Back in 2013 word of a VR mod for Half-Life 2 began to surface long before the release of VR headsets from Oculus and HTC. As the title suggests it would let players relive one of the greatest shooters of all time, Half-Life 2, in VR. At the time Valve added support for Oculus Rift development kits into Source, but that's where the story ended. Or so we thought.

So the people behind the original mod are looking to finish what they started by adding full VR support into Half-Life 2 for both the Rift and Vive -- with motion controller support. According to those behind the project, and a report over at Roadtovr.com, "The Source engine is DirectX 9 only which does not allow texture sharing and is not supported by any of the new VR APIs." A hurdle that they've managed to overcome through some clever hacks to ensure consumer VR headset support. Their words, not mine. "We hacked that support to gain control over it and using my special rendering code I send the DirectX frames in low latency directly to the VR SDKs. It should be as low latency as native DirectX 11 rendering."

In addition to the Steam Greenlight page, the mod will also include some overall visual improvements to the game.

Modern VR headset support

Motion controller support

Updated effects, textures, models & maps

A 3D, made for VR GUI

Realistic weapon interactions

Multiple VR locomotion methods

Which all sounds great, except that the trailer for the mod seems to be more of a "here's an idea that we have" as opposed to something where we can see progress.



Either way a VR mod for Half-Life 2 sounds like a no-brainer, and something that Valve probably should have released by now. You know, as a kinda sorta still a game development studio.