One of the most compelling use cases for Virtual Reality is going to sharing social experiences with your friends and family. Patrick Martin is a developer on the Synergy mod Development Team, which is a popular co-op mod for Half-Life 2 and other Source 2 engine games.
He talks about adding VR support to Synergy, and how it makes the first-person narrative experience of a Half-Life 2 a lot more engaging and interactive when you’re playing it with other friends. There are ways that they can make the gameplay more challenging to the point where it’d be impossible to complete the game alone whether it’s by adding more enemies or making the ones that are there stronger.
I imagine that we’ll start to see more casual games in VR that will be primarily about facilitating social interactions with your friends, but in a way that’s more engaging than other ways of connecting online.
Here’s some instructions for getting VR working with Synergy co-op mod for Half Life 2, and you can find out more information on the SynergyMod website.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.082] Patrick Martin: I'm Patrick Martin, and I'm on the development team for a Half-Life 2 mod that allows you to play Source Engine games such as Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, and other various games that use the Source Engine in co-op online with your friends. And we recently have been working on Oculus Rift support, so we've made some progress on that, and I'm here to learn more about what we can do. I see. And so what is it like to play Half-Life 2 in a cooperative mode? It's quite a bit different. It changes the way that the game is played quite a bit, because instead of playing just for the enjoyment of the story, you're playing it with friends. It becomes, instead of being an antisocial, like you were reading a book, essentially, it's a social experience. It becomes more of a, where you interact with other people. It adds replay value to the game. And so what are some of the social interactions that you've started to see within this mod in the context of virtual reality? Well, we've only supported virtual reality for a short period of time, so I can't really say what we've seen in terms of virtual reality, but the mod's been running since 2005. I've only been on the team since December 2012. but I remember playing this mod when I was in high school and It creates this people are gonna end up working together and chatting about current events It becomes more of a thing to do with friends and it becomes kind of a social thing It's kind of like you feel like people are just hanging out with each other and socializing being friends So there's a certain amount of questing where you're all going out and sort of collaborating together on this in some ways. Well, Half-Life 2, it's a linear first-person shooter with puzzles and stuff. Half-Life 2 is not the only game we support with this, but it's the most commonly played one because it is the most polished of all the games that we support. Our support for it is the most polished out of all the games that we support. Because we increased the difficulty for co-op, oftentimes people will have to work together to take down some of the more challenging sections from the original game because oftentimes the enemies will be a lot tougher or there'll be more of them. And it really becomes kind of a thing where you have to work together in order to win. I see. And so you're able to, within the context of these mods, actually change a lot of the elements of the gameplay. Well, we have a special system called the EDT file system. It's a custom system we wrote to allow us to, while we're loading the files from another game, it allows us to make changes to the files while they're being loaded. It doesn't actually change the files on the disk, but it changes the files as they're being loaded into the game so that we can make things like increase the difficulty or fix bugs that occur when in multiplayer. And that's how we do the increased difficulties. And I know that there's the Half-Life 2 VR mod by Wormslayer and some other people where you actually are having like Razer Hydra support. Have you looked at that and what type of lessons have you learned to try to integrate other VR components within this mod? So I've talked with Wormslayer before about VR support and he's been helpful with trying to resolve some of our bugs that we've been having but we haven't really worked with him all that much in terms of anything and we don't really have Razer Hydra support although we've looked into it doing something some sort of collaboration with Wormslayer on that before but really we're in the early stages of virtual reality support because we've only been working on the support for virtual reality since about January and We've only had a rift to test it since about three weeks ago. So Even though it's you know working like showable state. There are quite a few bugs still to work out. So Anything like that would be more off in the future And so what do you see is next with where this is gonna go for you guys? Well, we're just hoping to provide a fun, immersive and enjoyable social experience while also adding replay value to some of these games that just deserve to have co-op. Any other final thoughts? Anything left unsaid that needs to be said? I'd just like to thank the other developers who've been working on this with me and Valve for their engine and stuff. The original creator of the mod, whose name is Vosk on Steam, even though he's not active as much anymore, the original version of Synergy was kind of a brilliant idea, and I just wanted to say thanks for that.
[00:05:23.321] Kent Bye: Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
