Half-Life 3 / HLX — Development & Features Database

A structured record of what Tyler McVicker’s HLX coverage claims about Valve’s unannounced Half-Life project, how those claims changed, and how they compare with the Miro research board.

Coverage: 31 videos, 2024-08-04 → 2026-10-22, plus the Miro export. Extracted claims: 610 events across 31 per-video summaries. Official release date: none. Valve has never announced Half-Life 3, HLX, or a launch window. Latest state: as of HLX Files #20 (2026-10-22), Tyler expects no HLX announcement in 2026.

The single most important caveat: “HLX” is a datamined project codename. Tyler identifies HLX as Half-Life 3, and the accumulated evidence is strongly Half-Life-shaped, but Valve has never publicly confirmed that HLX is Half-Life 3. Statements below distinguish Tyler’s identification from official confirmation.

1. Read me first

This database is organized around four different kinds of statement, which are easy to blur together:

Confidence labels in the per-video summaries:

• Fact — directly supported by a named primary artifact, official statement, datamine, store page, court document, etc.
• Speculation — Tyler’s inference, expectation, or opinion.
• Mixed — some parts evidenced, others inferred; the summary explains which.
• Unclear — the basis is not made clear.

“Fact” does not mean “independently verified by this project.” Many “Fact” entries are checkable artifacts that were not re-checked here. The verification field in each summary is the audit trail: verified, needs follow-up, unverified, or a partial combination.

Start here:

• claims.md — the detailed evidence trail for 19 contested claims (C01–C19), with dated position histories.
• appendix-video-stats.md — per-video event counts, evidence mix and coverage gaps.
• sources/README.md — what is archived, what cannot be, and how the receipts work.

2. Status snapshot

The shortest possible history

1. 1999–2017: several different “Half-Life 3” projects, including the Episode Three trilogy, a 2013–2015 attempt, and Epistle 3. None is HLX.
2. 2019–2020: Half-Life: Alyx retcons Eli’s death; Valve finishes Alyx; HLX takes shape and appears in public Source 2 builds by September–October 2020.
3. 2020–2024: HLX grows through shared Source 2 engine work; the codename leaks; dataminers find Half-Life-specific VData, NPC, vehicle, and tooling strings.
4. 2024–2025: Tyler argues HLX is a full game and enters late production; external playtests are reported; a 2025 announcement is expected and then missed.
5. 2026: The project is still in development after a semi-reboot. Valve says HLX is not VR. Tyler’s latest prediction is no announcement in 2026.

3. Source inventory (31 videos)

All 31 summaries are listed chronologically. Dates are exact YouTube upload dates from video-metadata.tsv. The YouTube ID links to the original video; the title links to the local summary.

Gaps in the set: HLX Files #3 and #13, and Every Last Detail Ep3, are not present among the 31 source files. The numbering gaps are source gaps, not missing summaries. Ep4’s spoiler content follows Ep2; Ep5’s AI content follows Ep4.

Video count by series label: 19 HLX Files episodes, 6 Every Last Detail episodes, 1 Gaiden, 4 hardware one-offs, and 1 retrospective = 31. The four hardware one-offs are the 2026-03-15, 2026-06-16, 2026-09-04 and 2026-09-14 videos.

4. Timeline

4.1 Before the discovery era (1999–2020)

This is the documented background, not the HLX datamine story. The important point is that “Half-Life 3” has named several different projects.

Project start is not settled. Miro #1182 says HLX “started taking shape in late 2019,” while Ep1 says it was greenlit around completion of Alyx’s ending (around the March 2020 release) and existed before 2020-09-22. These are compatible if “taking shape” precedes formal greenlight, but no public artifact dates the decision.

4.2 Discovery timeline (2024–2026)

Each entry is when Tyler reported the material, not necessarily when the underlying code was written. Tyler repeatedly warns that strings can predate their public appearance by years.

2024 — HLX becomes a public thesis

• 2024-08-04 — HLX Files #0. Tyler argues HLX is a full non-VR Half-Life game, not an engine feature or save format. Introduces the “Project White Sands” casting leak, a 2020–2023 former-employee résumé, HEV/offworld/feral-manhack strings, and the claim that HLX is Half-Life 3. He also reassigns voxel destruction, voxel hair, vehicle simulation and Xen creatures away from Deadlock — a correction that later splits again when the voxel claim is walked back. White Sands is corrected much later. → summary
• 2024-08-25 — HLX Files #1. A fresh Half-Life 2 testing branch, a secondhand “two non-CS/non-Deadlock games” claim, Deckard still in production, and Valve removing/renaming strings Tyler had reported (Xen gorilla removed; Houndeye → “NPC monster”; HEV suits → “Burbank suits”). → summary
• 2024-09-12 — HLX Files #2. Valve’s bandwidth across Deadlock/CS2/hardware; the Hopoo Games acqui-hire; the first explicit “wide-linear, not open world” formulation. Tyler also claims voxel-based destructible environments — a claim #9 later walks back and Ep1 debunks. → summary
• 2024-10-16 — HLX Files #4. Surface attributes return with flash points and heat conductivity; a purported 2013–2015 “posthuman” Gordon account; a 2021–2023 hiring wave; LinkedIn profiles describing unannounced-project work. → summary
• 2024-11-22 — HLX Files #5. Roughly 21 .h files from Valve’s cancelled voxel project “Arty” ship inside a Dota 2 update; NPC AI, level-streaming and physics changes; a new Point Orient entity. Tyler argues Arty’s voxel destruction, vehicle, buoyancy, fluid and multiplayer systems are being ported into HLX, and says HLX “is going to have voxel based destruction in some form.” #9 later reassigns the voxel systems to a different project, and Ep1 debunks the HLX use entirely. → summary
• 2024-12-11 — HLX Files #6. The simulation dossier: Pulse scripting, surface flammability, fluids, wind, material deformation, gravity/underwater/space movement, NPC damage and mood. Frames it as an emergent-physics successor to the E3 2003 demos. → summary
• 2024-12-20 — Gaiden: Fremont. A hardware-only episode. Public Valve GitLab mirrors expose an AMD “Lilac” APU, prototype board F7F, HDMI-A, and HDMI CEC for a device codenamed Fremont. No HLX content. → summary
• 2024-12-31 — Mike Shapiro’s G-Man post. The voice actor posts in character after roughly four years of silence, prompting the next episode. Reported in #7. → summary

2025 — late-production expectations, then a missed window

• 2025-01-01 — HLX Files #7. Tyler reads the G-Man post as a hook, not a date. Relays a colleague’s report that Valve has entered external playtesting, predicts an announcement by end-2025 if testing goes smoothly, slipping to 2026 if core gameplay/story/art need rework. → summary
• 2025-01-31 — HLX Files #8. Rejects the community “ARG 197” theory and argues Valve no longer runs ARGs; restates that HLX is very late and already being tested by third parties, without new evidence. → summary
• 2025-02-26 — HLX Files #9. Argues HLX has passed the maximum-risk holiday window and is in optimization/polish. The ten-hour Dota 2 datamine is mostly small end-of-production changes; the “HLX FSR3” string appears in the 2025-02-25 Deadlock update. Tyler also walks back the voxel-destruction association, saying those systems appear to belong to a different project. → summary
• 2025-04-08 — The Rise, Fall & Rebirth. The 1999–2024 retrospective: halflife3.com, Episode Three, the 2013 Jira leak, the 2015 project, Epistle 3, Alyx, and the HLX datamine era. The best single source for the pre-HLX history. → summary
• 2025-04-19 — HLX Files #10. Employee hints, a Ben Burbank talk touching gravity and NPC communication, the Deadlock HEV-suit datamine, and Morasky’s denial of Deadlock involvement. No new build numbers or assets. → summary
• 2025-05-28 — HLX Files #11. A from-scratch save/load rewrite, vehicle transport and meshlet attributes, electrical/elemental simulation, multithreaded physics, asynchronous AI, crouch/crawl states, expanded sight/sound AI, and a wind/fan system. Tyler calls it late-cycle polish. → summary
• 2025-07-31 — HLX Files #12. A large CS2 backend update replaces the animation system and rewrites AI scripts, FGD definitions and localization tokens. Tyler reads plain-language tooltips as public-facing polish, while qualifying that this is Valve. → summary
• 2025-09-03 — HLX Files #14. New HLX liquid simulation with oil/water types, an ability-positioning entity, a destructible-part event tied to enemy AI, vehicle entity changes including a removed jeep, and a new-vs-legacy save toggle. Also the claim that August 2025 was Valve’s busiest build month in about a decade. → summary
• 2025-10-29 — HLX Files #15. Destructible hit groups, destruction-death behaviour, liquid spills and sound absorption are read as late-stage refactoring. Tyler debunks the 4chan concept art as AI-generated, the Mike Shapiro “Valve opening” story as invented, and a Half-Life 2 SteamDB changelist as a mod update; relays a trailer-work rumour. → summary
• 2025-11-12 — Valve announces Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller. The Steam Frame team states HLX is not a VR game. This is the clearest official statement in the corpus. → Ep1 summary · HLX #16 summary
• 2025-11-18 — HLX Files #16. Hardware announcement coverage, the 4chan art and 18 November date debunked, CS2 string leaks, and a restated 2025 announcement expectation (with a possible slip to January/February). Tyler retracts the November 18 interpretation of the previous episode’s trailer-work rumour, and Jason Schreier clarifies his 2025 prediction was not inside information. → summary
• 2025-12 — Dota 2 adds Animgraph 2 authoring tools. Creation, mesh-to-skeleton and sequence-to-clip conversion, Model Doc resource lists, and a Hammer AG2 identifier field. Reported later in Ep6. → summary

2026 — the post-2025 window

• 2026-01-29 — Every Last Detail Ep1. The foundational chronology: shared Source 2, patch-diffing method, the 2019 Alyx pivot, VData, Sandbox, the first HLX string, the 2021 codename leak, Aperture Desk Job, vehicles, hiring, and the full debunk section (open world, VR, voxels, day/night). Also corrects White Sands to Deadlock. → summary
• 2026-02-02 — HLX Files #17. Valve returns from winter break with large CS2/Deadlock/Dota updates, but the HLX material is almost entirely refactoring into VData and Animgraph 2. No milestone, date, or asset. Tyler calls it a long polish pass. → summary
• 2026-02-05 — Deadlock update names HLX in a smoke shader. Particle-based volumetric smoke explicitly references HLX for refraction. Reported in #18. → summary
• 2026-03-01 — Every Last Detail Ep2. Gameplay dossier: HEV suit sounds, gravity gun FGD entries, dynamic fire, buoyancy, spills, waterfall helpers, fans, VData weapons, spawn-volume variation, level streaming, breakable props, gravity shifting, and the full modular vehicle schema. → summary
• 2026-03-08 — Every Last Detail Ep4. Enemy/location catalogue: Houndeye, Xen Gorilla, Xen Jellyfish, Xen Swooper, Feral Manhack, Kush Child, Howler, Flitter, Harvest Man Baby, Combine Charger, snipers, penta tank, off-world workers, Off-World Storks, the “fly guy,” and Xen/off-world/foundry locations. Spoiler warning. → summary
• 2026-03-15 — The Valve Hardware Nightmare. Traces Valve’s hardware messaging through the February 3 AMD call, the February 4 FAQ, the edited March 6 Steam Year in Review post, and GDC 2026. RAM/storage shortages and tariffs push the launch to a vague 2026. Hardware context, not an HLX update. → summary
• 2026-03-19 — CS2 reserves become clips. Miro #0438 records a CS2 parameter change: reserve ammo is treated as clips. It uses a weapon-VData concept also seen in HLX, but its relevance to HLX is unconfirmed and it is not reported in the videos. Miro only.
• 2026-03-23 — Every Last Detail Ep5. NPC AI dossier: navigation spaces, moods, four flinch/damage types (burn, sonic primary, sonic secondary, Newton), destructible body parts, modifiers, designer tuning, base NPC VData, abilities, schedules, squads, difficulty scaling, last-known/last-seen tracking, and deliberate misses. → summary
• 2026-03-24 — Dota 2 back-end dump. Tyler calls it the largest HLX-adjacent Source 2 dump he has seen: tool icons, Fountain screenplay tool, GPU particle lighting and particle ray-tracing collision marked HLX-exclusive, expanded vehicles/props/companions. Reported in #18. → summary
• 2026-03-31 — HLX Files #18. The Deadlock smoke shader, the Dota back-end dump, per-category HLX asset labels, choreography volume, Wobbler helper, FGD prop-physics/nav commands, and the argument that choreography tooling does not mean the game is early. → summary
• 2026-04-01 — CS2 switches everything to AG2. Miro #0857: CS2 uses Animgraph 2 for everything from the 2026-04-01 update; AG1 is completely removed. This resolves Ep6’s open question about player models. Miro only, after Ep6’s recording.
• 2026-04-16 — Every Last Detail Ep6. Technology dossier: hair strands, VData, procedural audio, Speech Graphics lip-sync, TAA/upscalers, weather/wind, ray tracing, AI LOD, distance fields, mesh shaders, Pulse, and Animgraph 2 architecture/shipping. → summary
• 2026-04-25 — Every Last Detail Ep7. A compilation of Valve’s own published statements from 2020–2024: Wolpaw, Walker, Coomer, Newell, Morasky, the Noclip documentary, and anonymized post-2020 résumés. Corroborates intent, not a release. → summary
• 2026-06-16 — Steam Hardware Is Weeks Away. Steam client/SteamVR datamines, Canadian radio certification, native Android VR builds, and US customs imports point to imminent pre-orders. An anonymous June 12 claim says prices/reservations between June 22–30; Tyler expects early-July sales. Explicitly separates this from HLX. → summary
• 2026-06-26 — Dota 2 “Dark Carnival” ships. The update supplies the HLX branch strings that dominate #19: subpixel AA, GPU particles, meshlets, MIDI beat system, GPU-driven Hammer audio, water material two, deformable geometry, ragdoll mass/buoyancy, zero-gravity/no-collision attributes, NPC vehicle animation events, choreography strafe modes, and new tool icons. → summary
• 2026-07-06 — HLX Files #19. The broadest 2026 state-of-play: Dark Carnival strings, upscaling beyond FSR, HLX audio/water/NPC/physics/tooling, the whole-floor claim, the abandoned chapter-rebuild explanation, and the inference that HLX was decoupled from the Steam Machine minimum spec. No official statement or date. → summary
• 2026-09-04 — The Steam Frame Situation is a Nightmare. Tyler traces the headset from rumoured summer-2025 announcement timing to a November 2025 announcement and an expected September 14, 2026 sale, with no confirmed price. VR developers had a late-July software deadline; review units arrived August 24. Alyx’s standalone port is bundled, unrelated to HLX. → summary
• 2026-09-14 — Steam Frame price and Alyx performance. Official US prices: \(1,059 (256 GB) and \)1,299 (1 TB); power supply \(29, accessory kits \)59/$49. Digital Foundry reports Half-Life: Alyx at native 36 FPS reprojected to 72 on the standalone headset. No HLX date. → summary
• 2026-09-22 — CS2 nav-generation check. Miro #0300 records a CS2 update function that checks for a specific entity when generating nav. Miro only; after #19, before #20.
• 2026-10-21 — Valve says “HLX” out loud. At the Game Sound Convention in Burbank, a panelist says Deadlock has its own HDR version and “HLX has its own version.” Tyler presents it as the first direct public utterance of the codename. → HLX #20 summary
• 2026-10-22 — HLX Files #20. The latest datamine pass over CS2 Rush Hour, Deadlock City Never Sleeps and Dota 2 Inside the Trove of Terror: “HLX cover preview,” “HLX Basic Projectile Emitter Helper,” Ranger Trap Helper, flyer flanking AI, threshold tips, gunship bomb drops, cloth/fire rules, precipitation audio, SFM2 Gen Biped. Tyler predicts no HLX announcement in 2026. → summary

5. Thematic dossiers

These are cross-video syntheses. Each claim inherits the confidence of its underlying events; “expected to appear in HLX” is Tyler’s framing unless stated otherwise.

5.1 Project identity and production history

What is solid: HLX is a real internal codename present in public Source 2 builds since at least October 2020. It was in production before the September 22, 2020 Sandbox builds. The codename became public knowledge on March 25, 2021. A 2020–2023 former-employee résumé describes work on an unannounced title. Valve hired heavily from other studios in 2021–2023 and acqui-hired most of Hopoo Games in 2024.

What is Tyler’s identification: that HLX is Half-Life 3. The supporting pattern is Half-Life-specific: HEV-suit sound references, “offworld,” Xen fauna, feral manhacks, Half-Life-style weapon buckets, a gravity gun, an HEV-suited protagonist, and Half-Life Hammer tooling. None of that is a Valve announcement.

What is secondhand: external playtesting (Gabe Follower, December 2024), the “entire floor” claim (2026), the trailer-work rumour (2025), and the semi-reboot/chapter-rebuild story. Tyler hedges each.

What changed: the project is not the 2013–2015 “posthuman” Half-Life 3 or the 2015 Source 2 build. The Final Hours confirms a 2015 Half-Life 3, but Tyler treats HLX as a later project that took shape around the Alyx ending. He also corrects the idea that the 2018 small team in The Final Hours was HLX: that line runs Citadel → Neon Prime → Shadow Line → Deadlock. Separately, his own 2024 voxel-destruction claim (#2/#5) was walked back in #9 and debunked in Ep1.

Current production read: Tyler’s latest position is intensive development/polish, not pre-production. The 2025 announcement window was missed. #19 says the project survived a semi-reboot and that his earlier chapter-rebuild explanation no longer holds; he does not state the replacement claim.

Links: Ep1 · Rise/Fall · Ep7 · #19

5.2 Engine, rendering, audio and tools

Shared-engine method. Valve does not fork Source 2 per title. Features developed for Dota 2, CS2, Deadlock or HLX appear across the others, so patch-diffing one game can expose another project’s needs. This is the methodological premise of the whole series; Tyler states it as fact, and the cross-game strings support it.

VData. A designer-driven data system that lets gameplay values and content definitions change without recompiling code. HLX’s weapons, NPCs, crates, crate items, grenades, vehicles, liquids, precipitation and map entities are all described as VData-driven. VData existed by 2020-08-12 and first appeared publicly on 2020-09-04. Its presence is verified; the claim that every listed HLX category uses it is Tyler’s reading of the schemas.

Animgraph 2. The replacement animation system: .vnmgraph graphs, .vnmclip clips, .vnmskel skeletons, .vnmvar variations (later deprecated), bone LOD, additive clips, legacy animevents, and networked efficiency. Deadlock moved its heroes to AG2; CS2 shipped AG2 for viewmodels on 2025-07-29 and, per Miro #0857, uses AG2 for everything from 2026-04-01 with AG1 removed. Ep6 found early HLX AG2 use in nav-link transitions, but HLX-specific AG2 deployment remains inferred.

Rendering. TAA and upscaling (initially FSR3, later more than FSR), ray-tracing support reported in Source 2 in late 2025, mesh shaders and meshlets, distance fields for AO/shadows/reflections, hair-strand simulation, subpixel anti-aliasing marked HLX-exclusive, GPU-driven particles, volumetric smoke with HLX refraction, dynamic shadow/RTP proxy work, and “only render in effects water pass” flags. The features are observable; which ones ship in HLX is not.

Audio. Procedural runtime sound generation, sound containers/stacks, a MIDI beat system, GPU-driven Hammer audio, precipitation audio operators that respond to surface and shelter, Speech Graphics lip-sync middleware, vehicle wind/RPM synthesis, and tape-player-style containers. HLX-specific sound containers and a test stack date to 2024-02-07.

Tools. Hammer helpers named directly for HLX include “HLX cover preview” and “HLX Basic Projectile Emitter Helper.” The same datamine adds Ranger Trap Helper and Wobbler, whose project attribution is not confirmed, plus a projectile/cover/trap toolset, a “Half-Life Hammer” feature set, surface-graph rebuilding, the Fountain screenplay format, Pulse visual scripting, Model Doc additions, and SFM2’s “Gen Biped” bone classification. Tyler reads plain-language tooltips and per-category asset icons as public-facing polish.

Save/load and streaming. A from-scratch save/load rewrite (#11), a new-versus-legacy save-version enum (#14), commentary-system save/load fixes (#18), and work-in-progress level streaming. Miro adds binary KV3 saves with a legacy path and a debug text export (#0387/#0390). The save rewrite is one of the stronger “late production” signals, but it is engine-level.

Links: Ep6 · #19 · #20 · #18

5.3 Simulation, physics and destruction

Fire and heat. Surface attributes carry flash point and heat conductivity. NPCs ignite after enough exposure above their flash point (ai_time_to_ignite, default 0.3). Held objects have ignition temperature and hold-time rules. Fire interacts with oil and other liquid properties. This is a generalized material-reaction system, not a scripted set piece.

Water and liquids. Source 2 adds buoyancy and drowning, liquid spills that spawn puddles, oil and water liquid types, waterfall helpers, a second water material, and an “only render in effects water pass” flag. HLX-specific liquid-property containers date to 2025-08-18.

Wind and weather. Fans with three particle types, wind affecting fog/grass/trees/hair/cloth, precipitation moved to VData, precipitation audio that changes with surface and shelter, and asynchronous particle wind simulation.

Physics and destruction. Multithreaded physics, deformable geometry, ragdoll mass and buoyancy scales, zero-gravity and no-collision attributes, destructible hit groups, destruction-death behavior, radius damage for destructible parts, breakable props that spawn sub-props and contained items, and NPC body-part destruction. Tyler compares the body-part system to Doom Eternal weak points but marks the combat application as inference.

Gravity shifting. Player and NPC traversal of gravity-bent spaces: walking on ceilings, warping across surfaces, orbiting. Compared to Super Mario Galaxy and Prey (2006). The tech is datamined; combat integration is inferred.

Vehicles. A modular, VData-driven, physics-based system: multiple passengers, passenger weapons, speed-dependent FOV, tire friction, suspension, wheel drag, surface-dependent handling, rollover/flip recovery, entry/exit rules, hit groups for occupants, and controller assists. Miro adds passenger enter/exit animations, passenger roles, and destructible car parts (#0410–#0544). The first schema leaked in a 2022-06-09 Dota 2 update and was removed in later updates; Miro #1487 says it changed again in November 2022 and March 2023 with CWheeledPhysicsVehicleVData, and Miro #0378 describes a sophisticated system in base FGDs. The “vehicles were deleted” shorthand is therefore too strong: the early accidental exposure was removed, but the system continued to evolve.

Links: Ep2 · Ep6 · #11 · #14

5.4 Gameplay, weapons and world structure

HEV suit and gravity gun. HEV sound effects (legacy pickup, plug detachment, a 1–9 container test) are in the engine; Tyler expects the suit to appear. Gravity-gun-related FGD entries were updated in 2021 and removed later; Tyler treats the gravity gun as likely but not confirmed as a usable weapon. The “Burbank suits” rename in #1 shows Valve actively scrubbing Half-Life names.

Weapons. Weapons were rewritten around VData. Flags support exhaustible/one-use weapons and weapons whose ammo never refills. Sound events cover primary, secondary, melee and special actions. HUD bucket positions follow a Half-Life-style weapon selector. Tyler explicitly says the one-use flag does not mean all HLX weapons are single-use.

World structure. Tyler rejects open world on technical grounds: Hammer’s 16,384-unit walk limit, baked lightmaps as the core lighting model, no traditional global illumination, and the scale of Deadlock/Neon Prime lighting. His description is “open linear,” comparable to Doom 2016’s Foundry or open-ended Uncharted 4 levels. Procedural spawn volumes and a director-style system may add variation inside those spaces, echoing the cancelled 2013 attempt.

Traversal and interaction. Physics-object pickup matches Half-Life 2; gravity shifting, vehicles, crouch/crawl states, level streaming, breakable props, and dynamic prop pickup/drop by NPCs round out the movement/interaction picture.

Multiplayer. Tyler understands HLX as single-player “as far as we understand.” The co-op question is unresolved; the corpus contains no verified multiplayer evidence.

Links: Ep2 · Ep1 · #19

5.5 NPC AI and combat

Navigation. NPC nav spaces/grids, moving platforms, gravity-shifted spaces, crawling, expanded movement capabilities, nav-link variants that can reference AG2 graphs, and AI level-of-detail.

Perception and mood. Mood files and a mood system; expanded sight-and-sound reactions; “AI volumetric events” replacing the older AI sound entity; last-known versus last-seen enemy tracking; deliberate misses; difficulty-scaled damage from all sources.

Damage and body parts. Four additional flinch/damage types: burn, sonic primary, sonic secondary and Newton. Destructible body parts generalize Alyx’s limited limb destruction into a full weak-point/dismemberment system, with hit-group damage and radius damage for parts. Tyler does not know which weapons use the new damage types.

Abilities, schedules and squads. A base NPC VData schema, abilities with proximity/range/cooldown/priority constraints, ability sound maps, NPC schedules, a rewritten squad system with squad slots, ally health regeneration, dynamic throwing/catching, and dropping/picking up/destroying abilities. Tyler compares the schedule ambition to Red Dead Redemption 2 but cannot confirm the task contents.

Tactical behaviours. Designer-placed Combine Charger shield deployments (absent in Alyx), dynamic sniper positions, signal/fallback hint nodes, NPC-run holdouts, dynamic physics-prop pickup/drop-off, a “flyer” flanking AI, a “threshold” tactical tip, and the “HLX cover preview” system with distance, peek, narrowness and model-size parameters. The cover system is a modernization of Half-Life 2’s node-based cover.

Caveat. Most of this is schema and tooling. It shows what the engine can express, not what shipped encounters use.

Links: Ep5 · Ep4 · #20

5.6 Enemies, factions and locations (spoilers)

This is the weakest evidentiary layer: names come from strings, icons, hint nodes and entity entries, not from models, maps or trailers. Treat the table as a candidate roster, not a confirmed bestiary.

Locations. Xen, the Combine off-world, and a foundry are framed as likely visitable places. The evidence is environmental/entity naming, not map files. Tyler marks all three location conclusions as speculative. The foundry may connect to the cut cremator-factory content, but that is inference.

Cut/renamed content. Valve removed the Xen Gorilla string and renamed Houndeye and HEV suit references after Tyler’s first reports. That is evidence of scrubbing, not necessarily cancellation.

Links: Ep4 · Ep1 · Ep5

5.7 Story and Valve’s public statements

The post-Alyx setup. The Final Hours documents the January 2019 decision to have the G-Man save Eli at the end of Episode Two. Alyx’s post-credits scene shows Eli alive, Alyx gone, and Gordon receiving the crowbar. Sean Vanaman and Erik Wolpaw describe it as a deliberate promise of more. That is verified scene content. What happens next is unknown.

What Valve said, 2020–2024:

• Robin Walker (March 2020): a Half-Life 3 team would have to answer “what is the big technological leap,” and “I don’t think there’s going to be another 13 years until the next one.”
• Erik Wolpaw (March 2020): “I would love to do more,” and later “I’m ready to sign up for the next one.”
• Gabe Newell (October 2020): the Alyx team is “incredibly fired up.”
• Gabe Newell (July 2021): the Alyx ending is “the right progression.”
• Greg Coomer (March 2022): “There are multiple games in development right now at Valve.”
• Greg Coomer (August 2022): “We love that world and we want to continue to explore the Half-Life universe.”
• Mike Morasky (September 2024): a recent project he “can’t talk about.”
• Noclip’s 2024 Half-Life 2 documentary: Gabe Newell frames Half-Life as a vehicle for innovation; Brian Jacobson discusses the team’s willingness to rebuild.

These quotes establish intent and a live Half-Life universe. They do not name HLX, confirm a sequel, or date it. Morasky’s project is unidentified.

What is not established: whether HLX continues directly from the Alyx ending, whether Alyx is rescued, Gordon’s role, the G-Man’s goal, or any chapter structure. Fan scenarios in the corpus — an adult Alyx and Gordon’s child, or an arctic Borealis search — are speculation and should not be repeated as leaks.

Barney Calhoun. Tyler’s only recurring story claim is that Barney is “likely a part of it” (#9, 2025-02-26), stated while recapping what HLX “appears” to be; he cites no model, voice line, script, or casting evidence. In #8 (2025-01-31) he closed with a rhetorical aside that the player would “probably be walking around part of Half-Life 3 with Barney Calhoun as your sidekick because Alyx Vance is captured,” offered with no supporting detail and never repeated. Treat the first as low-confidence speculation and the second as an unelaborated aside, not a leak. No Barney-named model, VO file, or script is reported anywhere in the HLX material summarized here, but that is weak negative evidence only: Valve scrubbed HEV suit strings in the same period, so missing names prove little.

Links: Ep7 · Ep1 · Rise/Fall

5.8 Release timing and marketing

There is no official release date, window, or announcement date anywhere in the corpus.

Marketing/hoax history. The “ARG 197” theory was rejected in #8. The 4chan concept art was judged AI-generated (#15/#16). The Mike Shapiro “Valve opening” Reddit story was called invented (#15). The circulating 18 November announcement date was false (#16). Game Awards 2025 did not host a reveal (#15). The Raising the Bar reprint was treated as a possible timing signal, then did not materialize (#15/#17). The Dbrand Half-Life 3 hint drew a reported Valve reaction but no announcement (#19). Tyler’s consistent rule: only a Valve announcement counts.

Links: #7 · #9 · #16 · #19 · #20

5.9 Hardware and platform context

This is not HLX evidence, but it shapes the release environment and repeatedly intersects the coverage.

• 2024-12-20: “Fremont” datamine points to a SteamOS living-room console with an AMD “Lilac” APU, prototype board F7F, HDMI-A and HDMI CEC. Tyler’s console conclusion is an assumption; the identifiers are factual.
• 2025-11-12: Valve announces Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller for 2026. The Steam Frame team says HLX is not VR.
• 2026-02–03: RAM/storage shortages and tariffs push pre-orders from “early 2026” to a vague “2026.” GDC 2026 reaffirms all three products for 2026.
• 2026-06: Steam client/SteamVR datamines, Canadian radio certification, native Android VR builds, and customs imports suggest imminent pre-orders. Tyler expects early-July sales; the actual timing slips again.
• 2026-09-04: Steam Frame expected on sale September 14, with no confirmed price. Review units arrive August 24; VR developers had a late-July software deadline.
• 2026-09-14: Official US prices: $1,059 (256 GB) and $1,299 (1 TB); power supply \(29; accessory kits \)59/$49. Half-Life: Alyx runs at native 36 FPS reprojected to 72 on the standalone headset and is bundled free. No release date for the port; reviewers already have it.

HLX-specific platform conclusions: none confirmed. Tyler treats HLX as a PC/Steam title and once expected it to be the Steam Machine’s flagship, but Ep1 labels that “pattern-based expectation rather than evidence.” #19 theorizes that Valve decoupled HLX from the Steam Machine minimum spec because the machine is weaker than a base PS5 and will miss its saturation target. That is speculation.

Links: Gaiden · Hardware Nightmare · Steam Hardware · Frame Nightmare · Frame Price

5.10 Casting, hiring and business context

• Casting codenames. Valve uses random cover names for casting. “Project White Sands” is a Deadlock voice-actor codename, not HLX, per Ep1 and Miro #0849/#0850. Tyler compares it to “Hot Dog” (Left 4 Dead VR/3) and “jameroquai” (Alyx); those comparisons are unverified.
• Résumés. A former Valve employee’s résumé describes 2020–2023 level design, lighting, combat encounters and puzzles on an unannounced title. Ep7 adds anonymized post-2020 résumés covering level design, lighting, prototypes, AI, player mechanics, puzzles, and physics-engine work; one veteran returned after 2004–2017. These are LinkedIn/resumé claims, not Valve confirmations.
• Hiring. Valve hired heavily from id Software, Sucker Punch, MachineGames, Insomniac and Naughty Dog in 2021–2023 (Mixed), and acqui-hired most of Hopoo Games in 2024 after cancelling its “Snail” project (Fact for the acqui-hire; HLX assignment is speculation).
• Production signals. External playtests (December 2024, secondhand); a “very late stage” claim (January 2025); the “entire floor” claim and semi-reboot survival (July 2026); a reported commit-number surge and AI use at Valve since 2024 (#20). None is an official milestone.
• Privacy. The original White Sands résumé and unnamed employee profiles are not reproduced here, deliberately. Public credited performers are named only where the published source names them; do not identify private individuals from résumés or casting documents.

Links: HLX #0 · Ep1 · Ep7 · #2

6. Claim ledger: corrected, superseded and unresolved

This table is the quickest way to avoid repeating an outdated claim. “Earlier” is not necessarily wrong at the time; “current” is the latest iteration in the corpus. The full evidence trail for each ID is in claims.md; the two files share the same C-IDs.

7. Miro cross-check

Source: 1,920 rows from the Miro research board, summarized in miro-report.md.

What the board contains: 1,078 notes, 713 labels, 63 dated notes, 35 file paths, 24 provenance notes, and a handful of date/number and path/fragment items. Top keyword clusters are AI (205), NPC (167), vehicle (144), VData (105), animation (103), HLX (65), Deadlock (63), physics (59), sound (48), entities (44), nav (42), weapons (40), shaders (38), and particles (32).

Important limitation: the Miro board is a research mural, not an independent source. Many notes are Tyler’s/community evidence boards; some are later than the videos; image metadata can be wrong or ambiguous. It is best used to corroborate, expand, and date-check, not to “prove” a claim.

7.1 Where Miro agrees with the videos

7.2 Discrepancies and nuances

7.3 Miro-only details worth carrying forward

These do not appear in the 31 video summaries (or appear only in passing) and are flagged as Miro-sourced:

• Vehicle passenger detail: passenger roles, allowed-passenger lists, enter/exit animations, PassengerEntered/PassengerExited outputs, procedural vehicle sounds, destructible car parts, suspension/wheel-drag parameters (#0410–#0544).
• Vehicle modifier states: MODIFIER_STATE_ENTERING_VEHICLE and EXITING_VEHICLE added September–October 2024, explicitly “not meant for Deadlock” because Deadlock has no vehicles (#0188).
• Weapon/ammo detail: reserve ammo treated as clips in CS2 from 2026-03-19 (#0438).
• Audio detail: a tape-player sound container added 2025-11-10 (#1041).
• Rendering detail: VS_MS_RTX mesh-shader/RTX path in Deadlock from 2025-05-09 (#0992).
• Nav detail: a CS2 function that checks a specific entity during nav generation, 2026-09-22 (#0300).
• Engine cadence: the latest Source 2 engine update at the time of the board’s last edit was Dota 2 “Dark Carnival,” 2026-06-26 19:55:51 UTC (#0083).
• AG2 nav-link variants: CNavLinkMovementVData can reference AG2 graphs; AG2 has been an HLX concept since 2020 (#0213, #0867).

Bottom line: Miro strengthens the technical chronology and supplies more granular vehicle/audio/rendering detail, but it does not independently confirm HLX = Half-Life 3 or a release date. Its most useful correction is the White Sands/Deadlock identification; its most important internal inconsistency is the VData date wording.

8. Verification audit and open questions

8.1 Verification counts

Every event in events.tsv carries a verification field. Across 610 events:

Confidence distribution: Fact 232 (including two hybrid Fact-first labels), Mixed 232, Speculation 121, Unclear 25. “Fact” is not the same as “verified”: 230+ events are labeled Fact because a primary artifact is named, but many of those artifacts were not independently re-checked for this database. Per-video breakdown: appendix-video-stats.md §2.

Category distribution:

8.2 What is genuinely well-supported

• The existence of the HLX codename in public Source 2 builds from 2020-10-09 onward.
• The first public reference (box_creature_model_hlx.vanmgrph, Artifact Foundry, 2020-10-09) and the codename becoming public on 2021-03-25.
• VData’s public appearance on 2020-09-04 and its existence by 2020-08-12.
• Valve’s published statements quoted in Ep7, including Walker’s “big technological leap,” Coomer’s “multiple games,” and Morasky’s “can’t talk about it.”
• The Steam Frame team’s statement that HLX is not VR (2025-11-12).
• Steam hardware prices and reservation rules (2026-09-14), which are official.
• Animgraph 2’s use in shipped games (Deadlock, CS2) and the documented file formats.
• The Dark Carnival voice cast and released-update content (#19).
• The 2019 Eli retcon and the Alyx post-credits scene, via The Final Hours and the writers’ interviews.

8.3 Priority follow-up queue

8.4 Open questions, grouped

Identity and release - Is HLX officially Half-Life 3, or a different Half-Life project? - Is it a direct sequel to Alyx, a new chapter, or something structurally different? - When will Valve announce it, and is there any fixed date at all? - Is the 2025–2026 delay a genuine delay, a re-scope, or a normal Valve schedule slip? - What did the semi-reboot change, and what did Tyler stop believing about the chapter rebuild?

Content and story - Does the game continue from the Alyx ending? Is Alyx rescued? What is Gordon’s role? - Which enemies are real gameplay factions versus test/legacy strings? - Are Xen, the Combine off-world, and the foundry playable chapters? - Is the game single-player only, or is co-op hiding in the schemas? - How much of the 2013–2015 “posthuman” material survives in HLX?

Technology - Which engine features actually ship in HLX versus remain shared Source 2 capability? - Does HLX use ray tracing, mesh shaders, or AG2 in gameplay-critical paths? - Does the vehicle system survive in the shipped game, and in what form? - How much of the NPC ability/squad/body-part system is used in encounters? - Is the level-streaming system seamless, and does it remove loading screens?

Business and platform - Is HLX a PC/Steam exclusive, or will it appear on consoles? - Is the Steam Machine “flagship” framing real or only fan pattern-matching? - Did Valve decouple HLX from the Steam Machine minimum spec, as #19 theorizes? - What is the actual state of the Raising the Bar reprint and the reported Valve/Dbrand interaction? - Which hiring/resumé claims correspond to HLX rather than Deadlock or another Valve project?

9. Method, evidence and limitations

Source archive

The archive layer records Wayback receipts for all 31 videos (all verified) and the Miro board (capture blocked by Miro, HTTP 403; the board export is the durable copy); source-manifest.tsv classifies all 610 events into build evidence, press, official statements, résumé/casting, community posts and inference. Most of the corpus is build evidence, which a web archive cannot preserve — those rows are marked as requiring a build snapshot rather than given an invented URL. Status: sources/archive-status.md; policy: sources/README.md.

Method notes

• Dates: upload dates come from YouTube metadata, not playlist order. In-video dates are kept as stated and labeled.
• Transcripts: auto-generated captions; names and technical terms are sometimes garbled. Summaries preserve Tyler’s hedging rather than silently resolving it.
• Summaries: each video has one summary, written to a fixed schema. Structural consistency is checked mechanically; truth is not.
• Fact vs. verified: Fact means a named artifact/official statement supports the claim; verified means the artifact is directly checkable. They overlap but are not identical.
• Miro: the board is treated as a secondary research aid. Its dated notes are useful but not authoritative; where its wording conflicts with its own dates, the dates and build references win.
• No source video was re-edited or re-uploaded. The VTT files are the immutable source of record.
• Privacy: no individual actor or employee is identified; résumé claims are summarized without names or links.

Known limitations

1. No official confirmation of HLX = Half-Life 3.
2. No official release date; every timing statement is prediction or hearsay.
3. Most engine features are shared Source 2 capability, not proof of HLX use.
4. Auto-captions produce name/term errors; where possible the summary notes the transcription uncertainty.
5. Miro metadata dates can be misleading.
6. The 31-video set is incomplete: HLX Files #3/#13 and Every Last Detail Ep3 are absent.
7. Verification is uneven: 400 events still need follow-up, and “Fact” labels were not independently re-checked.

10. Bottom line

The corpus supports a strong, consistent picture of a large Half-Life project in Source 2, publicly visible under the codename HLX since October 2020, with Half-Life-specific weapons, HEV suit, Xen fauna, NPC AI, vehicles, gravity shifting, liquid/fire simulation, Animgraph 2, and a deep Hammer/tooling stack.

It does not support any of the following as fact:

• that Valve has officially called it Half-Life 3;
• that it has a release date or a confirmed 2026 announcement;
• that it is open world, VR, voxel-based, or built around a day/night cycle;
• that “Project White Sands” is HLX;
• that any specific enemy, location, or story beat is confirmed.

The most defensible summary is: HLX is a real, long-running, Half-Life-shaped Valve project that entered public datamining view in 2020, was still in intensive development in 2026, and has never been officially announced. Everything beyond that is Tyler’s inference, secondhand reporting, or a prediction — useful, but labeled as such.