An update for Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx has launched today, bringing some seriously impressive liquid physics to the game.
Update 1.4 for Half-Life: Alyx was revealed via the game’s Steam community page, with the full patch notes available to read here.
In-game bottles will now “appear to have liquid inside them.” There’s a gif at the bottom of the blog post which shows wine sloshing around inside of a bottle when shaken. It’s kind of amazing.
We can seemingly credit this work to Valve visual effects developer Matthew Wilde, who said on Twitter, “this booze shader has been my lock-down hobby”. He showed off more of his work, too, which you can see in the tweet below:
Spent a good chunk of lock-down doing this important work. Boozy liquid shader, now available in the latest update for Half-Life: Alyx pic.twitter.com/Iw9h98pmEg
— Matthew Wilde (@skilful) May 28, 2020
It’s a cool and meaningful detail that adds another layer of realism to one of VR’s most impressive outings. There are a lot of bottles in the game, with some achievements even asking you to carry bottles of Vodka through entire maps to satisfy one of the game’s NPCs.
As well as the liquid physics, update 1.4 fixes a number of bugs and adds functionality to the game’s recently launched Workshop Tools. Extra features include a Postprocessing Editor and a series of example maps.
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Players have already been modding the game prior to the opening of the Half-Life: Alyx Workshop on May 15, which has resulted in some ridiculous memes involving the TV screens in the game’s opening scene.
If you’re still deciding whether to pick up a VR headset for Half-Life: Alyx, check out our review of the game, which we thought “set a new bar for VR.”
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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com Half Life: Alyx Update Adds Amazing Liquid Physics, Just Because