Holger Frydrych

Rise and shine, Mr Freeman. Rise and ... shine.

Half Life 2: VR is a third-party modification of the 2004 PC gaming classic by Valve Software, which adds full Virtual Reality support to the original game.

The project was originally started over a decade ago in the early days of Oculus. It successfully passed Steam greenlight in 2017, but then ran into trouble and was all but abandoned. I joined the project in July 2021 as part of an influx of new team members to revive it and finally get it out of the door. As the lead developer, I made sure to keep the project focussed on the essentials and slowly transform it into a playable and enjoyable experience. The project entered a private beta test phase in May 2022 and is launching a public beta in September 2022 on Steam.

Built on the Source 2013 SDK and using OpenVR and a customized dxvk build to implement the VR rendering.

The Dark Mod is a free community-developed stealth game in the spirit of the Thief series. I have created a VR adaptation that currently allows the game to be played as a seated keyboard+mouse experience in virtual reality, with motion controller support in the works. In the process, I have contributed many improvements to the game’s renderer to make performance meet the needs of VR rendering. Working on this project has taught me most of what I know about 3D rendering and VR, specifically knowledge in OpenGL, OpenVR and OpenXR.

This tool can inject upscaling and fixed foveated rendering into existing VR games, giving users tools to improve rendering performance with an acceptable loss of visual fidelity. The tool works by injecting into D3D11 and VR render calls.