Half-Life: Alyx’s firewater sloshes around real nice now

Now your VR headset is beer goggles

Half-Life: Alyx is full of a million tiny little touches that make it a splendidly neat VR game. You can wear a bucket on your head and it protects you from Barnacles. There’s a fully-functioning piano in a hotel lobby. It’s all a bunch of stuff that’s easy to miss but makes this world feel authentic.

Valve just released a new Half-Life: Alyx update that comes with an especially important innovation: Booze convincingly sloshes around inside bottles. Visual effects developer Matthew Wilde took to Twitter to show off his pet project, saying that he spent a lot of the past two months at home working on “boozy liquid shader.” Here it is in action:

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

Necessary? Nope. Extremely cool? Yep, definitely.

Considering that Half-Life: Alyx has a whole chapter that takes place in a vodka distillery, this new shader should be noticed by most everyone who returns to City 17. Previously, bottles just had a cloudy look to them, like you could tell they were full but without ever actually seeing the liquid. Don’t get too distracted by this new alcoholic aesthetic; that asshole Jeff will find you if you’re not willing to break a few bottles.