half-life-alyx-modding.html

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2773635024

Wanted to do some modding in half-life Alyx, mainly because of the mod Monomyth. It’s one of the few mods with some voice acting so that’s cool. I’ll be honest, the voice acting isn’t incredible. But it is fun. It sounds like how you’d expect a mod to sound with a couple of friends. So, without further ado, here’s the ol’ proof of concept that this CAN be done. Took way too long to figure this out though.

The problem is the Source engine doesn’t allow you to just drag and drop audio files in. Even with source 2 they made it a real mess around. So the way this get’s done is you follow this guide basically and hope it works.

Thing is that top part looks like metadata, and I wasn’t sure if it was up to date. It recommends you copy and paste from it’s example mod and work from there, hopefully that mod is always up to date. So I did that and my files were corrupted with control syntax. If you have the block blocks or it isn’t legible you have a problem. I uninstalled my entire alyx install and then reinstalled it and that fixed it for me. Not sure if it would work for you.

Next you move your .wav sound into a sounds folder in the mod. Just remember it’s name.

Next you open the soundevents folder and rename the file to be _soundevents.vsndevts. Edit the file.

On the inside of _soundevents.vsndevts paste this

{ "Addon.AudioNewSoundDemo" = { type = "hlvr_default_3d" volume = 1.0 volume_falloff_min = 70.0 volume_falloff_max = 2700.0 volume_fade_out = 1 volume_fade_in = 0 spread_min = 30 spread_max = 150 vsnd_files = [ "sounds/FILENAME.vsnd", ] }

finally go to the resource manifest folder and edit

_addon_resources.vrman and edit the line

“soundevents/_soundevents.vsndevts”,

nearly there. Now you boot up the alyx sdk, in the asset browser search for your audio file(s) and right click full recompile. Then search for the _soundevents.vsndevts and full recompile that. Reload it too.

Now here’s the gimicky part. When you’re in the hammer editor you might have the file in a snd_event_point or you might not. It’s frustrating when things just work and you don’t really understand why. The bottom of the dock says to reload/recompile and it should work. I think that’s what fixed it for me but I don’t know.

Anyway, this works which is nice but why can’t alyx just work? why is the source 2 still so scuffed with modding? A fair few people are tired of it not working and I hear are moving to the unreal engine to work, which makes sense. Unreal engine 5 is very similar to unreal engine 4, so much so you supposedely can port a lot of old files from there and into the new engine. And with the new advancements UE5 is making like with Nanite and their own lighting system VR could be a lot of fun. But right now all those fancy rendering things only work in one eye for VR headsets, so until they get that fixed people don’t have a lot of choice for what they work with.

I really want half life alyx to be a good modding tool, and technically there’s still a lot you can do. It’s just hard. And maybe that’s just me, but kill em I suppose.

Just some thoughts with your boy. Peace.

EDIT LATER THAT DAY:

so I tried adding another voice file and was stuck for a while. If you want multiple voice lines they all stick within the first set of curly brackets, like so.

 { "ex.voice1" = { type = "hlvr_default_3d" volume = 1.0 vsnd_files = [ "sounds/myramp.vsnd", ] } "ex.doinggoodvoice" = { type = "hlvr_default_3d" volume = 1.0 vsnd_files = [ "sounds/doinggood.vsnd", ] } }

hope this saves you some hours unlike me.

If your files aren’t showing up it’s definitely just you need to recompile the voice lines in the asset browser.