Bottles of vodka in Half-Life: Alyx are inspiring devs to design their own booze shaders

About a month ago, a visual effects developer at Valve shared details about the then-new Half-Life: Alyx booze shader - since then, indie devs have been designing their own versions.

Valve visual effects developer Matthew Wilde originally shared his Half-Life: Alyx booze shader on Twitter, which is one of many updates that have been added to Alyx since it launched back in March.

Check out the tweet below.

"Spent a good chunk of lock-down doing this important work," writes Wilde. "Boozy liquid shader, now available in the latest update for Half-Life: Alyx.

You can check out the Half-Life: Alyx booze shader below. Essentially, it adds liquid to bottles, which abides by the laws of physics that would govern real liquids in real containers. It's pretty cool.

What's even cooler, though, is that a variety of devs are trying their hands at their own booze shaders. Seems the construction of virtual boozy liquids has become a lockdown hobby for more than one person.

There's this one.

And this one.

And this one.

And, finally, this one.

There are actually loads more, but these were the four collected in a ResetEra thread that drew attention to the phenomenon.

I personally reckon this one is pretty great, because it properly accounts for how a liquid would flow when poured out. Not sure I'd be mad about drinking that green stuff, though. Probably some sort of potion, or maybe Absinthe — maybe both.

According to Valve, Half-Life: Alyx is the first of several more Half-Life games. It doesn't come as much of a surprise, though, given that Valve sold 103,000 Valve Index units after Half-Life: Alyx was announced back in November.

You don't necessarily need an Index though. One player managed to play through most of Half-Life: Alyx without using VR, and a full mod for non-VR Half-Life: Alyx has been released since.