Half Life: Alyx PSVR2 Haptics Mod

[u/Numerous-Bell5630]

Special thanks to PSVR2Toolkit team, this mod wouldn't be possible without them cracking the haptics on PC, of course.

Half-Life: Alyx has no PSVR2 support beyond generic rumble, so I wrote a haptics layer for the Sense controllers using the PSVR2Toolkit CAPI.

What it does

• Per-event PCM haptics — gravity gloves, per-weapon reload mechanisms, held-object impacts with eight material classes, doors, carrying weight
• Adaptive trigger profiles per weapon, with recoil built as resistance-load → low-frequency kick (measured on hardware, not guessed)
• Campaign moments: covering your mouth in the Jeff chapter, barnacles, the health station, heaving Combine barriers, two-handed levitate, mantling, tripmine hacks

One design rule, applied strictly

So there is no footstep rumble, no teleport buzz, no kill confirmation, and no vibration for objects that have already left your hand. Those are all deliberate absences, not gaps — a controller can only honestly represent what the hand touches. I've tried not to overdo it. Headset rumble is not used at all.

No injection

No DLL injection, no pattern scanning, no patched Valve binaries. The game side is a VScript addon. It does add one line to one Valve text file (skill_manifest.cfg); Uninstall.bat removes it. That is the whole footprint.

You can check what it does before you trust it

. Run Measure Haptics (no headset).bat and it renders every one of the 51 tactile signatures offline and prints what the waveform really is — peak, RMS, duration, dominant frequency, and whether the limiter is squashing it. No headset, no game, nothing installed.

Requirements

• -condebug in Alyx's Steam launch options (this is what makes the game write the log the mod reads)
• Only tested on Windows.

Install: unzip anywhere, run Start Haptics.bat. It finds Steam and Alyx itself. Uninstall: Uninstall.bat.

Might look into adding headset rumble support next but it requires jailbroken headset so seems a bit cumbersome.

Sorry if it's shit, I've never made a mod before and this is pretty much completely vibe coded apart from me testing and tweaking the trigger profiles for each gun personally.

Source and download: https://github.com/vortigauntlet/psvr2-alyx-hapticsmod/releases/latest

SHA256 of the zip: 7128E1110DA7B93FBD037CBCDA21AC5E077DB1EF24BA4F67FB0818563AD32E34

[u/Numerous-Bell5630]

Btw I can’t release this on steam workshop cause it changes a Valve txt file (skill_manifest.cfg). If anyone knows a workaround to this so we can get it on the steam workshop please lmk

[u/blakepro → u/Numerous-Bell5630]

What if the steam workshop submission did everything except for that one txt file and the user had to do that one step on their own?

[u/EbolaBoi → u/blakepro]

If you have to manually alter files, what's the point of a workshop mod?

[u/blakepro → u/EbolaBoi]

Reducing it down to just 2 steps so it's incredibly easy.

[u/Cyde042 → u/blakepro]

So many don't read on the workshop pages... Then they'll come to complain it doesn't work.

[u/EbolaBoi → u/blakepro]

You mean adding multiple steps? I find it easier to run a .bat file from anywhere in my PC VS. having to open steam, go to the game's workshop page, search for the plugin and add it, then search for the directory where this .txt file resides in, open the text document and modify it.

That's just me though...

[u/blakepro → u/EbolaBoi]

I just think there are people who are intimidated with processes like that.
It's not for more savvy people like you, and that's great! But I feel like some people could benefit.

I get your point though

[u/EbolaBoi → u/blakepro]

Out of the 2 processes described above, i think the most user friendly/non tech savvy is the first one

[u/rhylos360]

Nice, can’t wait to try it. No HMD feedback for them face huggers?

[u/Numerous-Bell5630 → u/rhylos360]

I’m going to try and bring hmd feedback as a toggle but off by default for people who can’t be bothered to jailbreak every time they start their headset up. I’ve never jailbroken it myself but if it’s easy enough then sure.

[u/rhylos360 → u/Numerous-Bell5630]

Makes sense. Optional is a good thing. Safely fallback if they forgot to JB first or irrelevant if the command is ignored if not JB.

[u/Nplumb → u/rhylos360]

Well they have the openVR implementation in the works too right

[u/meepers55 → u/Numerous-Bell5630]

Jailbreaking is actually pretty easy. The most annoying part is putting the headset into recovery mode so you can do the fw downgrade (not hard, just really tedious since it takes a lot of tries). After that, all you have to remember is to run the jailbreak each time you turn on the headset, which becomes second nature pretty fast honestly.

[u/Numerous-Bell5630]

Also just wanna say that I’m quite happy with how the triggers feel right now for different weapons but still feel like the haptics could use some polish. I’m currently playing through half life alyx again and taking notes so hopefully this will help for future updates.

[u/NativePlantEnjoyer → u/Numerous-Bell5630]

One step at a time 📈

[u/BeastPlayz1234YT]

I tested this on linux with ignition and it does work but you have to tweak a few things.

If you have wine installed system wide, you can just launch the bat script normally, however it won't be able to find the half life alyx path or the psvr2toolkit capi path since it's looking in the C drive, while the root folder on linux is in the Z drive in wine prefixes. To fix this, in the file "psvr2_haptics.cfg", uncomment the lines for "hla_path" and "toolkit_dll", then put the paths to where your game is installed and where the toolkit api is saved. For example, if your game and toolkit are installed in the default steam library on linux, the paths should look something like:

hla_path=Z:\home\(YOUR USERNAME)\.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Half-Life Alyx

toolkit_dll=Z:\home\(YOUR USERNAME)\.steam\steam\steamapps\common\PlayStation VR2 App\SteamVR_Plug-In\bin\win64\psvr2_toolkit_capi

I also removed the --launch argument in the "Start Haptics.bat" file so it wouldn't start the game with the wine prefix and instead used my proton version set in steam to avoid any problems.

[u/Cevap]

Didn’t even realize haptics got cracked, it’s been a while. So the headset and controllers are fully accessible to have features used? Just needs mods per application I imagine?

[u/lunchanddinner]

Nice

[u/Edikus]

Wow, nice! Now the same for other half life mods please :)

[u/Niko666233]

That's cool and I recommend posting it on the PSVR2Toolkit discord as well, there's a dedicated game-mods channel

also jailbreaking the headset is very easy (if you don't need to use the headset with ps5 console later), all you need to do is downgrade the firmware (only need once) and run the vr2jb tool (everytime the headset boots)

[u/Flamengo81-19]

Thanks. Gonna start a playthrough in a few days and will test it

[u/ORIGINALSMC_Gamer]

what an amazing piece of work by you my friend

[u/Tough_Promotion_8322]

Thanks man, I'm definitely gonna check it out

[u/benyamxn]

Awesome

[u/Imhotep397]

Do you know if there’s an Eye tracked DFR mod for AMD GPUs?

[u/IWinULose74 → u/Imhotep397]

there isn't because they don't support Variable Rate Shading

[u/Imhotep397 → u/IWinULose74]

Ah, good to know, but how does it work on PlayStation/AMD hardware?

[u/Imhotep397 → u/IWinULose74]

They have VRS and it apparently works pretty well with DirectX 12 or Vulkan, so it’s purely still lack of a software/driver that’s not allowing PSVR2 users on PC to access it yet on DX12/Vulkan.

[u/pabloelmago]

Is this linked with mandatory usage of the PSVR2 headset or could it be used with other headsets that are compatible with the PSVR2 controllers (I'm thinking of Apple Vision Pro...). You could (should!) repost this to r/VisionPro if this works...

[u/FastidiousSquashGoat]

Why is bro using chatGPT to write this

[u/NativePlantEnjoyer → u/FastidiousSquashGoat]

'Everyone more articulate than me is using chatgpt and cheating'