Valve folks decided to use the lockdown period to further improve the already impressive physics and environment interaction in Half-Life: Alyx by adding liquid shaders to bottles.
Half-Life: Alyx already offered some great interactions with the environment, such as the markers that people used for various things, from drawing penises to teaching geometry . The time has come for a new challenge for the devs though and it appears that the empty bottles all over the place were bothering them.
The latest update added a liquid shader to the bottles in the game. It will slosh around as players shake the bottles and some alcoholic beverages will even produce bubbles when disturbed. Semi-transparent canisters now appear to have polluted water in them as it's not supposed to have the brownish hue in regular circumstances.
You can check out an entire showcase of various bottles in the video below or click the link to patch notes which also has a gif showcasing the liquid movement inside a bottle.
While that is the highlight, the update was not all about liquid shaders. Valve also added subtitles for Brazilian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
There is also a quality of life change as UI will now appear quicker when returning from main menu and addon management UI has also been improved.
Mod enthusiasts could have issues tracking which mod they uninstalled previously but that should be dealt with as the game will now prompt them about missing addons, whether they unsubscribed or deleted them.
On top of that, an error message will pop up if the game fails to load due to a missing map used by an addon. Speaking of crashes, several have been fixed but Valve didn't specify which.
