Original 'Half-Life' Gets VR Treatment in a New Mod
While Valve Corporation is pretty much done with the "Half-Life" franchise, its most loyal fans continue to keep it alive. The latest attempt to do so brings virtual reality (VR) to the first installment in the video game series.
A developer by the name maxvollmer has shared on GitHub a source code for a "VR mod" for the original game. It was created a few weeks ago and appears to be in early alpha form. The dev is yet to provide more information on it.
He did, however, provide an early demonstration of the "Half-Life" VR mod on YouTube, in which he can be seen exploring Black Mesa and whacking things with a crowbar.
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However, as UploadVR points out, there is still a lot of room for improvement, which is understandable as it is still in early stages of development.
That being said, using the "Half-Life" VR mod has its own set of risks. For one, since it is still in early alpha, there will be bugs to expect and the performance will not be smooth. Also, unless players do not have a clear understanding on using it accurately, they might end up getting VAC banned.
But for the brave souls out there who would like to experience it, maxvollmer has provided a guide on how to get the VR mod to work:
You need to build the client and server dlls. No idea why they are skipping, but you definitely need to build them. You need to create a mod folder in your Half-Life directory with a liblist.gam (see any HL1 mod tutorial out there, or just take a liblist.gam from another mod and modify it). client.dll and hl.dll go into their respective folders inside your mod folder. HLVRLauncher.exe and opengl32.dll go directly into your mod folder. Do not put the opengl32.dll into your Half-Life folder. Do not run the game without the launcher (the launcher puts opengl32.dll into the Half-Life folder before starting the game and makes sure that opengl32.dll is deleted after the game ends). Do not play online. Doing this wrong might get you VAC banned.
It is unclear at the moment how this "Half-Life" VR mod will do as the developer progresses, but there is hope that it will gain the support it needs so that it will be built and work as it should.
Either way, it serves as the second VR project that "Half-Life" fans can look forward to — the first one being the "Half-Life 2" VR, which was approved on Steam Greenlight last May.
