Valve’s canceled Portal prequel with unique gameplay revealed in documentary
Aperture Camera, Valve's canceled prequel to the Portal series, was revealed in Exposure, a documentary series by LunchHouse Software.
Half-Life: Alyx Is Valve’s ‘Flagship’ VR Game, Details This Thursday (Update)
Update: Today on Twitter Valve officially confirmed that Half-Life: Alyx is the name of its upcoming flagship VR game, details to come this Thursday at 10AM PT.
We’re excited to unveil Half-Life: Alyx, our flagship VR game, this Thursday at 10am Pacific Time.
Can’t wait to share it with all of you! pic.twitter.com/BupFCxSrTw
— Valve (@valvesoftware) November 18, 2019
Original: According to the unconfirmed rumor, the title is supposed to be named Half-Life: Alyx and will focus on the non-player character of the same name from Half-Life 2. This most recent rumor is by way of PCGamer and suggests a full unveiling would come on December 12 at the annual Game Awards hosted by Geoff Keighley, with release said to follow in 2020. There are also unconfirmed suggestions the game could be teased much sooner than the awards.
The rumor comes from an alleged transcript of a conversation/interview between an unknown person, Valve’s Robin Walker, and Keighley. In the conversation several details are discussed that will be easy to fact check when the time comes, such as the game’s title being Half-Life: Alyx.
Usually a rumor like this wouldn’t be worth giving too much attention, and to be clear we haven’t confirmed the rumor mill here, but last year sources told us Valve was working on a Half-Life VR game. At that time we also heard the possibility that you would play as a female character (such as Alyx), and that would likely place it after Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and leading directly into the next full installment in development. Valve founder Gabe Newell even joked about Half-Life 3 at the Valve Index launch event.
Other recent nuggets of information add weight to the rumor as well. Earlier this year a DOTA 2 update included mentions of a “hlvr_weapon_shotgun_prototype” and “SPORE damage” in its code. Further, just a couple months ago, intrepid fans found references again to Half-Life VR in an update for The Lab.
Valve told us earlier this year that their “flagship” VR game is in development and will be released this year for all headsets compatible with SteamVR. We’ve contacted Valve representatives multiple times for clarification of the game’s release timeline and haven’t received a response. Recently, Valve programmer Kerry Davis talked at length about how intricately simulated mechanics will be in the game, such as the doors.
Additional unconfirmed rumors suggest the game includes a lengthy campaign (at least by VR standards) and a new weapon called the “Grabbity Gloves” said to leverage hand tracking, with writing from Jay Pinkerton, who worked on Portal 2 and the Aperture Hand Labs project released with the Index Controllers earlier this year. Half-Life 2’s 15-year anniversary was last week and The Game Awards specifically posted about it.
Hopefully all of this adds up to an amazing game getting announced soon, but as of yet all of this remains unconfirmed rumors and second-hand reports. Half-Life would be a great fit for VR, so fingers crossed it materializes as a real product. In the meantime, at least you can play a modded version of Half-Life 1 on Quest.
The post Half-Life: Alyx Is Valve’s ‘Flagship’ VR Game, Details This Thursday (Update) appeared first on UploadVR.
In Valve’s Upcoming VR Game Even The Doors Are Simulated In Detail
Valve programmer Kerry Davis spoke in detail about VR interaction design for the company’s “flagship VR title” this weekend at DigiPen Institute of Technology.
Davis spoke about a range of VR development topics, but most of the talk focused on the specific issue of designing interactable virtual doors.
Valve first confirmed they were working on a VR game, three in fact, back in January of 2017. The company still hasn’t confirmed any details about these games, other than to say that one of them is coming this year and that it will be compatible with all PC VR headsets.
Davis spoke about the challenges of meeting this goal of properly supporting all headsets — “if you want to sell your games to a wide audience, you have to have all this junk on your desk“. He said it is easy to have six or seven pairs of VR controllers and “cords everywhere“. Issues like these mean that some at Valve “hate” VR development, according to Davis.
The programmer also confirmed that the game will use Valve’s Source 2 engine. This was said to be due to the engine’s excellent physics engine, Valve’s own custom made ‘Rubikon’.
Doors In VR
A high fidelity physics engine allows for more realistic interactions in VR. Davis used doors as a case study for how VR game design is different from traditional games. “Doors have always been around, it’s hard to build a game world without a door in it“. In most non-VR games, opening a door involves walking close and pressing an interaction button, which causes the door to swing open — Davis calls this a “classic door”. But this isn’t how doors work in reality. Davis explained that Valve’s goal for its “flagship VR game” is to simulate the actual experience of opening a door, not just the result of it.
Not only must the player be able to use these doors, but NPCs traveling through them must interact with them as well. And what if a player closes a door as an NPC is walking through? Davis called this a “difficult” challenge, but didn’t go into detail on what solutions they are exploring.
Davis showed off a series of designs for doors that could simulate the experience of opening one to varying degrees.
Interactive Door
The first, most basic physics-based door shown allowed the player to rotate the door about its hinge by either grabbing the handle and moving or simply pushing the door itself with either hand.
Latching Door
The Latching Door adds a closing mechanic. When the door’s rotation brings it in parallel with the hinge it will stop rotating, and cannot rotate any further in that direction (ie. it’s closed).
Door With Lever Handle
Door With Lever Handle builds on Latching Door by requiring the player to rotate their hand, and thus the handle, in order to rotate the door about its hinge through movement.
Dynamic Sound Based On Interaction
One demo Davis showed included appropriate creaking noises while opening the door and a slamming noise when it closes at speed.
Rather than simply play a sound effect, Davis explained that the sound is varied in pitch and tempo based on how far and fast the player is moving the door.
It has often been said that VR sound is as important as VR visuals, and small details like these should further immerse the player in Valve’s virtual world.
What Game Is This?
While Valve hasn’t given a name or setting for the game, code found in The Lab and source engine suggests it could be Half Life VR. In November of last year, before the Valve Index was even announced, sources told us of the headset’s existence and claimed the game was planned to ship alongside the hardware.
If it is indeed Half Life, this may be why the company is working on details as small as doors. If Valve is putting this much effort into the other interactions and sounds in the game, its VR game could be one of the most significant VR releases yet. To get a full view of just how hard Valve is thinking about these problems, we suggest you watch the full talk.
We’ll keep you up to date with any further news about Valve’s VR games.
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Editorial: Why Facebook’s Portal Could Be The Next Great AR/VR Accessory
In case you are unfamiliar with Facebook’s Portal, please let me bring you up to speed.
I toured through the website for Portal for the first time this week. The product debuted last year, and the whole website for the device reads like Facebook put a mirror up to itself and had trouble figuring out how to explain what it saw. The gadget is supposed to help you video chat with your contacts, but there’s a whole section of the product site dedicated to privacy. There is a physical cover you can place over the device’s camera when you don’t want a palantir-like glass eye staring into your room all the time and there’s a red light, too, that comes on when you a press a button to physically disconnect the camera and microphone from the rest of the device’s electronics.
Normally $200, Portal is available as of this writing for purchase as a pair for less than $250. Facebook’s VP of VR and AR, Andrew Bosworth, said earlier this year that new Portals are coming soon.
Here’s why I think mixed reality and Oculus Quest should be at the core of the next Portal.
Portal XR
In 2016 I found myself following emailed instructions, and trial and error, to enable mixed reality capture on a PC with a handful of apps like Fantastic Contraption. Three years later software like Liv and Mixcast help activate these features in some apps, and decrease the friction of setting up a capture session, but overall it is still difficult to get working.
Why did I go through all that effort? Because mixed reality capture is the best way to show other people what it feels like in a virtual world. Valve’s 2016 marketing video for the HTC Vive and their SteamVR room-scale tracking system extensively used this technique to demonstrate the hardware’s capabilities, and the video remains (in my opinion) the single best piece of VR hardware marketing ever made.
If mixed reality videos are so good at showing what VR is like and we produce content for a VR news website that could benefit from this type of content — why do we almost never use the approach? The answer is simple — because it is so difficult to set up every time for each new game. Facebook could erase all that difficulty with a gadget like Portal.
Casting From Oculus Quest
I find it surprising the first generation of this video calling device doesn’t run the Oculus app already to cast the view from an Oculus headset — just like an Android or iPhone. I’m glad this feature is there on my phone to use when needed but, overall, it isn’t very usable for the same reasons Gear VR is essentially dead — I have to decide between draining my phone’s battery or seeing a virtual world. I’d rather keep my phone charged, thank you very much.
A Portal, though, could be plugged into the wall and mirroring the view from inside an Oculus Quest. And that should just be the beginning.
If Portal and Quest could communicate automatically to deduce their locations relative to one another, then you’ve got yourself most of the way toward an auto-calibrated mixed reality studio. For the player in an Oculus Quest — at any given moment they should be able to activate mixed reality on the nearby Portal and show everyone in the room exactly what they are doing.
Here’s a video from Oculus Connect 5 in 2018 where a bunch of Quests share their location with a nearby iPad for precisely this type of functionality:
Lets take it a step further. Why couldn’t we place a Facebook Messenger call and broadcast mixed reality video live over our call?
Facebook’s dedicated communicator already does this for AR effects overlaid on top of faces.
If the next version of Portal was capable of all that? We are suddenly talking about a product I might be interested in buying for $200 to go with my Oculus Quest.
We still don’t know what to expect at Oculus Connect 6 — we’ll publish some predictions closer to the event. Facebook announced this session coming at the event in September:
Xiang Wei, Tech Lead Manager, Facebook; Kevin Xiao, Software Engineer, Facebook
One of the biggest challenges to VR adoption is the ability to share its power and excitement with those who don’t have a headset in a scalable way. This presentation will describe how to add mixed reality capture support to your Quest applications, as well as important considerations to bear in mind. It will also introduce our updated camera calibration and capture workflows that are designed for developers, streamers, and influencers.
Let us know what you think of Portal and its future in the XR ecosystem down in the comments below!
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How Cloudhead Games Worked With Valve To Make Aperture Hand Lab
Over the last five years Denny Unger and his partners at Cloudhead Games would talk about possible VR projects with some of the world’s largest companies. Cloudhead staff would build pitch decks and work out the fundamentals of VR games that could become dream projects for everyone involved.
That is, if the funding partners ever followed through.
Unger got the impression that whenever an executive in charge of paying for one of these potential VR games got a sense from Cloudhead of what install base they might reach with a well-made VR game — they’d turn into a ghost.
“We want to make VR games,” Unger says. “That is all we want to do. And we want to be there with some amazing stuff when the market tips.”
Aperture Hand Lab
One prospective project which didn’t evaporate — Aperture Hand Lab — released in June on Steam published by Valve as a kind of on-boarding experience for the company’s new VR controllers.
Over the last few years Bellevue-based Valve developed a series of hand-strapped VR controllers. Initially called “Knuckles” when they were only available to developers, Valve revised the design and started selling them this year alongside the high-end PC-powered Index VR headset.
Oculus Touch and Sony’s Move controllers are held. Players wear Valve’s controllers. The Index controllers also sense individual finger movement with some accuracy, too. So software compatible with the controllers can be made to recognize gestures which aren’t possible (or not as intuitive) when holding controllers in each hand. For example, you can open your hand and wave at a virtual character with Valve’s Index controllers.
Cloudhead’s VR creators shared the path they took from brainstorming interactions on a white board — like waving hello, high-fiving and playing rock-paper-scissors — to fully realizing an interactive story built around Valve’s humor.
Meet Friendly Frank
When Valve partnered with HTC in 2016 to ship the first room-scale PC-based VR headset with handheld tracked controllers, the company also released The Lab onto its Steam storefront. The collection of interactive experiments plays with concepts of scale, teleportation, photogrammetry and haptics all enabled by 360-degree room-scale tracking and a pair of wand-like hand controllers.
One of the experiments called Slingshot gives players control of a machine which sends small colorful talking spheres — “personality cores” — flying off into a giant warehouse filled with boxes. Each sphere carries a distinct appearance and voice. The player chooses the exact moment and direction to send the robots screaming into the distance.
Three years of hardware development later and Aperture Hand Lab’s first task for players with the Index controllers in hand is to show “they can let go of these controllers,” Cloudhead’s Antony Stevens said.
So Stevens revisited the Portal games and Slingshot and wrote placeholder lines for an “egregiously friendly” core set in the same pocket universe Aperture Science facility. Valve granted Cloudhead access to many of the assets used for those earlier projects. This early version of the character “said hello a billion times in my script,” Stevens said, before Valve writers Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw “showed up for writing.”
Valve’s VR Writing
“Hello. I am Frank, a friendly human. I like you. So I am waving. To you.”
Most people are probably able to pick up on the animation cues of a waving hand and the friendly voice with its perfectly spaced pauses. For those who don’t release the controller immediately, though, Frank can continue on for quite a while hinting that you should try waving back.
When you finally do, Frank says, “Good! We are now bonded in eternal friendship,” and the machine holding Frank releases the sphere into the pit below.
Additional personalities appear for high-fiving, rock-paper-scissors and a firm handshake. Each of these personalities — animated arm and gaze movements set to audio files — did not begin as motion captured performances.
The ideas started as an outline in a presentation to Valve. Valve selected which ideas they liked and whittled it down into a story through successive rounds of brainstorming and feedback. A story emerged, then, from the storytelling possibilities connected to each interaction.
Valve rewrote the personalities and the story it told, recorded the dialogue and sent back a bunch of audio files. With these audio files animations could be “keyed” — or thousands of tiny transitions timed out to change the positions of the 3D models in the scene — and set to each of the sounds by Cloudhead’s Steven Blomkamp for Friendly Frank, Mike Ferraro for the handshake and Corey Belina for rock-paper-scissors.
ohshithe’sgotagun.mp4 pic.twitter.com/atVsCfi8nr
— Steven Blomkamp
(@sblomkamp) June 30, 2019
Here’s how Blomkamp described the VR development process when I sent him questions about the video he posted:
“I don’t know all the voice actors but the one I knew for sure was Henry Zebrowski. Have never had more fun animating something than his stuff. That combined with Erik and Jay’s writing… *chef’s kiss* … Basically writers try to nail down script as soon as possible so animation can start. Scope is assessed based on script needs vs manpower available. Someone does recording sessions, files are reviewed and given to our sound guy/producer/all round wunderkind Joel Green who processes them all and hands them to me to take into Maya and start animating to. As it was a lot of specific, triggerable dialogue, timing had to be accounted for in as many ways as possible with minimal variance. So between fully hand keyed performances, we used idles or programmatic solutions like eye darts and aim constraints to keep the cores alive during bits that couldn’t be estimated/covered for easily by the hand keyed parts. Once the anims are done, our programmers implement them and work with the designers to create the sequence of flow that has all the triggers that compensate for player actions and story needs.”
You can play Aperture Hand Lab now on Steam with the Index Controllers. The software is accompanied by the following description on Steam:
“These Aren’t Your Daddy’s Hands”
These aren’t even your hands. These are precision-tuned sensor-rich re-imaginings of your hands, presented in high-fidelity simulated reality.
Main Features:
- Grabbing
- Shaking
- Waving
If you’ve always longed to try these exciting edge-of-your-wrist hand maneuvers, but wanted the chance to practice first in the safety of a non-judgmental virtual world, Aperture Hand Lab is easily in the top three options currently available to you in VR.
Presented in the World of Aperture.
You didn’t read that wrong! This game is present in the bowl of ape nature! Hold on, we did read that wrong! But you didn’t, Reading Champ! This game takes place in Aperture Science, home to the modestly popular Portal games your daddy used to play! But this isn’t your daddy’s game!(Return to top.)
The post How Cloudhead Games Worked With Valve To Make Aperture Hand Lab appeared first on UploadVR.
Vertigo 2 Demo Hides Amazing Portal VR/Moondust Easter Egg
Just when you thought Vertigo 2 had exhausted all of its Valve-aping jokes, an amazing Portal easter egg shows its face.
Check our video below to see how to get it Early on in Zulubo Productions’ free demo, you can find a secret corridor. It involves a bit of a leap of faith, but it’s worth taking the jump. Follow the corridor and you’ll come to a hidden room with a very familiar-looking gun. Yup, it’s a very close replication of the Portal gun from Valve’s seminal puzzle series. The Aperture Science logo on the side has been swapped out for Lenticular Laboratories.
Still, it’s about a close as you’ll get to holding the Portal gun in VR for now.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. Shoot a certain surface and you’ll create a portal to the moon. Oh look, and all those weird cube-people running around the surface look just like those seen in Valve’s Moondust demo. You can mess around and push them about a bit. As far as I can tell that’s where the easter egg stops. I’m sure we can expect plenty more in the full game, though.
Once you’re done you can take the gun (aptly named the Gordol Pun) back into the rest of the game. We’re just a Left4Dead joke away from Vertigo 2 completing the set (unless I missed one).
The game may take a lot of inspiration from Valve’s adventures, but Vertigo 2 is genuinely promising in its own right. We loved the demo’s array of weaponry, visual spectacle and fun shootouts. The full game is expected to launch sometime in 2020.
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Valve’s ‘Aperture Hand Lab’ Index Demo Updated to Support Oculus Touch
Valve released a VR game recently that aims to not only put you through your paces with your brand new Valve Index controllers, but directly in the familiar halls of Portal’s Aperture Science labs. If you have an Oculus Rift and are curious to try it out though, developing studio Cloudhead Games has created a keybinding to let Touch users have a go too.
Update (June 28th, 2019): Cloudhead Games took to Reddit to show users how to play Aperture Hand Lab with Oculus Touch. A developer says that while it isn’t the intended way for users to play, “at very least you should get some laughs from the dialogue.”
Here’s the instructions, courtesy Cloudhead Games:
- Launch the game
- Open the SteamVR menu and click Settings > Controller Binding (or Devices > Configure Controller on desktop)
- Select “Knux [Testing]” under “Current Application”
- Click “View” on the binding labelled “CHG Recommended”
- Click “Select this Binding”
Note: Selecting a binding for “Aperture Hand Lab” will not currently sync to the game. You will need to launch the game and select a binding for Knux [Testing] under “Current Application.”
The original article follows below:
Original Article (June 25th, 2019): Developed by VR studio Cloudhead Games and published by Valve, Aperture Hand Lab is aimed at the Valve Index headset and its finger-tracking controllers, which arrive on users’ doorsteps starting this week. The demo experience also technically includes support for HTC Vive, although this is because the Index controllers can be used with any headset that uses SteamVR base stations. You’ll need Index controllers to play, as they provide the five-finger tracking that the experience is built around (see update).
According to the game’s Steam page, the single-player experience also requires at least 2 × 1.5 meters of room to play, so make sure to clear some space when the big day arrives.
If you can’t wait to get an idea of what it’s all about (we have a hands-on video below too), the short game passes you through several tests administered by a number of ‘personality cores’, the very same as seen in Valve’s landmark VR demo The Lab (2016). Each of the cores give you a different gesture to accomplish to move on, but Cloudhead says that they can also react to different hand gestures too, reacting differently when you give them the middle finger, devil horns, etc.
Cloudhead Games is probably best known for their ongoing VR series The Gallery, the first of which was a launch title for the HTC Vive back in 2016. You might also know them for their early work on VR teleportation as a locomotion standard in VR games. Back then, trying to find a nausea-free locomotion standard was still a big topic of conversation, and Cloudhead made some smart choices that are still in wide use today.
While Valve is listed as a publisher of the experience, Valve actually provided Cloudhead with Portal assets, something art director Anthony Hackett calls “sort of like Christmas.” Valve also included original audio, which Cloudhead ‘beefed up’ to make good use of the new Index headphones.
Valve writers Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw were also on hand to help refine the game’s narrative elements and keep it squarely within the Portal universe.
Check out our hands-on (pardon the pun) below:
The post Valve’s ‘Aperture Hand Lab’ Index Demo Updated to Support Oculus Touch appeared first on Road to VR.
ChromaGun Hits PSVR Next Week With Aim Support
The long-awaited PSVR support for ChromaGun is nearly here.
Pixel Maniacs announced today that the VR edition of its 2016 puzzle game is coming to Sony’s headset on February 19th. You can check out a launch trailer for the game below.
In ChromaGun you wield a paint-firing gun that can change the colors of walls and drones. Different colors will attract WorkerDroids that populate the test chambers you’re progressing through. You have to arrange the droids to unlock doors and progress to the next level. The game’s tone and story have often been compared to Valve’s puzzling classic, Portal.
On PSVR, the game’s set to support both the DualShock 4 and Sony’s flashy Aim controller. Move support isn’t listed, though. Either way, it’s quite nice to see Aim support for a game that isn’t just a straight up shooter. It has us wondering what other uses for the controller there might be out there.
ChromaGun VR is a separate release to the normal version of the game, which released on PS4 last year. A lone programmer has been working on the port ever since that launch.
This should provide a pretty solid bit of puzzling fun for PSVR fans. The original version of ChromaGun was quite well received by both critics and fans alike. Players point towards a story length of around four hours, too. It might not be the ultimate expression of what VR is capable of, but it should be a fun distraction for those that like to scratch their heads.
Support for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive hasn’t been confirmed at this time.
Tagged with: ChromaGun VR, portal, puzzle
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Personalwechsel bei Facebook: Neuer VP für AR-/VR-Division & Portal-Teamführer
In den Facebook Reality Labs gibt es interne Umstrukturierungen in der Personalebene sowie ein neues Mitglied für das Portal-Team. So wechselt Rafa Camargo, ehemaliger VP des Facebook-Portal-Teams, in die AR-/VR-Hardware-Abteilung, um dort zukünftig die Rolle des VP einzunehmen. Seine vorherige Position wird durch Ryan Cairns übernommen, der bisher als langjähriger Jahre AR- und VR-Ingenieur bei Google tätig war.
Facebook – Neuer VP in den Reality Labs und neuer Teamleiter im Portal-Team
Rafa Camargo sieht sich zukünftig in einer neuen Rolle in den Facebook Reality Labs. Der ehemalige Leiter des Portal-Teams übernimmt ab sofort die Führung der AR-/VR–Abteilung des Tech-Konzerns. Michael Abrash bleibt weiterhin als Chef-Wissenschaftler und Leiter der Reality Labs erhalten. Den internen Wechsel bestätigte Herr Camargo per Twitter und führt damit zeitgleich sein neues Aufgabenfeld an:
Excited to announce that I'll be leading Hardware for AR/VR at @facebook…and would like to welcome Ryan Cairns, who will now lead Portal. Launching @portalfacebook with the team was an amazing experience and I look forward to launching @Oculus Quest and more
— Rafa Camargo (@rafa_camargo) January 16, 2019
Demnach ist er zukünftig hauptsächlich für den erfolgreichen Marktstart der kommenden Oculus Quest verantwortlich, Facebooks autarker VR-Brille. Doch auch weiteren Projekten blickt er optimistisch entgegen.
Seine vorherige Position im Portal-Team, Facebooks Smart-Videokommunikations-Tool, übernimmt das ehemalige Google-Mitglied Ryan Cairns. In seinen zwölf Jahren im Konzern war er unter anderem maßgeblich an der Entwicklung der Google Daydream sowie diversen AR-Projekten, wie ARCore beteiligt und leitete bereits verschiedene Teams.
Damit gehen die Umstrukturierungen im Konzern weiter. Nach dem Ausscheiden von Brendan Iribe und Gerüchten um einen möglichen Rift-Nachfolger dürfen wir gespannt sein, welchen Einfluss die zahlreichen Personalwechsel zukünftig auf das Unternehmen haben werden.
(Quellen: Upload VR | Twitter: Rafa Camargo)
Der Beitrag Personalwechsel bei Facebook: Neuer VP für AR-/VR-Division & Portal-Teamführer zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!
Portal: Fanprojekt entwickelt VR-Klon mit Level-Editor
Der Reddit-Nutzer Tesseract-Cat kündigte in einem Post die Entwicklung eines eigenen VR-Klons von Portal bzw. Portal 2 an, um das Gameplay des Klassikers aus dem Hause Valve in die virtuellen Gefilde zu befördern. Der VR-Titel basiert auf Unity und soll neben den bereitgestellten Levels einen eigenen Level-Editor beinhalten.
Portal – Mod-Community arbeitet an VR-Klon mit integriertem Level-Editor
Die Portal-Reihe mit seiner ikonischen KI GlaDOS sowie der bekannten Portalgun erfreut sich großer Beliebtheit bei Spieler/innen unterschiedlicher Altersgruppen. So würde sich eine VR-Adaption des Sci-Fi-Puzzlers sehr gut in die derzeit gängigen Gameplay-Mechaniken einfügen und vermutlich wie geschnitten Brot verkaufen.
Dennoch blieb eine Ankündigung vonseiten Valve bisher aus. Bereits 2016 veröffentlichte die Community deshalb eine eigene Mod namens Portal Stories: VR für HTC Vive, welche zwar innerhalb des bekannten Universums stattfindet, jedoch die namensgebenden Portale und dazugehörigen Sprünge außen vor lässt.
Portal Stories: VR
Auf Reddit verkündete der Nutzer Tesseract-Cat nun, dass er das Projekt schlicht selbst in die Hand nimmt und derzeit an der Entwicklung eines Portal-Klons arbeitet. Der VR-Titel basiert auf der Unity Game-Engine und beinhaltet sämtliche Features des Originals. Dazu zählt eine Vielzahl an Rätseln, die beliebte Portalgun sowie die Möglichkeit Portale zu öffnen. Auch der Sprung durch die Dimensionsrisse scheint möglich zu sein.
Neben den bereitgestellten Maps soll die Community-Adaption sogar einen eigenen Level-Editor besitzen, um Spieler/innen die Möglichkeit zu geben, ihre eigenen Rätsel und Level zu erstellen.
Derzeit befindet sich der Fan-Mod noch in der Entwicklungsphase, jedoch soll dieser nach Fertigstellung auf GitHub kostenlos veröffentlicht werden. Bevor es so weit ist, möchte der ambitionierte Dev noch traditionelle Level-Elemente aus den Originalteilen einbauen, um das authentische Spielgefühl zu vermitteln.
Der Entwickler selbst nutzt eine Windows-VR-Brille für die Entwicklung seines Spiels. Mit welchen VR-Brillen der Fan-Mod letztlich kompatibel sein wird, bleibt zunächst abzuwarten.
Der Beitrag Portal: Fanprojekt entwickelt VR-Klon mit Level-Editor zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!