Why is the cinematic mod for HL 2 so difficult to find working links?

[HeXen]

I haven't played HL 2 since the month it released. I honestly did not care much for it back then, seemed like a typical, scripted fps with facial expressions and a figure it out for yourself storyline. But recently I decided I wanted to give it another go and preferably with a graphical update which from some searching reveals that the cinematic mod may be up my alley and the pics looked great but I've been googling for an hour and for whatever reason, I cannot find a legit working link nor can I figure out for certain which version is the newest and which version numbers are fake. I've seen CM v 12.xxx and CM 2013, CM 2018 beta 1.26, etc. So I'm not too certain on which version is the latest but so far I've not found any actual working links to anything.

So far torrents are seeding at 0. File planet has a version 12.x version but it downloads at kbps speeds and pauses a lot. Moddb's links have 2.0 gb parts for a 2013 version but when downloaded are only 177 kb torrent file in a zip where the torrent has 0 seeds..wtf? . The original hosting site doesn't seem to exist anymore.....so where's a MOFO have to go to find a working link to the full, latest version? Preferably without having to install 10 patches on top of each other.

I'm sure it's a dumb question but just seemed to me that a popular mod would have a decent copy of the last release somewhere. But I'm no google fu master or anything or is there another graphical overhaul of this game that everyone is using instead?

 

[Zenoth]

On Moddb, if you click on the 'Files' tab from this link: https://www.moddb.com/mods/fakefactory-cinematic-mod

You should then see by scrolling down a bit some main posts, a bunch of them are called CM2013_FINAL.part1 to .part10, those are the ones you'd want. Not the one that says 'Torrent' near the top of the list; that might be the one you looked at. Each one of the ".part" files are around 1.95GB or so, they seem to be direct downloads. Note, however, that after you download the whole thing there's a separate update, version 1.25 it appears (an update for Final 1.24, which is pretty much the latest version; but I myself wasn't aware of that 1.25 update so I'm mentioning it here just in case).

If that doesn't work then there's always FileFront's version of it, but I don't think that's the same one; it appears to be version 7.0, instead of CM2013... or it's the same thing just named differently (but I wouldn't know if that's the case): https://www.gamefront.com/games/half-life-2/category/fakefactorys-cinematic-mod (it lists each parts down the page, from Part 1 to 6)

I haven't played that mod in many years, it definitely wasn't that version when I played it (last time must have been way before 2013, more like around 2010 maybe). It was an older version but I remember playing it a bit until getting bored by the immense amount of loading between each maps. That's most likely because of course about 8 or 9 years ago I had a much older system that might have been barely enough for the mod to even run (much less at maximum settings) and my HDDs were working like hell to load all those huge textures (well, at the time of course). Today my system would eat that mod for breakfast but I've played H-L2 more than enough to not need to get back in even with a mod.

It might be a pretty good one to start with if you didn't bother playing the game much since release. If you ever encounter issues with the mod, whatever they may be, and you decide to call it a night then I would instead recommend you try something more simple like a SweetFX / ReShade mod (most likely ReShade, not sure if SweetFX is even a thing anymore). If you want check mods like that on the Half-Life 2 Nexus page (just search by Top Files and avoid the Adult content if you want, there's a specific search criteria for that).

Hope it helps.