A small patch to Half-Life: Alyx has added continuous turning, made adjustments to a key gesture for Windows VR users, and squashed a few bugs.
While continuous turning is never a default in VR games because it makes many people dizzy, there are those who find themselves unaffected by smooth turning and prefer to play that way for enhanced immersion. Though Half-Life: Alyx didn’t ship with a continuous turning option, Valve has added it in Update 1.1. With that addition they also renamed the ‘Quick Turn’ option to ‘Snap Turn’ to bring it in line with the common VRnacular, and added an option to disable controller turning entirely.
For Windows VR users, the update improves the ‘hand-over-mouth’ pose to work better with the WMR controllers. The pose turns out to be important later in the game.
Update 1.1 for Half-Life: Alyx also improved automated detection of quality settings for some hardware configurations, which means users should get better default recommendations for the game’s graphical settings.
Valve says it also fixed some sound bugs and “several crashes.”
As ever, if you’re having unexpected crashes in Half-Life: Alyx or performance issues, it’s always worth trying to update to your latest GPU driver. You can find NVIDIA drivers here and AMD drivers here, or check your respective GPU dashboard software for the latest driver.