Half-Life: Alyx has been updated to include
Steam Workshop support. This includes a beta release of our community development tools, as well as support for Linux and the Vulkan rendering API, and a few small quality of life updates.
Workshop and Editor Tools Beta Release
Half-Life Alyx's level editing tools are now open to the community! You can create new levels, models, textures, and animations for Half-Life: Alyx, and using Steam Workshop you can browse and play everything the community has uploaded.
Want to make your own VR physics sandbox or a giant Rube Goldberg machine? Design a new combat encounter featuring a dozen Combine soldiers at once? What about creating the world's longest Multitool puzzle, or imagining a whole new district of City 17?
Crack open the tools yourself and make it happen! If you just want to play what the community's been making,
browse the Half-Life Alyx Steam Workshop page to try out the latest and most popular addons.
This is the first Beta release of the Alyx Workshop tools suite, and we intend to add to and improve them in the coming weeks. Included in this release are new or updated versions of:
- Hammer, the latest version of the Source 2 level editor.
- Material Editor, the tool for creating and tuning materials in Source 2.
- ModelDoc, a tool for viewing, editing, and compiling models with animation, collision, and other gameplay attributes.
- AnimGraph, our animation tool used to create complicated animation setups with blends and transitions.
- Particle Editor, for making new particle effects.
- Subrect Editor, for creating smart texture sheets known as "hotspots."
- Source Filmmaker, the Source 2 cinematic renderer and animation tool.
In addition to these tools, the update includes several sample maps. We've included these to demonstrate and explain how we authored enemy encounters in the game, as well as showcase some new features of the Half-Life: Alyx level art pipeline including tile meshes, static and dynamic cables, and texture hotspotting. The entire set of Half-Life: Alyx maps is also included as editable source for reference - this includes a large collection of interactive objects and prefabs. We'll have news on more features and some smaller additional tools and examples in an future update.
We've also started writing
Half-Life: Alyx Workshop Tools documentation. If you're looking to start your first addon, this is a good place to start. This is a beta release of the development suite and we are still writing documentation for many of these tools, but we hope in the meantime you will dive in and learn by exploring for yourself. We can't wait to see what you make!
Linux and Vulkan
The Half Life: Alyx Workshop update adds a native Linux version of the game using the Vulkan rendering API, as well as optional support for using Vulkan on Windows.
Depending on your system, you may experience better performance using Vulkan, especially if your system is closer to minimum spec. To try Vulkan on Windows, open the Half-Life: Alyx main menu and choose
Options >
Performance >
Advanced (Gear icon) >
Rendering API. (You must restart the game for the Rendering API choice to take effect.)
On Linux, AMD graphics and the Mesa RADV driver are recommended for best results.
On Linux, if you had installed the game through Proton previously, please follow these steps to correctly download the update:
- Go in the Properties for Half-Life Alyx by right-clicking the game in your Steam Library
- Check the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" box
- Uncheck the box, and the download will properly complete.
Spectator View
The spectator view (the view other people see when watching someone play) has received a few small updates as well. The spectator view now supports two zoom levels, and can be run in full screen mode by adding -fullscreen to your Launch Options in Steam. There is also now an option to draw the Spectator HUD directly in the SteamVR "VR View" window, so your spectators can see the HUD along with any other SteamVR overlays you use.
Additional fixes
Fixed some occurrences of the player's in-game hands shaking, GPU optimizations for rendering fog, and CPU optimizations for NPCs.
Version 1.3, Content Build ID: 5035510
steamcommunity.com
