Half-Life: Alyx - Valve's full-length flagship VR game set between HL1 and HL2

[User0001]

brace yourself it's a bumpy ride

 

[Dexter]

 

[Infinitron]

The Half-Life: Alyx team talks player locomotion in a behind--the-scenes deep dive. 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 play design.

 

[The Decline]

So is VR as awesome as Fisher Stevens made it look in Hackers?

 

[ADL]

Yes
Also every VR treadmill I've experienced has sucked

 

[Morgoth]

 

[ADL]

I said it before playing the game and I'll say it again after finishing it, there's no fucking way a desktop user will experience this and enjoy it. Even with that mod shown above, you're gonna be noclipping through doors and skipping anything related to the multitool puzzles. You will also have to shift tab to watch scripted sequences on YouTube because you can't activate the trigger without a VR input. Even if you somehow get around all that, it will still look and play like shit which is a damn shame because it looks and plays amazingly when you're actually in the headset and manipulating the world around you with your hands with 1:1 precision tracking.

Even the cheapest mixed reality headsets you can grab off the shelf for a hundred bucks would be an infinitely superior experience to these shitty, hacked together desktop mods people are dreaming up.

 

[Morgoth]

 

[Morgoth]

Just gave this mod a brief shot, and it plays so catastrophically bad that I'm just gonna wait for 10 years for a good and affordable VR headset or simply erase the game from my mind. Either way, this mod is trash.

 

[schru]

There's no point in playing it without VR, or even without Index, since it's so reliant on immersion and designed so that the first experience counts the most.

 

[Dexter]

According to SuperData (who to be fair aren't exactly always the most accurate about such things) the game made it into the Top10 Top Grossing PC Games for March:: https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/worldwide-digital-games-market

They're also guessing that 860K people played it in March and that it generated $40 million in revenue via direct Sales (leaving aside how much money it likely made bundled with the $1000 Valve Index Kits):

Half-Life: Alyx performed modestly by the standards of AAA games but was a blockbuster by the standards of virtual reality (VR) exclusive titles. A total of 860K gamers played the PC VR title in March. The game had a limited addressable audience, as there was an install base of fewer than 4M PC-compatible VR headsets at the end of 2019. Direct purchases of Half-Life: Alyx generated $40.7M in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of free copies of the game were also bundled with devices like the Valve Index headset to boost interest in VR.

 

[Tehdagah]

brace yourself it's a bumpy ride

This could have been a good on-rail shooter. No reason to add clunky mobility on it.

 

[Semiurge]

That's it then. Valve is out of the game developing racket, now it will be just tech demos. One of the best shooter serieses is left without a proper send-off.

 

[Dexter]

https://www.roadtovr.com/steam-survey-vr-headset-growth-april-2020-half-life-alyx/

Analysis: ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Adds Nearly 1 Million VR Users to Steam in Record Gain
By Ben Lang - May 2, 2020

The launch of Half-Life: Alyx saw nearly 1 million additional monthly-connected headsets over the prior month, a leap that nearly tripled the previous largest monthly gain.

Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.

The latest Steam Survey data is the first time we’re seeing the impact of Half-Life: Alyx in the numbers; although the game launched in late March, Valve advised that most survey data is collected early in each month, so the impact of the game’s launch wasn’t truly revealed until now. And it’s a doozy.

The data represents the number of headsets connected to Steam over a given month, so we call the resulting figure ‘monthly-connected headsets’ for clarity; it’s the closest official figure there is to “active VR users” on Steam, though it can’t account for headsets that were connected in a given month, but not used.

The launch of Half-Life: Alyx brought the single largest leap ever in monthly-connected headsets on Steam.

Monthly-connected VR Headsets on Steam

The latest figures from April show that 1.91% of Steam users had a VR headset connected to their PC over the course of the month. This is far and away the record high so far, and the largest single-month leap, nearly three times the prior record held by December–January during the 2019 holiday season.

 

[Morkar Left]

Basically the first AAA VR game?
I wonder if Chris Roberts is going the VR exclusive route too now?

 

[DalekFlay]

I said it before playing the game and I'll say it again after finishing it, there's no fucking way a desktop user will experience this and enjoy it. Even with that mod shown above, you're gonna be noclipping through doors and skipping anything related to the multitool puzzles. You will also have to shift tab to watch scripted sequences on YouTube because you can't activate the trigger without a VR input. Even if you somehow get around all that, it will still look and play like shit which is a damn shame because it looks and plays amazingly when you're actually in the headset and manipulating the world around you with your hands with 1:1 precision tracking.

Even the cheapest mixed reality headsets you can grab off the shelf for a hundred bucks would be an infinitely superior experience to these shitty, hacked together desktop mods people are dreaming up.

I doubt you're wrong, but the thing this misses is that a lot of people don't want the VR experience and will never play it that way. The goal for many isn't "play it normally because I can't afford VR" but more "play it normally because I will never want to play it in VR." However you're not wrong that the sensible choice would be "pretend it doesn't exist."

 

[sullynathan]

https://www.vg247.com/2020/05/03/half-life-alyx-steam-vr-headsets/

Just 1.9 percent of Steam users own VR headsets.


This statistic was revealed by Valve following a recent hardware survey (via Road to VR) – the first survey of this kind since the March release of its flagship VR title Half-Life: Alyx.

This statistic represents the number of headsets connected to Steam over a particular month – which means, while it’s the closest we have to data on active VR users, it does not account for headsets which were connected but not actively used.

Even so, the numbers are fascinating. April 2020 saw a surge in VR users, nearly three times the prior record reached in the winter of 2019. Based on its own estimates, Road to VR reports that 950,000 additional VR headsets connected during this period, totalling an estimated 2.7 million headsets.

As we reported in January, the Index VR headset was already sold out in-stores and online. While Index isn’t the only VR headset you can use to play Half-Life: Alyx – Valve designed the game to work with a wide range of headsets – the increased demand was most likely driven squarely by the game.

Half-Life: Alyx was a critical hit when it lauched two months ago, receiving a 5 out of 5 review from VG247.”One of the reasons Valve never counted to three and gave us a proper sequel is the expectation that comes with it,” Kirk wrote of the franchise. “The series’ core ideas have been refined and polished, and believable physics are no longer such a novelty in video games. Where is left for Half-Life to innovate? It turns out Valve just needed new tech. It just needed VR.”

 

[Morgoth]

Half-Life 3: Brain-interface chip only

 

[Morgoth]

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.

 

[Perkel]

Even if you somehow get around all that, it will still look and play like shit

That is normal though. Because it is shit game. They sacrificed everything in order to get something motion controls to do.

 

[Dexter]

https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-index-stock-check-headset-availability-shipping-countries/

Index Still Backordered Globally, Valve Making “every possible effort” to Catch Up
By Ben Lang - May 6, 2020

Like other headsets, the Valve Index has been in high demand but limited supply due to the Coronavirus pandemic. While we’ve seen stock of Oculus Quest and Rift starting to return over the last week or so, Index is still backordered globally.

We checked stock availability for all Index packages across all 31 regions where sold. The latest shows that all packages of the headset are backordered by eight weeks or more, save for the Base Stations which are simply listed as “Out of Stock”.


Index has been backordered by eight weeks or more in all regions since a small supply of new stock was gobbled up just before Half-Life: Alyx launched in late March.

Despite the backorder, it’s been possible to register your interest in any of the Index packages (except for the base stations) to reserve a spot in line, check out the Index store page to sign up. Valve is then sending out notifications by email when stock is available, giving customers one week to pull the trigger. Even so, when offered the option to buy, no estimate for delivery is provided leaving customers wondering how long they’ll be waiting.

We reached out to Valve for an update on the situation. The company told us they are planning to make shipping and tracking info more transparent in the near future.

“We are making every effort possible to deliver units in a timely fashion. The current conditions due to Covid-19 are causing fluctuations. We appreciate everyone’s patience during this time, and we plan to make more shipping/tracking info available soon,” a Valve spokesperson said.

Like other headsets, the Chinese-manufactured Index has seen a double-whammy due to the Coronavirus pandemic: supply decreasing due to manufacturing disruptions and demand increasing due to shelter-in-place orders in many parts of the globe.

Oculus had been in the same boat; in the last two weeks however we’ve seen a surge of new Quest stock, suggesting that manufacturing of the headset is once again picking up steam. When the same might happen for Index isn’t clear, but we’ve got our eye on the situation.

 

[Luzur]

Yes
Also every VR treadmill I've experienced has sucked

Hey now bro it gets the nerds to atleast move abit ok LOL

 

[Venser]

Fluids added to bottles in 1.4 update

Half-Life: Alyx Update 1.4 released
Game Features

• Added subtitles for: Brazilian, 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

 

[Semiurge]

Half-Life 3: Brain-interface chip only

Maybe this time the fools will destroy its cpu.

 

[Dexter]

The fuck is this?