Half-Life: Alyx ported to ARM64 for Steam Frame - update out now

Gunman Contracts

Oh, that looks promising, thanks for pointing that out.

Half-Life Alyx uses a mix of dynamic and pre-baked lighting. That's how it manages to run butter smooth while still looking really good.

But as we can see in Deadlock, the engine also supports more modern techniques such as Ray tracing and upscaling

Also it's a bit outdated by today's standards in general, AFAIK. Does it still go with pre-baked lighting?

Yeah, you can license it with their permission. It's not something large studios want to deal with, and it's not something small studios usually have the influence to do. It's also a risk, as the engine isn't as documented as the major ones, and you don't know if it'll work for you.

I asked and they said "no" and "get out" and "it's 3 am" and "this is HSBC" and "put some pants on" so that's you told.

I am pretty sure you can license it if you ask Valve.

Do you mean the Source 2 engine? I don't believe Valve has released it for third-party developers to use, even though Valve released the first game with it 11 years ago.

Gunman Contracts started out as a HL:A mod, it just released.

Boneworks had a homemade engine called Marrow I think, so I assume Bonelab is too? I just looked it up:

The 1Marrow Interaction Engine (or just the Marrow Engine), is a proprietary physics framework developed by Stress Level Zero for the Unity engine. Originating from BONEWORKS' mechanics, it contains all physics, solvers and logic used to create physics-based VR games such as BONELAB.

Bonelabs is made in unity and is based on boneworks

Because source

Specially after Epic Games already did the dirty work of fighting Google for having their own store besides the Google app store.

Without altering any of the game assets either, all optimisations, driver fixes, and steamvr. Getting that to run on a ~20W budget is absolutely bonkers

Yup! Although using the Frame's own CPU to render all this seemed to reduce by quite a large chunk the battery life. Did I read somewhere around 45min for high intensive games at 144Hz? There's a battery saving 72Hz or so, but that might make you more motion-sick, specially in more active games.

I didn't understand this so I looked it up. The game literally can run on the headset's mobile chipset, no computer needed. Possible through foveated rendering. Absolutely insane. And there are 131 verified titles at launch.

I agree. It's been my prediction that Valve will use this to publish mobile games. They already have the Steam app. There's also an app that already uses this that lets you play your Steam library on mobile (GameNative). I think Valve would be stupid to not push a patch to the Steam app that allows you to play your games on mobile.

I will never get why there are no VR studios just taking the HL:Alyx engine and make games with that. I *think* maybe Bonelabs is?

It is by far the best VR FPS game engine available, yet studios reinvent the wheel or use Unity3D 😒

Secretly the most exciting thing about the frame

I’m not denying that this is a big technical achievement, but for valve to release a new $1000+ headset with no new software feels like such a massive self goal.

Why not put all this effort into something new and exciting? Feels like we’ve been in a VR drought for years, and a big new headset release from valve just coincides with the same game they used to market their last headset like 6 or 7 years ago…