NVIDIA this week announced Half-Life 2: RTX, a community-made remaster of the legendary game featuring all-new assets, textures, and lighting. Pieces of the remaster are likely to make their way to the already existing Half-Life 2: VR Mod.
And now it seems that fans are in for another treat; the Half-Life 2: VR Mod is likely to get a range of graphical upgrades thanks to the newly announced Half-Life 2: RTX remaster.
1 of 2
Image courtesy NVIDIA
Image courtesy NVIDIA
Though it already featured improved graphics and lighting over the original Half-Life 2, the Half-Life 2: VR Mod largely focused on touching up the game’s existing assets, and enhancing some key 3D models while building out full support for VR.
Half-Life 2: RTX, on the other hand, is a complete graphical overhaul says Nvidia.
The project is described as being in “early development,” with developers consisting of a range of experienced Half-Life 2 modding teams, including folks from the Half-Life 2: VR Mod team. The teams are working under the banner Orbifold Studios and say they’re seeking more talented people to work on the project.
1 of 2
Image courtesy NVIDIA
Image courtesy NVIDIA
According to Nvidia, the project will see “every asset reconstructed in high fidelity,” textures built with physically-based rendering techniques, and RTX ray-tracing support.
And while the project will likely mean that high quality 3D assets will make it over to the Half-Life 2: VR Mod, unfortunately RTX ray-tracing probably won’t.
A member of the Half-Life 2: VR Mod team called modding the full Half-Life 2: RTX game to support VR “just a pipe dream at the moment.”
“Currently RTX Remix [the platform used to build Half-Life 2: RTX] is not compatible with Half-Life 2: VR Mod, since they both hook into the rendering pipeline and abuse it in different and incompatible ways,” they said.
But, the member says there are plans to “work with other members of this new super-team [that’s working on Half-Life 2: RTX] on back-porting as much of the shiny new HD content as we can to the old source engine, and putting them into our Half-Life 2: VR Mod graphics update.”
Following last month’s release of the Half-Life 2: Episode 1 VR mod, the Source VR Mod team is set to release Episode 2 on April 6th. A launch trailer shows how the episode has been fully adapted to be played in VR.
After years of starts and stops on various attempts to turn Half-Life 2 into a fully playable VR game, the Source VR Mod Team released the Half-Life 2 VR Mod to major acclaim last year. Since then the team has followed up with an equally well received VR mod for Episode 1.
Less than a month later, the team is set to release the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 VR Mod on April 6th, including a full set of VR features like hands-on weapons, comfort options, real ladder climbing, and—of course—a crow bar you can actually swing.
The Source VR Mod Team released a launch trailer for the game ahead of release, showing the classic Episode 2 action that players can now relive in VR.
The Half-Life 2: Episode 2 VR Mod is free, but requires that players own the original Episode 2 game in order to play. The mod supports all SteamVR headsets like Index, Vive, and Quest via Oculus Link.
Image courtesy Source VR Mod Teamsou
All three of these Half-Life 2 VR mods are built by volunteers who make up the Source VR Mod Team. If you want to support their current and future work, they accept contributions on their Ko-fi page.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two will soon join its predecessors in PC VR, arriving as a free Steam mod on April 6.
Having previously confirmed plans for an Episode Two VR port, the Source VR Mod Team revealed the release date for this final part (sorry Half-Life 3 hopefuls) of Valve’s iconic FPS last week when Half-Life 2: Episode One VR Mod released. Like the Half-Life 2 VR Mod and Episode One, you must own the base Episode Two game on Steam to access this. Furthermore, the Source VR Mod Team states anyone using someone else’s account via family sharing feature won’t work.
Offering full room-scale VR with motion controls, new weapon interactions, comfort options like motion vignettes and more, that’s compatible with any headset supported by SteamVR. You can check out the mod page for more information. Based on the quality-of-life updates Half-Life 2: VR Mod received post-launch, support for bHaptics TactSuit vests and Steam Workshop also seems likely.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two is available now on Steam for $7.99, and included in the The Orange Box bundle for $19.99 alongside the Half-Life 2 base game and Episode One.
The now somewhat mythical Half-Life 2 VR mod, HL2VR, has resurfaced again, this time with fresh gameplay.
There’s been multiple attempts to bring Valve’s classic shooter to VR with a full mod over the past few years. We first wrote about it back in 2017 (and I wrote about earlier versions at a different publication 9 years ago now) but, time after time, promising outlooks end up turning into vaporware. In 2021, though, popular VR modder DrBeef was confirmed to be joining the project alongside fholger. Last week, the latter shared updates on their progress, including new gameplay footage seen below.
Half-Life 2 VR Mod Returns
The gameplay is taken from an early segment of the shooter, and shows full motion control support and expanded features like long-distance grabbing, crowbar attacks with physical movement, and even weapon reloading manual input.
In a lengthy Reddit post, fholger — who is currently the sole developer on the project with DrBeef on leave — explained that large parts of the project’s past work had since been erased, meaning the developers have had to start from scratch in many areas.
“The problem, though, was that every single one of those components was broken and left unfinished,” the developer said of past builds. “The input bindings for the controllers were created in the days of the OG Vive and were basically unusable on something like the Index controllers. The hand models were bulky, completely flat and unanimated and placed at a weird spot slightly in front of the controllers. They were also coupled to a partial player body without any IK that behaved weirdly and often got in the way of the camera. Not a single weapon was actually functioning.”
The issues go beyond that, with fholger pointing to the Source engine’s archaic framework and having to lose some parts of the project that had already been built. “On the upside, we will now probably be able to release the source code for HL2VR at some point in the future,” they said. Currently, the start of the game up until the airboat sequence is playable and, in the developer’s words, enjoyable but still with plenty of issues to fix. The next milestone will be to get the full game working in VR with major elements like the vehicle sections performing comfortably.
“I am not going to promise any particular timeline for this (real life would interfere, anyway), but I will try to update you on our progress semi-regularly,” the developer said. “Please do not expect a perfect VR experience for this initial release – flat-to-VR ports will always have some jank remaining, and we will still be focussing on the most critical aspects to get the game playable.”
In an excerpt from our upcoming interview with community modder Simon ‘DrBeef’ Brown, he said that he would love to port Half-Life 2 to Quest but that it will “probably never happen.”
The reason is mainly practical — all of Team Beef’s ports are possible because the games’ original engines are open source, allowing them to be ported to Android for a Quest release.
Half-Life 2 runs on the Source engine, which is free to use for Steam users but not exactly open source (pun sorta intended) and therefore any Quest ports of the game would not be direct translations of the original. Open source engines also allow modders to port the engines in full without running into any issues.
Here’s DrBeef’s response in full:
UploadVR: I’m wondering if you decided to port something that was Quest 2-only how recent do you think you could go with a game. And is there a dream game that you would like to see ported? Or have you already gotten there?
DrBeef: The problem is there’s a dependency on the actual software being open source. As far as modern games go, I think Doom 3 is kind of — I’m quite happy to be corrected — but Doom 3 is probably one of the most recent well-known popular games that actually has its engine code open source. After that point, I think, id software stopped doing that. There’s not many games studios where they actually open source their engine software. It’s a bit of a shame.
The game I would most like to do, but I think will probably never happen is Half-Life 2. Because I’m slightly ashamed to admit I’ve never played all the way through it. And also I got halfway through playing it on the original dev kit, but never finished it. You know, it’s one of those games that we get asked about all the time. There’s somebody who’s managed to do some sort of Android port somehow. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but it’s, you know, it’s not like a truly open source engine port.
So I think there would be some risks entailed with trying to pick that up. So as it stands, I think that game is out of reach, but, yeah, that would kind of be the dream game to bring to the Quest, but I fear it’s probably never going to happen.
Keep your eyes open for our the rest of our interview with DrBeef, which releases tomorrow on our YouTube channel and here on the site as a transcription.
A new mod for Half-Life: Alyx recreates environments and assets from Half-Life 2 in VR, using the Source 2 engine.
Created by Vect0r, the mod is just a showcase for now and won’t be released to the public. It features the outdoor area of City 17 which Gordon Freeman runs through in the beginning of the game and shows some other Half-Life: 2 assets. So while it’s still exciting, the mod is just a demonstration and doesn’t represent a fully playable VR version of Half-Life 2 just yet.
As you can see, despite running on the new Source 2 engine that debuted in Half-Life: Alyx, the ported assets and visuals in the mod don’t look nearly as polished, for very understandable reasons. “I took the original map file and converted to Source 2 format and added to Half-Life: Alyx,” said Vect0r, in the video description. “In process, I converted assets of Half-Life 2 to Half-Life: Alyx as well. Things I was able to do was very limited since Valve didn’t share SDK with the public yet. [sic]”
Obviously substantial work would be needed, particularly with lighting and other effects, to properly port the Half-Life 2 assets into Source 2, for VR or otherwise. That being said, the mod does allow the player to use the reload and eject mechanic from Alyx, which is exciting.
While it’s just a demonstration for now, it bodes well for the future. It would be amazing to play through Half-Life 2 in VR using Alyx’s gunplay and mechanics. A group of developers is working on porting the original game to VR more fully, though.
If you’re looking for something to play after finishing Half-Life: Alyx, physics playground Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades now includes a new mode that’s inspired by Half-Life 2.
For those of you unfamiliar, the game better known as H3VR from RUST LTD. is a kind of sandbox playground with a range of modes, tons of weapons, and an irreverent sense of humor that chooses to make non-playable characters look like hot dogs. An obsession with meat — and sausage in particular — runs throughout the game and its developers continuously update the title. In fact, this latest mode is the game’s 87th update. That’s an extraordinary number of changes since H3VR’s release in 2016 that, combined with the game’s large fan-base, makes it unlike anything else in VR.
Welldone Freemeat
The new update adds a new playable character called “Welldone Freemeat” to H3VR’s Take & Hold game mode. That’s the game’s tactical roguelike mode in which players become a character like a Cowboy, WW2 “riflewiener”, or a special operations commando to then fight through stages of increasing difficulty. The latest update features custom weapon progression with five new weapons inspired by Half-Life 2. The new weapons include a “custom Mp7 and a crossbow that grills and fires 2-foot long hot dogs,” according to developer Anton Hand. New “Sosig Soldiers” are there too (members of the “Porcine Oberwurst”) alongside new enemy types that include “the absurd Bread Crab and terrifying Meat-hack,” according to Hand, plus “even more stupid puns.”
When Boneworks (read our full review) released late last year from Stress Level Zero it led the charge in redefining how we interact with virtual objects in digital space. We took some time to speak with Brandon Laatsch from Stress Level Zero about the game’s innovations and successes.
By all accounts, Boneworks seems to have single-handedly ushered in a new era of interaction in VR games. For the next year or two I’d imagine we’ll often discuss types of interaction systems in terms of “pre” and “post” Boneworks. Or in other words, Stress Level Zero did some really impressive and immersive things with the way the game handles physics.
In most VR games before Boneworks when you reach out to touch something your virtual hand passes through it or becomes a silhouette of some kind to indicate you can’t do that. If you try to push open a door it doesn’t work unless you grab the door knob. If you want to shove an enemy you need to grapple them in the right spots and if you want to hit something hopefully you’ve found the right item and swing at something that’s assigned as having collision properties.
“After Duck Season we had a lot of ideas for what we could do that we felt would be much more mainstream and really push the medium forward, especially physics interaction in VR,” says Laatsch. “We had a lot of ideas from making YouTube videos [with Node] and seeing what people are responding to. Viral marketing is what sells games. What’s gonna sell new technology to people is seeing what their peers and people they relate to are playing and what they think of things. So we’re like, well, it’s very important to consider presentation inside the headset, as well as presentation outside of the headset.”
That’s on display immediately in Boneworks. When you pick up something that’s clearly heavy, like a metal barrel or a two-handed sledgehammer, you have to treat it as such. An early sign posted during the tutorial segment instructs you to pretend you’re lifting something in real life even though there’s not actually anything in your hands. Mime it, if you will.
That not only tricks your brain into moving accurately, but also makes it more entertaining and believable to watch for a viewer — which is crucial not just for selling VR to a consumer, but demonstrating it to friends too.
“We went after the genre of a physics action adventure FPS because it has a long tradition in the game industry of being a strong performer,” says Laatsch. “It’s what Sony goes after for a lot of their big tent pole releases.
“So we wanted to go after that and beyond and really tried to take a stab at being what we think action-adventures genre could become in VR, like, what does VR enable and that’s where the marriage of physics came in. Physics for a game can only go so far with a keyboard and mouse, you know. Following the launch of Half-Life 2 in 2004, you would say, ‘Oh, wow, the keyboard and mouse is really spectacular for physics input!’ But since then, in over 15 years, not a ton of expansion on physics has happened. You can list off some, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild, you have Red Faction, a handful of fitness games that have risen to the top, there’s Bioshock, There’s a handful of them, and then in terms of game design, a lot of that stuff somewhat stagnated over the last few years.”
If you draw a line charting the changes in how players interact with digital worlds using keyboards and gamepads since Half-Life 2, that line doesn’t have many fluctuations in it other than the titles Laatsch cites specifically.
Imagine playing a game like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (VR or otherwise) with an actual physics-simulated world rather than just a bunch of geometry you walk across and pick up a few items in. Bethesda does a great job of selling illusions, but when you craft a world full of physical interactions the illusion starts to become reality, at least virtually.
“Then we looked at VR input devices, like we have this three 6-DOF tracked devices between the headset and controllers and they’re very accurately tracked,” says Laatsch. This is the input we’ve been waiting for to be able to push things further, right? To push to beyond what’s out there in traditional gaming. And the nice thing too is because it’s your actual body, there are real world limitations to how fast those tracked devices can move. It’s not like the flick of a mouse where you can send your character spinning in a circle super rapidly because in the real world you can only move your hands so fast and you can only accelerate your hands so fast or whip your head so fast. Like there’s actual real world constraints which are tied to your own anatomy, right?”
This is where the miming of actions becomes even more important. In a lot of video games your character learns new abilities and can suddenly swing weapons faster, hit harder, and do unnatural maneuvers that defy the laws of physics. But to instead flip things around and use the laws of physics as the basis for your gameplay puts added stress on your actual body. What looks cool and feels cool are often very different things in VR.
“So we figured this is ultimately where physics can take the next step. Boneworks is not saying, ‘Here’s a complete exploration of what can be done with physics in VR’ though, like no, we think of it as this is the beginning of it.
“And it’s our job and everybody else’s job, hopefully, to now try to go and, as much as I hate to say it, make Boneworks age poorly. Like, we want to look back in 10 years and say, ‘Dang! It was awesome for the first time, but it’s unplayable now!’ That just means that we’ve done a great job here and now.”
“We had to figure out what a longer form VR gameplay session looks like,” says Laatsch. “Like, how fast can you move and how quickly can you do things? Eventually playing just gets way too tiring for long sessions. We had that experience and compared to something like Sprint Vector, where it’s like, everyone only has a few good a few races in them where they’re trying their hardest before they get too tired…In that case, it’s a race. It’s supposed to be exertion. But looking at the action-adventure genre and looking at how we can encourage people to play for an hour-long session or two-hour long session or, you know, whatever…To try to stand, you know, try to be on your feet all day is like a very full day at work, and you come home, then you’re exhausted.”
As someone that often binges VR games to get through them for reviews, I can personally confirm how exhausting many of them tend to be. But as the medium continues to evolve and grow, making room for more physical games (without leaving behind less intensive experiences) is important for innovation.
“Design-wise we wanted to make something, reckoning back to what I was saying earlier about reading well to the 2D viewer as well as to the in-headset viewer,” says Laatsch.
“Ultimately, where does it go? It seems like VR is, you know, we’re getting to a great point in terms of the amount of installed hardware on the PC side of people having CPUs and GPUs powerful enough to buy it. They’re just a headset away and we’re seeing the headset conversion starting to really ramp up with a good assortment of quality headsets out there for them to buy.”
The most anticipated virtual reality (VR) title coming in 2020 has to be Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx, the next instalment in a highly venerated series stretching all the way back to the late 90s. While it might not be the sequel to Half-Life 2 fans have been yearning for, its pending arrival is no less exciting. In preparation for the launch in March Valve has decided to treat gamers with free access to the entire Half-Life series on Steam.
This is a great chance for those gamers who never got to play any of the franchise the first time around and have been hesitant to purchase a 20-year old videogame, introducing them to the deadly Combine which have infested planet Earth. It’s also a great chance for those who did originally play the series when it first came out to get reacquainted with the storyline.
Available to play free now until the arrival of Half-Life: Alyx:
Another good reason to play through the first two titles is that Half-Life: Alyx’s story is set between them, where: “Alyx Vance and her father Eli secretly mount the resistance to the brutal occupation of Earth by a mysterious alien race known as The Combine.” You play as Vance, trying to save humanity by taking the fight to the invaders.
From the screenshots and details released so far Half-Life: Alyx looks to be an ambitious VR experience, playable on Valve Index, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Already available for pre-order with a 10% discount on Steam, as previously reported if you own the Valve Index headset of the controllers then Half-Life: Alyx will be free.
Additionally, the Half-Life: Alyx team will be taking part in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) to connect with fans, taking place today at 9am PT (5pm GMT). Expect some (not all) questions to be answered revealing a few more secrets about the videogame.
VRFocus will be closely following the latest Half-Life: Alyx news, reporting back with the latest updates (whilst playing a little Half-Life).
This is a great chance for those gamers who never got to play any of the franchise the first time around and have been hesitant to purchase a 20-year old videogame, introducing them to the deadly Combine which have infested planet Earth. It’s also a great chance for those who did originally play the series when it first came out to get reacquainted with the storyline.