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Half-Life: Alyx ported to ARM64 for Steam Frame - update out now (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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[–] 42 points 1 month ago (10 children)

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 😒

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Also it's a bit outdated by today's standards in general, AFAIK.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

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago

    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

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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    • [–] 25 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Secretly the most exciting thing about the frame

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  • [–] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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    • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    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…

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    19 comments in c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca view that post
    [–] 25 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Well that wasn't unexpected.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Well it was a little expected - basically the flagship game for VR

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    HLA is almost the VR game. Would be weird if they didn't port it to their own new headset.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Really wish Meta would port Lone Echo, at least to the Quest 3, and ideally to steam. Its such a good game, but with it not being able to be played unteathered, in nearly forgotten.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    That game was where VR clicked for me. Would absolutely pay again for it to be able to play it through SteamVR.

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    • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Valve were working on 3 full VR games in 2017. It's a shame we're just getting Alyx as the flagship again.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    A lot of people still haven’t played it. I can’t even afford a Steamdeck much less a VR headset.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    "Much less"? The 1TB oled steam deck costs almos the same as the Steam Frame vr headset.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    At one point in time you could get a refurbished LCD for ~$300 and even that was more than I could spare.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I mean yeah, at one point you could get a lot of stuff for a lot cheaper. Unfortunately we usually live in the present xD

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    • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Didn't dawn on my that this was an arm device. Makes sense, I just didn't really think about it.

    How many current VR games (or Linux games in general) have arm builds?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    How many current VR games (or Linux games in general) have arm builds?

    There should be a ton of current VR games that have ARM builds because the Meta Quest is also an ARM-powered device. But I believe that it runs some customized Android, not Linux, so that part might be trickier. Still, I also understand that Steam has included a compatibility tool to allow running Android games on it. Between those two things, there should be plenty of games that could be converted to run natively on Frame without too much effort, I would think.

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