Half-Life: Alyx news & patch notes

• Fixed transition from a1_intro_world_2 to a2_quarantine_entrance.
• Allowed Workshop Tag dialog to be resized.

Content Build ID: 8694564

• Updated the Workshop Tag list, based upon the community's suggestions.
• Changed the method used to transition from a1_intro_world to a1_intro_world_2. This fixes addons being broken across that transition.

Content Build ID: 8644003

It's been quite the year since we launched Half-Life: Alyx, our full-length virtual reality return to Half-Life. Shortly after its debut, we enabled Steam Workshop support to open the doors for the creativity of mod-makers and make it easy for players to expand on the Alyx experience. Later in 2020, we released over 3.5 hours of developer commentary, adding a new way to experience Alyx while hearing directly from the team about how we built the game. We are grateful to have been honored by our industry as well as the community of Half-Life: Alyx players. As developers, there is nothing more rewarding (or terrifying) than releasing your work to the public. We are both proud of what we put out and humbled by how it has been received. In addition to receiving nominations from the D.I.C.E. Awards and BAFTA, Half-Life: Alyx won a slate of awards including:

• GameSpot: Game of the Year 2020
• Destructoid: PC Platform Game of the Year
• The Game Awards: Best VR/AR Game
• VR Focus Awards: Game of the Year
• 2020 VR Awards: Game of the Year

As we close out the first year, the number of mods created and shared via the Steam Workshop is in the hundreds, ranging from simple model replacements to full-on campaign experiences. With over 800 now available to try, we thought it would be interesting to shine a light on some of these great mods available to the community, so we enlisted the help of journalist, writer, and Alyx-mod-aficionado Craig Pearson to play and write about his favorites. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/546560/view/3032584660736119720 We are super grateful to the Half-Life community, and we hope this post gives you a chance to enjoy Alyx in some new ways. Gaming has been a much-needed bright spot for a lot of us in this past year, and we consider ourselves lucky to be a part of it.

As we celebrate the one-year anniversary since the launch of Half-Life: Alyx (more on that here), we thought it would be interesting to look at some of the great mods that the community have been creating that bring so much more life to HL Alyx. We enlisted the help of Craig Pearson, a journalist, writer, and Alyx-mods-aficionado, to play and write about his favorites. -- I’m Craig Pearson. I’ve worked for PCG, IGN, RPS, Facepunch, and more. I’m also a big fan of Half-Life: Alyx, and I’ve craved more ever since /that ending/. The community didn’t disappoint me. Just weeks after the game was released, before the official tools were out, there were mods to play. Then the Workshop arrived with the bespoke tools, and I’ve been stuck in City 17 ever since. There’s been a steady drip of weapons, levels, and oddball scenarios to keep me entertained. Armed with this experience and, more importantly, an intimate knowledge of the development team’s home addresses, I begged them to let me put together a list of my favourite mods.. They “agreed”. They following is a collection of the mods that kept me locked in my Valve Index during 2020. I’ve made two lists: the first is for those of you looking to replay the campaign, and it adds new enemies and new weapons, and new play styles. You’ll have a blast taking on the Combine while carrying their shield. The second list is full of levels that’ll challenge and surprise everyone who thought they knew what the original game was capable of. You can’t get further from the intense battles with the Combine than a round of mini-golf. I hope you enjoy what’s here. To me, there's no better way to celebrate the first anniversary of Alyx than with more Alyx. Even more so, I hope you share your experiences, favorite mods, and exciting moments from Valve’s return to the Half-Life universe.

Part 1 - New enemies and new weapons, and new play styles

Scalable Init Support

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2182586257 Not the most exciting addition, I’ll grant you. But it’s a mod-loader that you should just enable and leave on, so download it before we get to the good stuff.

Campaign+

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/ec62fc695f2f27f63abaad6dcdd3c694a48702af.jpg After /that/ finale, you might need a few moments--or months--to take stock of what happened. And if you decide to return to see it all again once more, Campaign+ is a great way to do that. It’s a fairly chunky overhaul of the main game, and assumes you’ve already been through everything. You start off with upgraded weapons, but that’s balanced out with new enemies, encounters, and more. The enemies have new variations and spawn in new places, but they often come with new weaknesses to help you out. The Armoured Grunts have armour which forces you to headshot them. There are Combine Medics, running between their comrades and healing them in battle. The Shield Squad all deploy their barriers as they move around, which takes 20 bullets apiece to destroy, but you can also target the power source. Every encounter is far tougher, far more fraught with danger, but also hugely rewarding.

Handheld Combine Shield

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/19f566031426882312c12bab8f8afe6e7f92b708.jpg This evens the odds between you and the Combine, adding one of their shields to each level (aside from the intro, outro, and J**f) as an item. Just stick it in a wrist pocket and deploy in battle. It gives you some excellent new options during combat, fundamentally shifting Alyx to a more aggressive playstyle. With it you can melee enemies and deflect grenades or bashed chairs, and it of course lets you fight in open areas without worrying about the need for cover.

Recurve Bow

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/e827b2f7a52e566c22ff1409a8cddc89ebf96efb.jpg Right-handed or Left-handed Valve took the controversial decision to make a VR action game without a bow. This rights that wrong and turns you into Hawkeye in the process. Though it doesn’t fit as snugly into the game as your hands do into the Russells, it does complement the guns quite nicely. The bow is an item in the game that spawns at the beginning of a number of chapters. You stow it in your wrist slots, and when grasped in either hand (there are versions for lefties and righties) you can draw an infinite number of arrows. It adds the same sort of friction to the combat that trying to reload while surrounded by enemies does. Pulling the arrow, knocking it, and firing is a learned skill. The results are brutal one-hit kills, or hilarious, panicked retakes. Aiming is a challenge, and I’d much rather it just replaced a weapon and was bound to a hand, but that’s a limitation the mod has to live with.

Glorious Gloves

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/7e11079f63aead6d2bab16e01395d3e6a77580bf.jpg This handy addon turns the Russells into full-blown gravity gloves, bringing the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator into Alyx’s grasp. It allows you to pull large objects across the level. Instead of leaping into your hand, the object floats just in front, waiting for the player to punch it at a victim, though it takes some training to be accurate. There’s no subtlety when you do; you simply hurl whatever you were holding at an enormous velocity. Aiming and maiming in one clenched fist.

Auto Pickup

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/5a7d930ee8fe90c802cd5010f8e29e2718a066c4.jpg A mod that I can’t live without, now. Seriously. I uninstalled it and I’m now writing this in a coma. Instead of having you toss all your ammo over your shoulder, Auto Pickup simply stores it as soon as you grab it and let go. It has reduced the terrible blight of Alyx Shoulder that has been overwhelming sports doctors all over the country.

Energetic Hands

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/30af4dd271350975829fb29af59a26852267e2f6.jpg Ever wanted to fight like a Vortigaunt? To send an arc of green lightning from your fingertips capable of killing whatever it strikes? You have? Same! Here fistbu -- fashhhhhhhooom! Energetic Hands gives Alyx the ability to power up energetic blasts from the Russell’s and fire them right from the start of the game. It’s not a simple procedure, though. You use movement and gestures for different effects. Grasping your hands like a prize-fighter powers them up, then you can blast the energy out by throwing your hands out like a dramatic magician, or tilt them open to produce grenades. It’s a fun shift in the dynamics of the combat, putting you in a position of power and endless mayhem in ten seconds bursts.

Sustenance Mod

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/c3b9ca0b86998f9a24a9714c2f58e04525e1a1ca.jpg There’s food all over City 17, so why not have a bite to eat to recuperate instead of squashing that poor whateverthehellthatis in the health station? Sustenance Mod not only lets you snack yourself back to health all over the City, but it also means when you’re offered up dinner, you can be a good guest and eat what’s given to you. Drink doesn’t have an effect, and rotten food harms you. Balanced? No. Delicious? Also no.

Gordon's Crowbar

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/c8969ee9624168198f97fa93ccb1fa8fddf04aba.jpg You know you want this. It adds a heavy, two-handed crowbar to the campaign. It can be used for melee attacks, prop-breaking, and starting off insurrections against a powerful alien hierarchy that’s slowly consuming all life on the planet. It is very hard to play the game with it, but it looks so good in your hands.

Part 2 - New levels and campaigns

C17YSCAPE

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/665ba002f065f3a0507e88d0b7fb8638a4960083.jpg C17YSCAPE is set in City 17, between the events of Half-Life: Alyx and Half-Life 2. You’re a prisoner whose Combine jail cell has malfunctioned, letting you escape through the terrifying underbelly of the occupied area. C17YSCAPE feels a lot like lengthy sections of Half-Life 2, where you’re undoing the nuts and bolts of the Combine’s vast empire. With bullets. The opening 10 minutes is slow going, but it pulls it all together with some frugal ammo and health and wonderfully timed enemy encounters. I’ve played a lot of Alyx, but I’ve never spent this much time cowering behind pillars or crouching and timing my shots between enemy reloads. Instead of holding onto health syringes for later, they get jammed into my arm like a champion bodybuilder aiming for a dubious world record. Even after picking the laser pointer to help me conserve my ammo, every encounter was TENSE. That’s right, I capitalized, boldened, italicized and underlined the word. I blame the shotgunners. An excellent addition if you like shooting the bad guys and want about 90 minutes more of that.

Overcharge

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/cc7ad662ab2cafbeb0e08e54a8c6c2ef0a6037a6.jpg A map that was built before the official tools were released. Overcharge is a hefty chunk of Combine-infested City 17. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done in Alyx, but that’s not an issue. The space that you’re playing through, where backdrops spotted through windows will become part of the level, guides you neatly though the enemy encounters and puzzles. It’s economically designed. There aren’t many moments where you’re overwhelmed by a huge number of enemies, but you will be taken by surprise a few times as you wander the level. There are a couple of metrics you can use to gauge how good a VR game is. During Overcharge my face sweated and my cable got tangled. That’s at least 7/10 from IGN. Depending how you play, this should take about 45 minutes to complete.

Belomorskaya Station

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/549cb902f75a9c766a2259c58786b053c14d3c72.jpg Belomorskaya Station starts off in a dim room and barely gets brighter than that. You’re crawling through a zombie infested subway in a straight-up scavenging survival horror level. Swathed in shadows and screams, Alyx is constantly fretting over her low ammo count. You have to check every nook for sneakily hidden shotgun shells. You’d think in such a dark and dismal space that finding a flare would be a cause for celebration, but here the blood red light cast by it feels utterly feeble in the onslaught of darkness. It’s of no comfort whatsoever. It lasts about 20 mins, but it feels like you’re down there for days.

Brewery Break-In

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/373b73fa7650c6f0c0af8ff28b0ae05e199ca951.jpg Set before the events of the main game, Alyx has to investigate a brewery. There seems to be a lot of these in City 17, which often leads to some excellent levels but bad morning afters. Though there’s nothing bright and shiningly new in the level, it’s built very well. The puzzles are well-connected and the level loops in and around itself, letting you plan ahead a little. This is simply more Alyx, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s only about 15 mins long, and sadly part 2 has yet to materialise. If you’re reading this, Jake… *waggles eyebrows*

Goon Squad

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/94c3e3a69f336820329cf5a0f1a758a0642eb608.jpg There’s more to this map than I’m willing to tell you about. You’re part of a Combine patrol squad stuck in a quarantined sewer system. You have to escape. It’s about 30 mins long, depending on how much of a coward you are. That means it took me 7 hours.

Xenthug

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/7bc54ec03f8b563c18c92c4c3731714ff082d40a.jpg Xenthug was released before the mapping tools were made public, but even with that limitation it’s a fun, new way to play. You’re in a single level beset by waves of enemies. Survival is a little bit more complicated than just shooting them. You have to pay for the pleasure. Each wave spawns all around you, leaving you frantically trying to duck around abandoned trucks and piles of boxes to gain a few seconds to reload. Some, not all, enemies drop Resin, and in between hordes you can speedily spend this in vending machines on simple ammo, health, and more. The first wave is just headcrabs. If you gain access to the room in the corner (look for the keycard), you can use that to prepare for later fights. But if you trap a single headcrab in there the wave won’t end until you kill it, letting you explore the nooks of the level. You have plenty of time to find resin, grab explosives, and move boxes to get to higher ground.You’ll need any advantage you can get in the later levels, where you’ll discover movement and shooting abilities you never thought you had. It’s a great mix of frantic and thoughtful, and you’ll lose hours to it.

BLOPS17: Emergent

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/5fff8b6d4f535707237c4511976778f67ca4913d.jpg Sometimes the best way to play is to let the game come to you. This is an Alyxifed take on CoD’s zombie mode, where you can toss vodka to kill the screaming, baying, headcrab wearers. It’s a very different horde mode to XenThug. You’re in a smaller space, constantly moving back and forth to tend to the access areas. Zombies break down the boarded up doors and you have to keep those blocked if you want to live to see another sunrise. It has buyable upgrades for ammo and the defences, but the reset between levels is far more frantic than Xenthug. It’s quite a workout.

Minigolf

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/8def3ba4c5eff3c0873614b10e914ec0e8f77ad5.jpg You know what’s harder than shooting a Combine soldier in the eye while dodging a Manhack? Golf. A whole seven holes await you in this baffling but entirely necessary download. No more than ten minutes of your time will be spent knocking the ball about, but the fact that it exists and is well made is enough to consider having a putt.

Northern Star Bowling

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/91576b967a6f3c716a56278d36a2c8583cf493a6.jpg You know what’s harder than shooting a Combine soldier in the e -- no, wait. I’ve already done that one. Northern Star Bowling is a fun place to blow off some steam. A secret bowling alley with the G-Man serving his private reserve ales and four bowling lanes for you to try. It’s not a perfect representation, largely because the physics don’t really allow for anything other than a straight toss of the ball, but it’s still an amazing example of what the creators on the Alyx Workshop crafted. The pins reset and there are scoreboards should you get competitive with yourself. -- You can explore all the Half-Life: Alyx mods in the Steam Workshop here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/546560/workshop/ You can find Craig on Twitter

Changes

• New honorary achievement for Gnome Chompski's upcoming journey into space on Rocket Lab's "Return To Sender" mission.

Content Build ID: 5850798

Game Fixes

• Fixed a case where developer commentary would appear to turn off when continuing from an autosave generated at the start of a map
• Correctly display commentary panel on primary hand in single-controller mode
• Corrected numbering of Commentary points of interest in Processing Plant map

Content Build ID: 5844889

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/6d5f3ddedcf737f344a1ee9e671e45b14de41599.png Developer Commentary contains significant spoilers. We highly recommend that you play the game to its conclusion before enabling commentary As you may recall, the Half-Life: Alyx team was in the process of finishing the game when the COVID-19 lockdown went into effect here in Washington State. In fact, much of the team had already made the decision to work from home prior to that point. Adapting to this new way of collaborating meant that, while were able to get the game out on time, we weren't able complete some work, such as Developer Commentary and Steam Workshop integration. We later shipped Steam Workshop integration while in quarantine in May and, over the summer, we have had time to reflect on the development of Half-Life: Alyx. We have collected 147 different points of interest from the team and recorded over three hours of audio commentary, covering every aspect of development, including design, art, animation, rendering, sound and more. You can access these points of interest by starting a new game with Developer Commentary enabled. As the commentary contains significant spoilers, we highly recommend that you play the game to its conclusion before playing through with commentary. Like much of the world, we are all working from home, which means that rather than using our comfortable high-quality recording studio at the office, we have been recording our commentary voice overs in closets and blanket forts around greater Seattle. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/be41c0bc9c24836974783d73cf75f2caa7e9d92a.png When you play in commentary mode, you will see a floating headset at each point of interest. To listen, just grab the headset and put it on your head. A commentary status panel will be displayed above your off hand, showing the playback progress and the name of the speaker. If you like, you can remove the headset to stop playback. When you drop it, it will return to its original location. Commentary subtitles are available in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

Additional Changes

Added in-game localization for Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Thai and Turkish. Added new convar: hlvr_move_ladder_must_reach_top. When set, players are required to climb all the way to the top of a ladder before they are automatically teleported there when they let go with both hands. This addresses a request made by a number of players to make the ladders more realistic.

Game Fixes

• Fixed recent problem preventing creating or updating new Workshop items.

Content Build ID: 5292973

This update includes some small fixes discovered after the bigger 1.4.1 Update released earlier this week.

Game Fixes

• Fixed a regression where attempting to hack a tripmine could crash.
• The in-game Addon menu no longer lists templates and non-playable addons.
• "New Game" preferences are no longer reset when returning to main menu from in game.
• Several other crash fixes.

Content Build ID: 5175117

Game Features & Fixes

• Added option to turn off Valve Index pre-order weapon skins to the Preferences menu.
• Fixed wine bottle labels that had been regressed by the liquids update, and fixed several issues with the liquid shader.
• Fixed an issue that could result in corrupt save games.
• Numerous crash fixes.

Workshop Features

• Added hl_vr_weapon_generic_pistol, a data-driven weapon entity for workshop customization.
• Included sources to many of Half-Life: Alyx's AnimGraphs as example content, plus usability improvements to the AnimGraph editor.
• Added simple example addon for audio content, plus audio workflow improvements and fixes.
• Added example materials and subrect files demonstrating use of more complex shaders and dynamic expressions.
• Added support point, directional, spot and ortho lights to Source Filmmaker.
• Added "Show Intro" toggle to hacking plugs (allows placing hacking plugs that do not play a hologram intro animation).
• Reduced memory usage for compiling maps (32GB RAM is recommended).

Workshop Documentation

• ModelDoc Tutorials
• Replacing Sounds
• Custom Pistols
• Hotspot Texturing

Workshop Fixes

• Fixed a bug which was causing transitions between Valve maps to disable any loaded addons, and level transitions to not work at all when transitioning between maps within an addon.
• Fixed bug where map extensions could spawn multiple times (or not at all) when multiple addons were active.
• Fixes and clarifications added to hacking_example map.
• Fixed a crash in maps with a very large numbers of handposes.
• Fixed shadow artifacts with Source Filmmaker's projected lights.

Content Build ID: 5168833

Game Features

• Added subtitles for: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
• Bottles now appear to have liquid inside them that sloshes around as you shake them.
• UI appears quicker when returning to Main Menu
• Improvements to addon management UI

Game Fixes

• Added checks for users loading a savegame with missing addons (eg. unsubscribed or deleted)
• Added error message if a game fails to load due to a missing map requested by an addon
• Various crash fixes
• Fixed bug where exiting the game by closing SteamVR could generate bad save files

Workshop Features

• Enabled the Postprocessing Editor (Documentation)
• Added "Custom Character" example addon (Documentation)
• Added example maps for:
  • Blind Zombie (a.k.a. Jeff)
  • Hacking and Toner Puzzles
  • Parked Vehicles and other Interactive Prefabs
  • Visibility System (Documentation)
  • Postprocessing Volumes (Documentation)
• Added core functionality required for Lua scripting and added some Alyx-specific script bindings for querying VR controller input and creating nav mesh paths from entity scripts
• Enabled live bone constraints in SFM, which can be baked/enabled as procedural bones, like cloth

Workshop Fixes

• Fixed case where some explicitly specified meshes became hulls. (eg. func_shatterglass will now build in a map without having to enable legacy collision mesh.)
• Added some meshes that were missing from parked vehicle prefabs.
• Made SFM UI less Dota-specific in a few places
• Fixed missing map models (mostly combine stations) in SFM
• Fixed Import Sequence in SFM to work correctly on sequences with animated root orientation

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/ebd09ce02b4b9b7c3d59eb442ee6afe22f20d291.gif Content Build ID: 5087083

Changes:

• Added missing tools lighting preview environments and associated assets.
• Fixed Hammer's "entity-only" compile mode not working properly.
• Fixed a bug that prevented interactive prefabs and other physics entities from compiling correctly.
• Fixed a bug that prevented "Start Game with Addons" from working with "Original Maps".
• Fixed a bug where loading a mis-configured addon could result in getting stuck at the loading screen.
• Fixed a bug that could cause point_worldtext rendering to be corrupted.
• Numerous crash fixes and other minor fixes.

Content Build ID: 5050655

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/fc17307cccb990965a73479c7df826c9659f3b53.jpg Half-Life: Alyx has been updated to include Steam Workshop support. This includes a beta release of our community development tools, as well as support for Linux and the Vulkan rendering API, and a few small quality of life updates.

Workshop and Editor Tools Beta Release

Half-Life Alyx's level editing tools are now open to the community! You can create new levels, models, textures, and animations for Half-Life: Alyx, and using Steam Workshop you can browse and play everything the community has uploaded. Want to make your own VR physics sandbox or a giant Rube Goldberg machine? Design a new combat encounter featuring a dozen Combine soldiers at once? What about creating the world's longest Multitool puzzle, or imagining a whole new district of City 17? Crack open the tools yourself and make it happen! If you just want to play what the community's been making, browse the Half-Life Alyx Steam Workshop page to try out the latest and most popular addons. This is the first Beta release of the Alyx Workshop tools suite, and we intend to add to and improve them in the coming weeks. Included in this release are new or updated versions of:

• Hammer, the latest version of the Source 2 level editor.
• Material Editor, the tool for creating and tuning materials in Source 2.
• ModelDoc, a tool for viewing, editing, and compiling models with animation, collision, and other gameplay attributes.
• AnimGraph, our animation tool used to create complicated animation setups with blends and transitions.
• Particle Editor, for making new particle effects.
• Subrect Editor, for creating smart texture sheets known as "hotspots."
• Source Filmmaker, the Source 2 cinematic renderer and animation tool.

In addition to these tools, the update includes several sample maps. We've included these to demonstrate and explain how we authored enemy encounters in the game, as well as showcase some new features of the Half-Life: Alyx level art pipeline including tile meshes, static and dynamic cables, and texture hotspotting. The entire set of Half-Life: Alyx maps is also included as editable source for reference - this includes a large collection of interactive objects and prefabs. We'll have news on more features and some smaller additional tools and examples in an future update. We've also started writing Half-Life: Alyx Workshop Tools documentation. If you're looking to start your first addon, this is a good place to start. This is a beta release of the development suite and we are still writing documentation for many of these tools, but we hope in the meantime you will dive in and learn by exploring for yourself. We can't wait to see what you make!

Linux and Vulkan

The Half Life: Alyx Workshop update adds a native Linux version of the game using the Vulkan rendering API, as well as optional support for using Vulkan on Windows. Depending on your system, you may experience better performance using Vulkan, especially if your system is closer to minimum spec. To try Vulkan on Windows, open the Half-Life: Alyx main menu and choose Options > Performance > Advanced (Gear icon) > Rendering API. (You must restart the game for the Rendering API choice to take effect.) {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/4bb84d545f75038d78838972452904bba6829172.jpg On Linux, AMD graphics and the Mesa RADV driver are recommended for best results. On Linux, if you had installed the game through Proton previously, please follow these steps to correctly download the update:

• Go in the Properties for Half-Life Alyx by right-clicking the game in your Steam Library
• Check the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" box
• Uncheck the box, and the download will properly complete.

Spectator View

The spectator view (the view other people see when watching someone play) has received a few small updates as well. The spectator view now supports two zoom levels, and can be run in full screen mode by adding -fullscreen to your Launch Options in Steam. There is also now an option to draw the Spectator HUD directly in the SteamVR "VR View" window, so your spectators can see the HUD along with any other SteamVR overlays you use.

Additional fixes

Fixed some occurrences of the player's in-game hands shaking, GPU optimizations for rendering fog, and CPU optimizations for NPCs. Version 1.3, Content Build ID: 5035510

We are excited to announce the launch of the Half-Life: Alyx Soundtrack. Today we are releasing Chapter 1. Entanglement, which includes 9 tracks in both MP3 (320K) and FLAC formats. We will be releasing all 11 chapters of the soundtrack over the next few months on Steam. If you purchase the soundtrack, it will update with each release and you will get the new chapters automatically in your Steam Library. More about the Half-Life: Alyx Soundtrack: Following the story and locations of Half-Life: Alyx, the soundtrack evolves and combines industrial, electronic, experimental and orchestral cinematic pieces, alternating between abstract environmental, emotional soundscapes and direct action-oriented cues. Owners of Half-Life: Alyx get 25% off for a limited time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1310460/HalfLife_Alyx_Soundtrack/

Changes:

• Fixes for issues with carrying contained objects (e.g. objects in a crate).
• Fix for hand orientation on Windows MR and Vive systems.
• Fix for some missing haptic feedback on Windows MR and Vive systems.
• Fix for controller systems that don't have support for skeletal hand animation.
• Fix for exhausting GPU memory on Proton.
• Fix for several crashes.
• Fix for not properly falling back to English subtitles when selecting a language in Steam that is unsupported by Half-Life: Alyx.
• Improved rendering of Japanese narrow subtitles.
• Fixed a regression which rendered an empty subtitle panel even if the subtitles were only visible in the spectator window.
• Localization improvements in multiple supported languages.

Content Build ID: 4876399

Join the Half-Life: Alyx team in a behind-the-scenes deep dive that examines locomotion and player presence in the game. Valve developers Jason Mitchell, Luke Nalker, Greg Coomer, and Roland Shaw share some of our early prototypes, and walk through user interface, audio, and player movement discoveries that led to the game's final designs.

Transcription:

Jason Mitchell: My name is Jason Mitchell, and I'm a developer at Valve. Today, some colleagues and I would like to share with you the details of the player movement in Half-Life: Alyx. Traversing space is a fundamental challenge in VR generally, and we have spent considerable effort on our locomotion system. We'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of our early prototypes and some of the more interesting things we learned along the way. In Half-Life: Alyx, we decided to support three different types of player locomotion: Blink teleport, shift teleport, and continuous locomotion. Continuous locomotion is the most similar to traditional WASD mouse and keyboard controls. This allows players to move smoothly through the environment without teleporting. In both teleport modes, the player uses a targeting interface to select the location where they would like to move. In blink teleport, the screen turns black, the player is moved to the target location, and the screen fades back up from black with the player at the new position. This all takes place in a fraction of a second. Shift teleport is similar, except the screen doesn't go black, and the player is rapidly moved to the selected location. Today, we're going to dive into the details of the blink and shift teleport modes. Luke Nalker: Since we already shipped blink teleport in The Lab, it was a natural place for us to start our development. The Lab had a combination of specifically authored teleportation locations and room-scale spaces, which was where we started our prototypes. While the targeting reticle worked well in The Lab, it turned out to be distracting to players in the more realistic environments of our game. In order to present an indicator that was more physically grounded in the world, we began experimenting with showing the player's feet at the target location. This had the added benefit of enabling the player to select the desired orientation at the teleport destination. The presentation of the feet implied the volume that the player's body would occupy, which was especially important when moving to cover during combat. We also experimented with presenting the visualization of player footprints, not just at the destination, but along the current path. Players had a great reaction to this because it allowed them to visualize themselves moving over and around obstacles, as well as understand why some desired movements may not be valid. Greg Coomer: Those virtual footsteps you see are a visual representation of our pathing system. Initially, we tried repurposing our existing nav mesh system, which is the same one our AI uses to navigate. In practice, however, this proved to be too rigid. The nav mesh system precomputes all possible movement paths. And while that's efficient, it didn't support the locomotion and interaction desires of our players or our designers, who were building very dynamic environments. This led us to our next series of tests, using the well-known A* system to build routes. Our A*-based teleport pathing approach was successful in that it freed players from having to micromanage their teleport targeting. Ultimately, it was too computationally intensive, so we had to explore more efficient solutions. During these early experiments, two things became pretty clear to us: First, players have a strong tendency to focus on the destination, and the rest of their environment is seen as a potential obstacle to them getting where they want to go. Second, players imagine themselves to have super-human speed and agility. Playtesters would happily tell us that, yes, in fact, they could reach that spot by squeezing through a gap, catapulting over an object, or sliding under an obstacle. Ultimately, our initial tests and playtesters' desires led us to the system we have today, the main goals of which are to ensure that the end player position is a valid place for the player's body and that the path to get there is viable. To get to this point, we had to solve a whole variety of problems. Some of the more interesting ones are things like how player height has an impact on pathing. Also, building player trust in the system and keeping players grounded in the world just using audio. When we talk about a viable path, we mean one where the representation of the player's body in the virtual environment stays intact. Players obviously can't squeeze in between jail bars or fit into a tiny mouse hole or do things like jump hundreds of feet up onto ledges. But they can crawl, turn, or contort, or engage in their environment in a way that stays true to their physical shape. Traditional video games put the world in front of you, and, as a player, you have expectations about your ability to navigate and act on the world. But movement in VR generates so many more player expectations because the world completely envelops the player. Players actually lean around corners. They even get down on the floor to try to peek under doors. It turns out that the height at which players view the virtual environment is very important. We as humans are strongly attuned to the perspective that our height gives us on the real world, and it was essential that we preserve this in the virtual environment in Half-Life: Alyx. The result of this is that the extent of each player's virtual body is subtly different due to the variation of their real-world height. And this affects the way paths are computed. In fact, early on, we would get hard-to-reproduce bugs from players banging their virtual head on low-hanging pipes 'cause they were unable to teleport through certain areas. And it was only later that we realized all those bugs were coming from our taller colleagues. At the time, our system required players to crouch down to the minimum height along their desired teleport path. But players frequently failed to notice that or understand it. They were focused on their goal, not realizing that, halfway through their path, there was an obstacle they needed to crouch under during their movement. So to solve this, we decided on a standard minimum body size, which was used to validate the middle portions of the teleport path and only required that the start and end positions could support the actual presence of the full-size player. Jason Mitchell: At the core of all Half-Life games is a particular mix of story, puzzle, and combat experiences. In order for the combat experiences in particular to succeed in VR, it was essential that we built players' trust in the teleport system. Ultimately, we wanted the teleport interface to fade into the background, enabling players to concentrate fully on the combat scenarios. This meant that the teleport system had to perform a player's desired movement even if they were performing quick and coarse gestures. During development, we discovered two key elements that were essential to gaining players' trust: Prioritizing movement along the floor and, under certain conditions, moving players only partially along their desired paths. If you think about a traditional first-person control scheme, you have forward, back, left, right, strafing. All of these movements happen in a plane. When the player wants to leave the plane, they have to do something explicit, like jump or climb a ladder. Prioritizing the floor is the teleportation version of that concept. In combat, the player's focus is, as you would expect, on the enemy and not on the environment. Playtesting has shown us that players teleport targeting becomes frantic and imprecise in these situations. And even under these conditions, our system needs to match player expectations. Typically, players want to stay in contact with the floor and move out of danger, not jump up and down on all the objects in their environment in the middle of a battle. Floor prioritization achieves this. Another way that our teleportation system achieves reliable results, even when used quickly and imprecisely, is by moving players partially along their desired path in certain cases. In the heat of battle, players focus on quickly repositioning themselves for tactical advantage. Instead of requiring the player to precisely specify a valid teleport destination, partial movement moves the player as close as possible to the desired location along the valid movement path. As a result, players don't have to shift their mental focus away from their enemy in order to move during battle. Another variation of partial movement occurs at drop-offs. Heights are very impactful in VR, and dropping into a new environment, especially one that was not visible prior to committing to the teleport, can be very disorienting. To address this, we also perform partial movement when a player's end position is not visible from their starting position. The result is a movement up to the edge of the cliff or the drop-down, creating a natural pause that allows the player to view the terrain below and make a better informed decision about how to proceed. While we want the locomotion system to become effectively invisible, it's also important that the player's subconscious remains aware of their presence in the virtual world. Sounds are used as a constant, subtle reminder of the player's presence in the game. Roland Shaw: Teleporting in The Lab and SteamVR is supported with a relatively abstract sound. But that's not consistent with the more grounded realism of Half-Life or with the visual and haptic cues we are providing players in Half-Life: Alyx. So rather than a simple, abstract teleport confirmation sound, we use audio to describe the player's locomotion after they teleport. This isn't something that's limited to teleporting; we use sound to describe and support all kinds of body movement. For example, a player moving their arm to grab ammo, crouching, turning, and twisting are all movements supported with sound. When we were developing this technology, we began with just playing some basic Half-Life footstep sounds after each teleportation. Players responded well, so we experimented with using the distance traveled to drive footstep volume and timing. They also started providing feedback that they expected to hear a louder, heavier sound when they teleported from a high to a low area, effectively jumping down in virtual space. This kind of feedback convinced us that players were feeling as if they had a physical presence in VR. They began to expect their weight to impact the environment and hear the results. We implemented that feature and iterated based on further feedback. Jason Mitchell: Now that the game is in the hands of customers, it's exciting to see that players who prefer different styles of VR locomotion have been able to select the option that's most comfortable for them. Interestingly, the fact that we implemented multiple locomotion systems together meant that each of them were stronger because they could borrow ideas from each other. For example, the fluidity of continuous locomotion influenced the design of the teleport system. Likewise, the audio cues that we developed to summarize the player movement during teleports were integrated back into the continuous locomotion mode to provide the same kind of player feedback. So in the end, no matter which locomotion method players select, they'll be able to move confidently through the complex environments of Half-Life: Alyx.

Additions:

• Added full-featured support for left / right hand for movement controls, independently of left / right hand for weapon controls. To use this: Select Left / Right hand in the in-game UI, and then select the desired Weapon / Off-Hand bindings in the SteamVR controller bindings UI.
• Added an option to draw subtitles and captions to the spectator window only.
• Clarified Height Adjust accessibility options, and set better defaults across various controllers.

Performance notes:

• Created a Performance Tips Page: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7689-WAKZ-8117
• Improved discoverability of the Performance UI settings.
• Added better detection of low-memory situations.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a UI issue where graphics settings would appear to drop from Medium to Low.
• Fixed not being able to use Quick Back, Shift-Dash-Jump, and teleport feet rotation when Controller Turning was turned off.
• Fixed a case where loading a left-handed savegame from the Main Menu could cause the player to lose ammo.
• Fixed savegames where the SMG was missing parts of its model.
• Fixed a number of crashes.

Content Build ID: 4831658

Changes:

• Improved turning options in Preferences: - Added "Continuous Turn", and associated turning speed options. - Renamed "Quick turn" to "Snap Turn" to make its functionality clearer. - Added option to disable controller turning.
• Improved hand-over-mouth pose usability for Windows MR controllers.
• Improved the resolution of impact decals on enemies.
• Improved automatic detection of default Quality settings for some machine configurations.
• Fixed an issue where some sounds didn't play as intended.
• Fixed an issue where the main menu could become less responsive if you had many save games.
• Fixed several crashes.

Content Build ID: 4815971

It's here. Half-Life: Alyx, Valve's long-awaited return to the Half-Life series, is NOW AVAILABLE to play. Compatible with all PC-based VR headsets, the game has been designed from the ground up for virtual reality. Half-Life: Alyx can be purchased from the Steam store and is available for download and play immediately.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36225228/2e5f58e571d2e630486dc9d6963b13a83bb47704.jpg On Monday March 9th, the Valve Index VR system will be made available again for purchase after having been out of stock for some time. Recent demand for the Index system has been high, so we do expect that available stock on hand will sell out quickly. We will continue to take orders after those units have been sold, so purchases beyond this initial quantity will be fulfilled in the order in which they are received, as supplies increase over the coming months. The exact time that the Valve Index will be made available on Monday is 10:00 AM Pacific (5:00 PM UTC). If you already own a Valve Index, or have ordered one, the bonus Half-Life: Alyx preview locations have just been released and are now accessible to you via Steam VR Home. Starting now, you can download and visit two locations from the game, before the game comes out on March 23rd. One is an outdoor space taken from City 17 in the shadow of the under-construction Citadel. The other is Russell's laboratory, where he helps Alyx make plans to take on the Combine. The rendering technology available in SteamVR's native environments is different than that in Half-Life: Alyx, and the interactivity is significantly lower than what the game itself provides. So while these scenes do not have quite as much fidelity as they will in the actual game, we think they are a faithful enough translation to provide a fun VR preview of the game's setting. If you don't own a Valve Index but would like to check these environments out in VR before March 23rd, you can ask an Index owner to host a SteamVR Home session for you.

Half-Life: Alyx releases to Steam on March 23, 2020. Today we're releasing three gameplay videos, showing a variety of environments and play styles. Each one is a live capture of the game running in real-time, featuring one of the locomotion mode options available to players: Teleport, Shift, and Continuous. Half-Life Alyx is playable with all SteamVR-compatible headsets. Bonus content for those who own Valve Index hardware prior to Half-Life: Alyx's release will start rolling out this Wednesday, starting with a set of SteamVR Home environments showcasing locations from the game. For more coverage of Half-Life: Alyx, including a longer unbroken section of gameplay, visit IGN.com.

{STEAM_CLAN_LOC_IMAGE}/36225228/51f8471c605f02a30f64421b919f719c208d316e.jpg Half-Life: Alyx is coming in March, and we are celebrating early by making all games in the Half-Life Collection FREE to play for Steam users, from now until the day it launches! Half-Life: Alyx is set before the events of Half-Life 2 and the episodes, but the games share characters and story elements. The Half-Life: Alyx team believes that the best way to enjoy the new game is to play through the old ones, especially Half-Life 2 and the episodes, so we want to make that as easy as possible. From now until Half-Life: Alyx launches, visit the game page of each Half-Life game to install it and play as much as you want, right up until the day Half-Life: Alyx is released! If you already have Steam installed, you can click the following links to start playing now! Half-Life Half-Life 2 Half-Life 2: Episode One Half-Life 2: Episode Two Also included in this bundle and available to play for free are: Half-Life: Opposing Force Half-Life: Blue Shift Team Fortress Classic If you don't have Steam, you can download it here.

It’s here! Half-Life: Alyx is available for pre-purchase NOW, and set for a March 2020 release. Watch the trailer: Valve’s return to the award-winning series in virtual reality takes place between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine’s brutal occupation of Earth. As Alyx, players battle to save the future of humanity: engaging in visceral combat, solving puzzles, and exploring a world decimated by a mysterious alien race. VR was built for the kind of gameplay that sits at the heart of Half-Life.