Things to look forward to: For nearly a decade, developers and modders have been working hard to make Valve’s groundbreaking Half-Life 2 playable in VR . The latest attempt, long dormant, is still a long way from full completion, but will reach a major developmental milestone next month.
This week, a modding team announced that they will be releasing Half-Life 2’s VR mods into public beta in September. Major aspects of the mod seem to be done, but the team still wants to improve it.
The beta will let Half-Life 2 owners play the main story from start to finish in VR. All weapons will support VR features such as manual reloading, dual wielding and optional laser sights. Players will also have room-scale movement, head- or controller-facing movement, quick turns, smooth turns, and optional vignette to prevent motion sickness.
Half-Life 2 VR should work with any headset that supports Steam VR, including Index, Quest, Vive, and Pimax. However, the beta version may not come to Steam. The modders program provides a standalone installer that requires an existing Half-Life 2 installation. Hopefully the final version will have a Steam page where users can easily add it to their library like many other Half-Life 2 mods.
exist After the beta, modders plan to add Half-Life 2 episodes, which will require a different build to fix some bugs. They also want to improve hand animation, motion controls, textures, lighting and other details. The team promises visual upgrades – using artificial intelligence upgrades and manual touch-ups – that will stay true to the classic 2004 look.
Half-Life 2 VR will finally be open source if there are no laws preventing modders from doing so. Any other Half-Life 2 mods that don’t use custom DLLs should be playable in VR, possibly including some custom activities.
The first Half-Life 2 VR mod came out in 2013, but it was incompatible with the latest VR headsets due to defunct support for Source Engine VR. The current work, developed in 2017, aims to correct this by moving frames from DirectX 9 games to modern headsets that require DirectX 10 or 11.
The mod disappeared after falling into development hell, but new team members restarted the project last year with regular progress updates.
It’s unclear if Half-Life 2 VR will borrow ideas from Valve’s official Half-Life VR game Half-Life: Alyx, but that’s not Not surprisingly. Alyx will also receive a mod later this year in the form of Levitation, a new custom event.
