It's slow, but creates beautiful maps and is why Alyx has the upper hand in VR fidelity right now.įor this reason, it is recommended that users of the S2FM get acquainted with building maps on their own in Hammer. So Half-Life: Alyx uses a new, still work-in-progress system called VRAD3, which is built off of Valve's old VRAD and VRAD2 baking processes. Where some modern engines are concerning themselves with realtime global illumination and raytracing, Valve considers baked lighting to be the best for their VR, performance-driven platform used in Half-Life: Alyx. The biggest one most people will be familiar with is volumetric lighting, which used to be available on a per-light basis, but is now defined by the map you are making videos in. For most cases, this is good, however it does limit you when you want to utilize some of the advanced graphical techniques available in Source 2. mdl.Ĭoming from Source 1, you may be expecting to go into a retail or workshop map and just start building a scene around that. These usually have analogs to old file formats from Source 1, such as. vmat, and more files of that nature inside 'content' to store the text data used to compile into the game.

So there's a lot of confusing information there, but essentially, when you're making content like models and materials, they exist in 'content' and if you're just using them in SFM or Hammer, that content exists in 'game'. vpk is inside 'hlvr/maps', or game content if it's inside a pakXX.vpk file. vpk, which can either store map data, if a.

'game' is a more familiar file structure, this is where 'compiled' content exists, so it is where you will find Valve's new file formats like. tga/.png/.psd, and other sources are stored inside of the game's 'content' directory, found in the Half-Life: Alyx directory next to 'game'. All of the raw files that make up the game's content, such as. Source 2 uses a new content pipeline, which is built off of Valve's content system they've been using internally since Source 1. Note: This gets a bit technical, so hang in there.

Valve source 2