News | Portal RTX is an official mod for the Valve game
Portal RTX was unveiled yesterday at Nvidia's GTC presentation, a mod for the PC game that adds ray tracing to the game.
To do that, the mod will use RTX Remix, a new technique that makes it relatively easy to enrich old games with ray tracing and improved textures.
The mod will be released for free to owners of the PC version of the puzzle game in November. Nvidia has also created new assets for the game, which should make it look even better.
Hardware | Dock for Steam Deck is delayed
Valve has announced that the official dock for the Steam Deck has been delayed again. Delay will not impact production of Steam Decks themselves.
When the so-called Steam Deck Docking Station could appear, remains unclear for the time being. In February of this year, Valve itself indicated that the official release period would fall somewhere “in the spring”, but that season now seems to be no longer feasible.
Valve indicates in a blog post that the postponement is (once again) due to shortages in material, as well as the ongoing impact of the corona pandemic. “We are working to improve the situation and will provide more information as soon as we have it.”
The dock is delayed, sorry all. The team is working on it and we’ll share more info when we have it. https://t.co/9K5X5AAiJw
— Lawrence Yang (@lawrenceyang) June 1, 2022
Valve does point out that the delay will have no impact on the production of the handheld itself. The Steam Deck was also delayed at the end of last year for roughly the same reasons and still has long reservation periods, but according to Valve, the dock is in no way slowing down the rollout of the Steam Deck itself. “Different parts, different factories,” said the Valve development team.
News | Free Portal Spin-off Aperture Desk Job Revealed
Valve has unveiled a free spin-off of Portal called Aperture Desk Job.
This “interactive tutorial” will be available to download from March 1, and will introduce new Steam Deck owners to the device and its capabilities. Reportedly, playing the game only takes about twenty minutes.
Valve emphasizes that it is absolutely not about Portal 3. “Limit your expectations. This isn’t a sequel to Portal. But raise your expectations a bit, because it does expand the universe of those games.”
News | Half-Life: Alyx VR-game officially announced
Valve has officially announced the vr game Half-Life: Alyx. The Game will be revealed on Thursday.
There have been rumors for years about a virtual reality game based on the Half-Life franchise. In 2015, the company indicated that it was still experimenting with VR and IP. But the last few days rumors started to flare up again due to a leaked interview.
Via Twitter, Valve announces that Half-Life: Alyx really exists and that the game will be revealed this Thursday at 19:00 Dutch time. There are no further details about the game yet.
The original Half Life game appeared on PC in 1998. A few years later, the game also came to PlayStation 2. The player is Gordon Freeman, a scientist who must find his way out of the Black Mesa Research Facility after an experiment with alien material goes wrong.
Continuation Half-Life 2 appeared in 2004. After that two more episodic sequels were released. The second episode ended with a cliffhanger and after that no new Half-Life game was released.
We’re excited to unveil Half-Life: Alyx, our flagship VR game, this Thursday at 10am Pacific Time.
— Valve (@valvesoftware) November 18, 2019
Can’t wait to share it with all of you! pic.twitter.com/BupFCxSrTw
