Less than seven days after the release of Half-Life: Alyx strikes the first modder and creates a VR adventure with the new Source 2 engine from Valve, which many fans have been waiting for years: Half-Life 2 is finally running in virtual reality!
Half-Life 2: VR was officially launched on Steam Greenlight in 2017, but not much has happened on this construction site since then. The modder Vect0R has therefore taken the fate of the project into their own hands and created a mod that takes the old shooter classic from 2004, in which we wander through City 17 with Gordon Freeman, rebuilt with the new VR engine from Half-Life: Alyx. You can watch the first result in the video above this news.
Source 2 makes it difficult for modders – yet!
For the mod, Vect0R claims to have grabbed the original map of Half-Life 2 and then converted it together with some additional assets from HL 2 into the format of Source 2.
The problem with this, however, is that Valve has not yet released the Software Development Kit (SDK) of the Source 2 engine. This means that the possibilities for modders like Vect0R when working with the VR engine are relatively limited.
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However, Valve boss Gabe Newell has only recently confirmed that the engine will be made available to other developers free of charge in the future – but when this will happen and whether modders will benefit from it is not yet clear.
However, the mod is not available for download
You won't be able to play Half-Life 2 in VR too soon, at least not with the Vect0R mod. Because, as he explains in his YouTube video, the scenes shown are "just a demo and not more than that."
Therefore he expressly writes that at least for the time being he does not intend to publish the mod and make it available for download. So until you can trudge through City 17 in VR, you have to be patient.
But at least look at how Half-Life 2 could run and work in VR, we can already do that thanks to the Vect0R mod.
