However, through its own efforts, the dev team has found a way to make it work with current Vive and Rift headsets. “Oculus and SteamVR both need DirectX 10+. Valve thus abandoned and left it in the DK2 ‘extended’ state based on a old SteamVR version.” “The Source engine is DirectX 9 only which does not allow texture sharing and is not supported by any of the new VR APIs ,” Marulu, one of the key members of the dev team, told Road to VR. The project sat idle because few people had Oculus Rift dev kits to play. The mod has sat dormant for a few years because, even though the Source engine had been modified to support Oculus Rift dev kits, Valve never modified the Source code as the VR tech continued to get better. It is expected to be compatible with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and should be released 'soon.' You'll need Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 and 2 to play it, but only Half-Life 2 will be playable initially. The mod, which has been in development since 2013, has redone all the maps with HDR lighting and hi-res shadows, while remodeling all the weapons to be VR compatible, including the trademark Crowbar.

So let's all console ourselves with a Half-Life 2: VR mod that has just entered Steam Greenlight. Truth be told, we may never get Half-Life 3.

Half life 2 non steam