RNG state dumping, when you can't use the one from the original Bunnymod XT.
• bxt_fade_remove, bxt_shake_remove, bxt_skybox_remove, bxt_novis, bxt_wallhack, bxt_disable_loading_text.
• Mostly-working recording real-time gameplay into a .hltas script.

For a full list of features, console commands and variables visit the wiki page.

Started as an experiment to re-architecture Bunnymod XT from scratch with the benefit of hindsight.

VAC Ban Warning

Do not connect to VAC-secured servers with bxt-rs or you might get VAC banned.

Usage

You can download the latest development build from GitHub Actions. Open the topmost workflow and scroll down for Artifacts.

On Linux, you can use the runhl.sh script. Correct the paths at the top of the script if necessary.

On Windows:

1. Download Bunnymod XT Injector 3.2 or newer.
2. Create a new folder with Injector.exe and bxt_rs.dll.
3. Start Half-Life with the injector: Injector.exe path\to\Half-Life\hl.exe. Running HL on its own and running the injector afterwards is not supported.

To run bxt-rs together with the original Bunnymod XT (e.g. for capturing TASes) simply put BunnymodXT.dll, Injector.exe and bxt_rs.dll together into the same folder and start Half-Life with the injector.

Video Recording

To use video recording you need FFmpeg. On Linux, install it from your package manager. On Windows, download a static FFmpeg build (e.g. this one) and extract ffmpeg.exe into the Half-Life folder (the folder that has hl.exe).

If the video looks glitched or the game crashes when starting recording (happens on some Windows AMD GPU setups and on some NVIDIA driver versions):

1. Update your GPU driver.
2. If the problem still occurs, try _bxt_cap_force_fallback 1.

Profiling

Start Half-Life with the BXT_RS_PROFILE environment variable set to make bxt-rs output a trace.json file in the Half-Life folder. This is a Chrome JSON trace file which you can view in Perfetto or in chrome://tracing.

Alternatively, you can use the Tracy profiler. To do that, build bxt-rs with --features tracing-tracy, then start the game with BXT_RS_PROFILE_TRACY environment variable set, and connect Tracy.

Debugging

There are environment variables that may assist you in debugging:

• BXT_RS_VULKAN_DEBUG will enable the Vulkan validation layers. You need to have 32-bit validation layers installed, otherwise Vulkan will fail to initialize.
• BXT_RS_VERBOSE will log more verbose and spammy messages.

Building

You can uncomment the right line in .cargo/config to avoid writing --target every time.

Linux

1. Install 32-bit libc for linking. On Ubuntu that's libc6-dev-i386, on Fedora you'll need glibc-devel.i686.
2. Install stable Rust (for example, via rustup) with the i686-unknown-linux-gnu target.
3. cargo build --target=i686-unknown-linux-gnu

You may need to set CC=cc environment variable on Fedora and some other distros, otherwise you'll get build errors for SQLite. You can uncomment the corresponding line in .cargo/config to set it automatically if you need this.

Windows

1. Install stable Rust (for example, via rustup) with the i686-pc-windows-msvc target.
2. cargo build --target=i686-pc-windows-msvc

Windows (cross-compiling from Linux)

MinGW on Ubuntu currently fails to link Rust code. Debian and Fedora work fine.

1. Install MinGW for the 32-bit target. On Debian that's gcc-mingw-w64-i686, on Fedora you'll need mingw32-gcc and mingw32-winpthreads-static.
2. Install stable Rust (for example, via rustup) with the i686-pc-windows-gnu target.
3. cargo build --target=i686-pc-windows-gnu

Documentation

• Contributing: how to add patterns and new functionality
• Design notes

License

GPL v3 or later.