In anticipation of the upcoming release of the leading VR games Valve, Half-Life: Alyx, you might want to go over some of the earlier entries in the series Half-Life.
Although all games in the series are still traditional and are available for official games only on PC, a side Quest Oculus app lets you play the original game of Half-Life in virtual reality with full 6DoF on your headset.
The app itself, Lambda1VR, valid only for the engine to run Half-Life in VR on your Quest. Developer fashion Lambda1VR, Dr. Beef says the modders themselves that they “need to legally own Half-Life” to play in VR. Team Half-Life: Alyx recently said that they encourage players to get acquainted with a series of Half-Life, especially Half-Life 2, and at the time of this writing, the company sells games in a set for 940 RUB.
Training
To set Lambda1VR and Half-Life on your Quest, you need to know how to download content to your quest, and make sure your quest is also in the developer mode. If you have previously downloaded the content through a SideQuest, then you can move on to the next section.
If you did not previously loaded or don’t even know what that means, read our guide on how to upload content to the Oculus Quest. In order to install Half-Life you need to follow the guide on the side loading up to the section “Download content from the store page SideQuest“.
If you watched everything up to this point, you can continue with the guide below.
To download a copy of Half-Life
The app itself Lambda1VR will not work without a copy of the game files Half-Life you will need to copy from the computer where you installed the game.
Before continuing, make sure you have a copy of the original game Half-Life (not Half-Life 2 or Half-Life: Source) downloaded from Steam on the same computer on which you use SideQuest.
Install Lambda1VR
Connect your Quest to the computer and open the SideQuest. App Lambda1VR will be available in the “Games and applications”. Just click on the list, click “Install Latest” (“Install latest version”), and SideQuest will do the rest.
To check installation progress or make sure that everything is set up correctly, you can click the ‘Tasks’ (Tasks) in the upper right corner, and if the application was downloaded and installed correctly, you should see a line that says “APK file installed ok!!” (” * . APK file is installed correctly!!”).
However, the application Lambda1VR will not work by itself. You still need to copy the files Half-Life.
Install Half-Life on your Quest
There are two ways to take the next step, which involves copying the files Half-Life in your Quest.
You can stay in a SideQuest and use the built in Quest Guide for the Quest SideQuest, but the file Explorer of your system is easier to copy files to your Quest. For the purposes of this manual we will use Windows Explorer (or Finder if you are on Mac).
1. In Windows Explorer or Finder navigate to the root folder of your Oculus Quest.
Once your Quest will connect to your computer, it should appear in your file Explorer as any other hard drive on your computer. In the root folder will be folders like Alarms, Android, DCIM, Download, Oculus, Screenshots and many more.
2. In the root folder create a new folder called “xash” without the quotes.
You copy the files Half-Life to this folder in the next step.
3. Locate the folder where you have installed the Half-Life in their system.
In Windows you can find it in C: \ Program Files Steam steamapps common Half-Life.
On a Mac you need to open the Library folder which is hidden by default. Click Finder, then from the top menu bar, click Go then Go To Folder, then type the following and press enter: ~ / Library / Application Support
This should open a new Finder window with the folder application support. From there, navigate to the folder Steam SteamApps common Half-Life.
4. Copy the folder “valve”.
In both systems in a folder Half-Life will be a lot of different files and folders. You don’t need to copy all this in your Quest. In the folder Half-Life just find the folder called “valve” and copy it.
5. Paste the folder “valve”
Now that Valve copied the folder back in the root folder of the Quest. Open the folder “xash” that you created in step 2, and paste the folder “valve”. It may take some time to copy to your system.
NOTE. You want to copy the actual folder “valve” folder in the “xash”. Upon completion, the structure should look like Quest xash valve with all subsequent files in the folder valve.
6. Restart your Quest.
Press and hold the power button on your Quest to invoke the power menu, and select restart.
Play Half-Life on your Quest
Lambda1VR will now appear in your library tab on the “unknown sources”. You can stop reading right here and go and play, if you want — it works perfectly. However, there are a few tweaks that you can do to improve performance, and some textures if you want. These steps are optional and are listed below.
HD Graphics
Note. This step will only work if you are using a copy of Half-Life with Windows computers. It seems that Mac users can’t install HD graphics in your Quest.
The default setting is Half-Life on the Quest uses original graphics. However, each installation of Steam Half-Life also includes the HD version, which slightly improves the model, especially NPC. However, if you install all the HD models, users have reported that it can affect performance in Lambda1VR.
Users subreddit Lambda1VR recommend simply update the model file Barney and Scientists, to maintain stability, but to update some NPC.
To do this, locate the installation folder of Half-Life, as you did in the previous steps. Then:
1. Navigate to the Half-Life valve_hd models
2. Select all the files Barney and Scientist, and copy them.
This includes barney.mdl to barney05.mdl, and scholist.mdl to scholist10.mdl.
3. Navigate to the folder xash your Quest.
Open the folder and navigate to xash Valve models.
Insert the model files Barney and Scientists in folder models. When you are asked, you will want to replace existing files, as you rewrite the old model on the HD.
When you restart the game, the updated model needs to enter into force.
Performance improvement
If you want to improve game performance, particularly in more challenging areas, you can follow the instructions from this post in subreddit Lambda1VR , which involves editing a text file in the folder xash in your Quest.
Other settings
For any other more advanced settings we strongly recommend that you read this guide in subreddit Lambda1VR , which goes a bit further in terms of configuration with the controls and other options. It also has instructions on how to play in the expansion Half-Life Blue Shift.
You can read more about fashion Lambda1VR on the website.
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