Gamers still hoping against hope for a true follow-up to Half-Life 2 (after so, so many years) may remember last year's flurry of speculation that Half-Life 3 was finally nearing completion. Amid all those rumors, though, we never got any official sign from anyone inside Valve that a Half-Life project was currently in development.

That changed this week thanks to an apparent slip-up during a panel at GameSoundCon, an industry conference devoted to "the art, technology, and business of game audio." In a panel devoted to Valve's use of open audio engines (captured in this Vimeo clip), Valve composer and audio artist Mike Morasky let an interesting string of three letters slip while talking about the way the company implements high dynamic range (HDR) audio:

Our HDR system is basically that's one of the three pieces that come together to make an HDR that you can easily optimize. And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth [emphasis added].

"HLX," of course, has been widely reported as the internal code name for Valve's next Half-Life project. The codename has shown up in Valve engine code since at least 2024, but it has never been referenced in public by a Valve employee until now (though Morasky was responsible for a close call in an interview last year).

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