Update log
Full OVRLRD update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Greetings, operators. This next update is taking longer than expected, so I thought it'd be good to let you all know what's going on behind the scenes. Or rather, BEYOND THE SCENES. (That's a joke about Unity's scene graph system.)
Extracted changes
- Compatibility
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Workshop
So! The scenario editor's been missing from the game for a while now. You can still use it on the old-version beta branch, but it's clunky and missing features, and the workshop is disabled. Is it ever coming back? What's going on?
Since the world's gaming press has VERY rudely not yet approached me for an interview about my insane steel battalion revival project, I'm going to write this as if I was being asked questions by an openly hostile interviewer, similar to that one nightmare I keep having.
(If you're a games writer and would like to talk please get in touch on bluesky.)
OVRLRD'S campaign is unpolished.
It sure is! I'm actually surprised the game hasn't received more pushback on this. I guess expectations are low for Early Access games, and even lower for VR games. The lack of pushback has actually given me the mental space and time I needed to take a risk on this quite stupid task: building an entirely new campaign inside OVRLRD's own scenario editor.
That's stupid. Why would you start over?
Well, it's not really starting over. I was in the middle of migrating the campaign to the new terrain and graphics system, and designing entirely new maps in Unity's scene system was taking forever. It was also bothering me that all this effort was going into new one-off environments that would only be used for one mission, instead of into iterating the megamap, Zaliznyy, which players will be spending much more time on.
I thought it'd be better if the whole campaign took place on Zaliznyy, in the style of classic milsims, in a story that takes you from one end of the island to another, describing an evolving conflict in a setting you gradually get to know better and better. This was the original wish for the project back when I started, but I didn't know that it would eventually be possible.
I realised then that if there was just the one map, the missions would need far less data associated with them. Then I remembered that the scenario editor still needed rebuilding to work with the graphics and terrain update.
So the choice became: do I keep building the campaign like this, slowly and painfully, and then build the scenario editor as a separate system which works a different way? Or: do I build the best scenario editor I can, then start migrating the campaign into that, iterating and improving the editor as I go?
To an engineer that's an easy question. To get the best tool possible, you have to use it yourself and refine it as you go (grossly, this is called 'dogfooding'). That's how all my favourite game developers do it, so I figured it made sense for me, too. That way, once I'm done, the players get access to the same tools I had, and can make campaigns just as complex and interesting as the one I ship myself. (Probably more so.)
Okay, so it's going to take a million years?
I understand being skeptical of this sort of thing - I've been disappointed by many projects for which the killing blow was somebody announcing "we're starting from scratch and it'll be better!" That announcement is usually the time to pack your bags and get outta there.
This actually would
Source