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Installing HLRally mod & crash fixes
By Max Lagomorph
Yet another HLRally installation guide with some crash fixes.
   
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Created by
Max Lagomorph
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Category: Modding or Configuration, Multiplayer
Languages: English
Posted
Updated
28 Nov, 2023 @ 2:25pm
4 Dec @ 11:31am
201 Unique Visitors
7 Current Favorites
Guide Index
Overview
Introduction 
Installation 
Startup crash fix 
Linux server crash fix 
Comments
Introduction
This is an adaptation of this Steam guide but more detailed and with some extra information.

This guide will help you how to install the Half-Life mod "HLRally" on your Windows computer (and for Linux servers too) and also fix common crashes on modern systems. I won't go into detail about the gameplay here, so I recommend that you take a look at the game manual from here[www.hlrally.net] or in "{your_hl_directory}/hlrally/manual".
Installation
First download the Beta 1.0 version of the mod from its official ModDB page (just press that big red DOWNLOAD NOW button and wait) and then run the installer.

Once you have the installer open, this should appear:


Do click to Next >...


Here you will need to specify the installation path of your Half-Life. In case you have the game on Steam this will be located as it appears in the image I have selected (I assume the installer will select it by default).

When you have selected the folder, click Install and just wait.


You will then be asked if you want to create shortcut paths to the mod. This is irrelevant, so you can omit it if you wish.

And with all this, the mod would be installed.


Now you will need to apply the Beta 1.1 patch, otherwise you will not be able to join to some servers that uses it. It's also necessary to have it as it will fix some problems with Steam.

Just download the patch from the ModDB page, wait and run the installer... The installer will be the same as the previous one, only this one will contain some differences as you will see below.

Here you can simply disable these two things, although for my part I recommend only disabling the last option as it is part of the mod's MP3 player, which nobody uses.


Then you will have to apply the installation path of your Half-Life as I explained before, there is no need to explain this part too much because the installation process is the same.

After you have done these two things, you will need to restart Steam so that it appears in your library.

Startup crash fix
UPDATE 2025-11-29: Consider using these new patches made by MrCalvin, which solves most of these issues below
https://forums.retromorph.top/viewtopic.php?pid=13

In case you want to play this mod in some widescreen resolutions (for example on 1440x900) or on a modern system, the game will simply close (and sometimes with a weird loud stutter sound) when you try to open or connect to a server. If this happens to you, you can try to solve it this way...

Go to your Half-Life root folder, right click on hl.exe, Properties and then on Compatibility, enable the option "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and select "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)". Once you have done that simply click on Apply and close the window.

The only drawback to having Half-Life run under Windows XP is that it cause some recording programs (such as OBS) to not recognize the game if you have it in full screen.

Now to force a resolution when opening the game (and without changing it manually inside), you must add in the launch parameters a specific resolution to use using the -w and -h parameters, for example -w 1280 -h 720 will make the game open in 1280x720. I also recommend playing it in windowed mode using -windowed (or -window) in case you don't like to play from different resolutions in full screen and have a messy desktop after closing Half-Life (lol).


Now every time you open Half-Life it will ask for an administrator verification, simply click Yes and the game will open without any problems.


This solution has worked for some of my friends as it has for me, so it should work for you too.

Also, consider seting "rally_sound_hw3d" to 0 to disable HLRally's hardware accelerated sound (and also "rally_sound_3dchannels") in the console.
Linux server crash fix
In case you want to run a HLRally server on a Linux system and you get a weird error with strange characters or something similar, then install ReHLDS[github.com] and also use this patch[archive.org] to fix problems with server-side plugins like AMXX and Metamod. For Metamod, use only Metamod-P[metamod-p.sourceforge.net] versions as other forks like the Metamod from AlliedModders or Metamod-R will crash with this mod on Linux (but not on Windows).

Installing these patches are really simple. When you downloaded ReHLDS, extract the files with "tar -xvf <filename>" and move all the contents from "bin/linux32" to your HLDS directory. And about the HLRally server patch, move the "hlr_i386.so" file from "hlrally/dlls" to your HLRally directory inside your HLDS installation.

# Assumung you already have a HLDS installation from SteamCMD or elsewhere and you already created a user for gameservers... wget https://github.com/rehlds/ReHLDS/releases/download/3.14.0.857/rehlds-bin-3.14.0.857.zip unzip rehlds-bin-3.14.0.857.zip cd rehlds-bin-3.14.0.857/bin/linux32/ mv * /home/gameserv/hlds/ cd /home/gameserv/ && rm -rf rehlds-bin-3.14.0.857 rehlds-bin-3.14.0.857.zip cd hlds/ wget https://www.hlrally.net/media/page_media/hlrally/downloads/server/hlrallyb11.tar.gz tar -xvf hlrallyb11.tar.gz && rm hlrallyb11.tar.gz cd hlrally/ wget https://archive.org/download/hlrally-b11-linux-server-fix/hlr-b11-ded-lin.tar tar -xvf hlr-b11-ded-lin.tar && rm hlr-b11-ded-lin.tar

If this didn't worked for you, then use Wine.
For Wine I strongly recommend using version 5.18 or below as the new versions of Wine no longer support the "curses" mode for wineconsole, which allowed you to run command line applications (like HLDS in this case) without a graphical X11 environment (and also allowed you to write commands on the HLDS console).
Because installing older versions of Wine is a grade 10 headache, I recommend if you're using a Debian based distro to install a "debootstrap" of Debian 11 Bullseye or Debian 10 Buster (on 32-bit because HLDS was designed to run on that architecture in the first place and also to save disk space), which has such older versions of Wine on their repositories without having to die in the process.

NOTE: Making a debootstrap will eat half of your disk space, beware!

# Install debootstrap package ## The sudo command is in parentheses only to omit it if you're doing this under the root user (sudo) apt install debootstrap # Creating a new debootstrap (sudo) debootstrap --variant=minbase --arch=i386 bullseye /srv/chroot/deb11i386 http://deb.debian.org/debian # Creates a minimal Debian 11 Bullseye chroot (sudo) debootstrap --variant=minbase --arch=i386 buster /srv/chroot/deb10i386 http://deb.debian.org/debian # Creates a minimal Debian 10 Buster chroot # Mount necessary file systems ## Change "XX" with the Debian version you choosed ("11" or "10") (sudo) mount --bind /proc /srv/chroot/debXXi386/proc (sudo) mount --bind /sys /srv/chroot/debXXi386/sys (sudo) mount --bind /dev /srv/chroot/debXXi386/dev (sudo) mount --bind /dev/pts /srv/chroot/debXXi386/dev/pts # Entering the newly created chroot (sudo) chroot /srv/chroot/debXXi386 /bin/bash # Add the Debian package mirrors in your newly chroot ## Change "XX" with the Debian version you choosed ("bullseye" or "buster") echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ XX main" > /etc/apt/sources.list echo "deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security XX-security main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ XX-updates main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list # Update packages, install your language locale and required packages apt update && apt install locales -y dpkg-reconfigure locales apt install tmux htop curl wget net-tools iputils-ping -y # Add Wine package repo (you can just use the default Debian Wine and skip this process to save time, but if you need to choose another version then follow these steps) mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key ## Change "XX" with the Debian version you choosed ("bullseye" or "buster") wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/dists/XX/winehq-XX.sources # Install Wine ## Choose a version first. If you're using a Debian 10 distro use only the 4.x versions because newer ones returns errors with dependencies. apt-cache madison winehq-stable ## Change "XX" with the Debian version you choosed ("bullseye" or "buster") apt install wine-stable=X.X.X~XX winehq-stable-i386=X.X.X~XX