For those who are lucky enough to have a VR kit, Valve's Half-Life: Alyx has today hit one year old and so Valve are doing a small celebration. Despite it still not advertising Linux support on the store page, just a reminder that Valve did add a Linux version with Vulkan support back in May 2020.
The community around the game has built up since Valve updated it post-released with Steam Workshop support, with over 800 mods now available for Alyx. Sifting through it, Valve teamed up with guest writer Craig Pearson to point out some of the top mods going.
Direct Link
Valve noted in their celebratory post that it gained a number 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
Since it's a Half-Life game and it was meant to really showcase a true VR experience, it's not exactly surprising that it did well overall with over 45,000 user reviews on Steam giving it an Overwhelmingly Positive score which makes it number 15 currently on the Steam Top 250 chart.
Additionally Half-Life: Alyx is 40% off until March 31 to celebrate, which is the lowest price for it yet.
Hopefully though, for those of us where VR is out of reach for various reasons that some of Valve's upcoming games that Gabe Newell mentioned will be more…flat so we don't miss out.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Mar 23, 2021
Waiting to see the other two VR games that Valve are working on.
That said, I was able to make it run well enough on my 980 Ti, so if your hardware is better than that you’ll be fine.
So I would really like to play that, but when will there be actual gfx cards for a reasonable price?
Quoting: LanzIs VR still a major pain to get running on Linux?
That's a big question for the future. There are patents for a stand alone HMD from Valve. What would that run on? Steam doesn't have any ARM games yet... would that change with a new VR headset? Or will they use x86 hardware and run Linux?
slaapliedje Mar 24, 2021
Quoting: peta77The reason why they officially don't support Linux, was that it only worked 100% on AMD GPUs for Linux. Do I remember that correctly? Does anyone know what the current status of that is? Because if it doesn't work as good with an Nvidia GPU even the current price is way too high for me.I beat the game on my 2080 RTX under Linux
slaapliedje Mar 24, 2021
Quoting: LanzIs VR still a major pain to get running on Linux?Nope, I play a good chunk of my VR games through Linux on my Index and 2080 RTX. Half-Life ran very well with that setup.
slaapliedje Mar 24, 2021
Quoting: Guestwish they released a version that didn't need vr. can't see it being hard to make it usable with a mouse and keyboard.Having recently beaten the game... it is full on designed around VR. You have 'gravity gloves' that yank things into your hands from a distance. There are fights where you have to duck behind objects and shoot at enemies. It's incredibly intense, and the experience wouldn't be anywhere near as good with a mouse / keyboard. There are even alien exploding balls that you can hold in your hand, until you squeeze them, then you have a few seconds to throw them before they blow up. Even cooler, you have to try to snatch them quickly from the grasp of the weird tentacle thing that is holding them.
Even the feel of throwing actual grenades is enhanced by having it in VR.
Quoting: slaapliedjeYou have 'gravity gloves' that yank things into your hands from a distance. There are fights where you have to duck behind objects and shoot at enemies. It's incredibly intense, and the experience wouldn't be anywhere near as good with a mouse / keyboard. There are even alien exploding balls that you can hold in your hand, until you squeeze them, then you have a few seconds to throw them before they blow up. Even cooler, you have to try to snatch them quickly from the grasp of the weird tentacle thing that is holding them.Every action you mention here could be implemented with a normal mouse click + kb. Or a chain of clicking, holding, etc.
It would definitely be doable via simplification. Valve just decided not to do it, probably because of multiple reasons.
It is also somewhat funny, as most of these things are not "VR" at all - they just use the controllers typically associated with VR.
But there's no real reason you shouldn't be able to use these touch/finger controllers with just a normal monitor. In the end, they are just a much improved variant of what started with the Wiimote.
I've always said and will likely always continue to say that not the headset, but the controls are the actual "revolution" here. The headset "just" increases immersion and lets you look around - saving a button/stick on the controllers.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 24 March 2021 at 6:20 am UTC
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