Just last night, Half-Life Alyx received a brand new update that adds a new piece of physics that allows bottles filled with liquid to slosh around when players interact with them. Not only that, but according to the Steam Community Page, the update fixes a few game issues, adds several different subtitle languages, adds some UI improvements, and increases the number of workshop features.
The new game features will allow players from Vietnam, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine to play the game with subtitles in their native language. This new feature could significantly increase the number of people playing Half-Life Alyx because of the increase in the number of language subtitles. That’s not the only new game feature though, aside from the new piece of physics for liquid in bottles, players will also be able to experience a faster UI when returning to the main menu as well as experiencing improvements to the addon management UI.
Update 1.4 also introduces a number of game fixes that improve player experience. Players will now have added checks when loading save files with missing add-ons and be able to see error messages when the game doesn’t load because of a missing map requested by an addon. The update also implements various crash fixes and fixes that pesky bug that risks the generation of bad save files when players exit the game by closing SteamVR.
The new update also adds a number of workshop features including enabling Postprocessing Editor and adding in a “Custom Character” addon that, according to the Valve Developer Community will “provide all the functionality necessary to create completely new characters for your mods, all without the need to modify the underlying C++ code.” Meaning that players will be able to produce brand new custom character mods far easier than before. Another new workshop feature is example maps for Blind Zombie (a.k.a Jeff), Hacking and Toner Puzzles, Parked Vehicles and other Interactive Prefabs, Visibility System, and Post Processing Volumes. The last new workshop features added in this update are added core functionality required for Lua scripting, Alyx-specific script bindings for querying VR controller input and creating nav mesh paths from entity scripts, and Enabled live bone constraints in SFM, which can be baked/enabled as procedural bones, like cloth.
The update also includes several workshop fixes including instances when explicitly specified meshes became hulls and adding several meshes that were missing from park prefabs. The workshop fixes also make some SFM UI less Dota-specific in a number of places, fix missing map models in SFM, and fix the import sequence in SFM, allowing it to work properly on sequences with animated root orientation.