Greetings everyone!
It's been a while - but today we are happy to announce that Half-Life 2: VR Mod has been verified for the Steam Frame.
It was not a straight-forward journey; when we began our testing on the Frame, it would not start at all. Then we managed to boot it up, but performance was poor and the experience riddled with bugs. We fixed the bugs and optimized our frame timing - now we had a playable build with decent performance, but still some way from hitting the required frametimes consistently. From here it took careful selection of suitable performance settings, further optimizations and the addition of eye-tracked foveated rendering to get it over the threshold.
Today's patch is the culmination of all that work. But we also fixed a number of bugs and snuck in a few improvements that we hope you will enjoy no matter if you get a Steam Frame or not.
Summary of changes
updated built-in dxvk version - might fix some startup issues
significantly improved performance on lower-end CPUs
potential fix for an issue where the headset view keeps shaking on uneven ground
new sniper scope for the crossbow and added stabilization when holding it with both hands
smoothed controller poses for hand movement
the gravity gun will now show a weapon laser if enabled
loading screens are now visible in VR
fixed a startup issue with the episodes on Linux
hands will no longer disappear when holding something
added Steam Frame controller bindings
New sniper scope
The crossbow now features a very "chunky" scope with actual depth that should make it more comfortable to use. We also added smoothing to the controller tracking and additional stabilization when holding the crossbow with both hands to make it easier to aim.