Now modders are using Half-Life: Alyx to get Half-Life 2 working in VR

Last week, the Half-Life community's attempts to translate Valve's new VR extravaganza, Half-Life: Alyx, to the flat screen showed very early promise. And this week, another portion of Half-Life fandom is approaching the problem in something like the opposite direction, attempting to turn the seminal, and distinctly non-VR, Half-Life 2 into a VR game, using Alyx as its foundation.

This isn't the first attempt to translate Half-Life 2 into VR, of course - an extensive VR overhaul, promising to deliver "updated effects, textures, models & maps" reemerged in 2017, having started life four years earlier - but this latest effort takes a rather different approach, porting Valve's original game into Alyx's VR-enabled Source 2 engine.

One enterprising modder, known as Vect0R (who's also spend time digging up unused Half-Life 2 content and producing a real-time raytracing mod for the game), has made enough progress - converting map files and assets to Source 2's format and adding them to Alyx - to be able to show off a little bit of a VR shooty-bang-bang run around a very old-school City 17.

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