The Graphics Update - 20% discount

This update, as with every update, will probably have some big bugs that I've missed. If you're lucky enough to be the first to spot it, please let me know (using the new ingame bug reporter!) so I can race to push the inevitable hotfix before anyone else notices. This is kind of a tradition now. Thank you.

The graphics update has arrived! See this earlier news post for some details and before-and-after pics.

Your copy of OVRLRD has just been upgraded with a new terrain rendering system and general visual overhaul. This includes significant changes to the simulation's underlying code. Campaign and skirmish missions will both look much better, with grass and foliage rendering, wind simulation, higher-resolution meshes and textures, and spline-based texture mapping for better-looking paths and roads.

The demo has also been updated (finally) - which should fix a large number of bugs that've been plaguing it since it's last update six months ago.

This upgrade comes with a performance impact, but not the kind you might expect. I've carefully and thoroughly optimised as much of the rendering as I can, so if you use the maximum new graphics quality the impact should be minor, and if you disable the fancy new wind-simulated grass rendering, you may find that performance is better than it was before! Please let me know if your performance is significantly degraded (along with details of your GPU, RAM and CPU) and I will investigate.

This update also includes new graphics options in the menu - if you run into performance issues, try disabling grass rendering, reducing the draw distance and switching quality to 'compromise'.

For the time being, the scenario editor is disabled while I rewrite it to work with the new terrain system.

I've also had to temporarily disable terrain decals (footsteps, scorch marks and crater effects) for performance reasons. I'll be rewriting this system to be faster and better ASAP.

Additionally, I've removed random map generation from the game. Random maps have been replaced with Zaliznyy, a new 15x15km megamap, which is where skirmish and career mode missions will take place.

Continue reading to learn about my reasoning for all these changes, and as usual a full changelog can be found at the bottom of this post.

And, as always, just in case you prefer the previous version of the game, I will keep it available as a Steam Beta Branch, under the name 'old-version'. Opt into that through the Steam Library and you can continue to play randomly-generated skirmish and career maps with the old terrain system.

Why the visual overhaul?

A couple of months ago I saw a comment online about OVRLRD's visual style. It was very polite, and came from someone who was clearly interested in the game but couldn't get past the roughness of the environment visuals - the blocky terrain, ugly textures, janky roads and blurry-looking buildings.

Personally I was quite fond of the 90's-looking terrain and meshes, but I came to realise that it was keeping people from getting into the game who would otherwise probably appreciate the kind of thing OVRLRD is trying to achieve. The old clonky terrain engine was also showing its limitations in other ways, and was stopping me moving forward with megamaps, which is something I've wanted for a long time.

So! I decided to license some tech from an experienced AAA programmer to see what it could do for the game. It required me to rewrite a few things,