ReHLDS

ReHLDS

Reverse-engineered (and bugfixed) HLDS

What is this?

ReHLDS is a result of reverse engineering of original HLDS (build 6152/6153) using DWARF debug info embedded into linux version of HLDS, engine_i486.so

Along with reverse engineering, a lot of defects and (potential) bugs were found and fixed

You can try playing on one of many servers that are using ReHLDS: Game Tracker

> [!TIP] > ReHLDS linux-releases now is signed via GPG, pubkey is: 63547829004f07716f7be4856c32c4282e60fb67 and could be found at https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/. > > How to: > 1. Download 63547829004f07716f7be4856c32c4282e60fb67.asc key > 2. Import: gpg --import 63547829004f07716f7be4856c32c4282e60fb67.asc > 3. Download release archive and .asc file. > 4. Verify: gpg --verify some-rehlds.zip.asc some-rehlds.zip.

Goals of the project

• Provide more stable (than official) version of Half-Life dedicated server with extended API for mods and plugins
• Performance optimizations (use of SSE for vector math for example) is another goal for the future

🛠 License

ReHLDS is licensed under the MIT License.

License Transition

> [!NOTE] > Originally released under GPLv3, ReHLDS transitioned to the MIT License in July 2025 with the agreement of the core contributors. > See LICENSE-TRANSITION.md for details.

How can use it?

ReHLDS is fully compatible with the official pre-anniversary edition of HLDS (engine version <= 8684) downloaded by steamcmd. All you have to do is to download ReHLDS binaries and replace original swds.dll/engine_i486.so. For windows you can also copy a swds.pdb file with a debug information.

> [!CAUTION] > ReHLDS is not compatible with an old 5xxx or below platforms downloaded by hldsupdatetool.

Downloading HLDS via steamcmd

app_set_config 90 mod cstrike
app_update 90 -beta steam_legacy validate

Downloads

• Release builds
• Dev builds

ReHLDS binaries require SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instruction sets to run and can benefit from SSE4.1 and SSE4.2

Warning! ReHLDS is not binary compatible with original hlds since it's compiled with compilers other than ones used for original hlds. This means that plugins that do binary code analysis (Orpheu for example) probably will not work with ReHLDS.