An addition offers a detail that appears small but has caused a furor among fans.
Valve developer Matthew Wilde made a big impression today on twitter by showing the outcome of his project in these weeks of quarantine: adding realistic liquid to the inside of the bottles we can catch in Half-Life: Alyx. The great interactivity that the game offers and the way in which it has revolutionized our immersion capacity, eg virtual reality games, are already well known, but it is those kinds of details -or the commented ability to draw freely on some surfaces- that most Attention attracts all kinds of fans and those who end up becoming good ambassadors in order to attract people to this technology.
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
Long live the wine
The addition, which is already in the latest version of the game, is a shader that generates the effect that the bottles have liquid, also behaving credibly when we move it, depending on the direction or intensity of the movement. Not that it has simulated liquid inside – that would be expensive at the processing level – but it offers a credible visual effect and that's what it's all about.
Since games began to pay attention to physics and use them as a distinctive element, advances in this field have not stopped, although there are still many small and large details to undertake in order to get closer to realism. The more advances that occur, the more difficult it is to achieve significant new advances, so the playing field becomes precisely that of small details, things that do not seem revolutionary on paper but that ultimately end up being decisive in delving into the ability of virtual worlds to immerse ourselves in them.
Half-Life: Alyx appeared on March 23 and became the latest addition to Meristation to its list of "masterpieces", games rated 10 in this magazine, which has not occurred since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, also according to an international criticism that has crowned it with a 93 in Metacritic, with 91 by users, which places it as one of the best-rated games in 2020.
