Greetings, operators.
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, but I figured it wouldn't take long. (It took ages.) The new system uses a beefed-up version of Unity's native terrain system, with better shaders and super-fast GPU-based tools for working with it.
This new system has a bunch of advantages for me - it lets me make use of tools built for terrains instead of meshes, it gives me easier access to performance boons like tesselation, culling and LODs, and it allows me to throw away a bunch of legacy code that was slowing things down.
Why get rid of random maps?
For two reasons: firstly, getting them to work with the new terrain system would require a good amount of extra work, for an end result that would be noticeably worse than the campaign missions. The additional work wouldn't be in generating the terrain (that's not super hard), it would be in adapting and endlessly testing and refining the other systems based around creating a fun mission via an algorithm. I didn't want to spend ages working on something that I'd later end up hating, and which provides less value to players.
Secondly, and more importantly, I've completely gone off the idea of procedural generation for game environments. Garry Newman put it well in this old blog post about Rust. Good maps are ones you can learn and develop strategies around, and which are designed to create moments of drama and interesting challenges.
Planning and mounting an assault on a town whose layout you understand is interesting. Fumbling around a lumpy generated terrain and learning as you go before you get domed by an NPC is less interesting. A generated map might be different every time, but the algorithm isn't. The map itself might not be familiar, but the patterns it creates will be.
Variation between missions, in my mind, shouldn't come from randomly mucking up the environment. It should emerge from NPC behaviour, objective design and consequences of player choice. Designing a megamap like Zaliznyy takes time, but I think it'll be worth it in the long run. In the meantime, I welcome your feedback while it develops.
Why now, instead of later?
OVRLRD is still in Early Access for a good reason - I'm refining it and changing it, and I only want to settle on 1.0 when it's something I can be proud of. I need feedback and players to help me refine it, and that means regular updates. I didn't want to hide away in a cave for six months perfecting a graphics update - I want to ideally release an update every month or so to make sure I'm going in the right direction.
Also I want more people to get excited about the game and spread it around so that I can continue to afford rent beer licensed graphics technology. I didn't want to risk any more players getting turned off by an ugly trailer and screenshots.
I hate this! Turn it back!
No! I won't! We move forward! But I will keep the old version available as a beta branch. Opt into 'old-version' on Steam and your copy of OVRLRD will revert back to pre-graphics-update and you can keep playing random maps if you want. OVRLRD also has no DRM, so you can copy and archive any version of it you want and keep playing it like that.
I love you mechs! How can I help?
I love mechs too! OVRLRD is 20% off for the next seven days to celebrate the graphics update. Tell your friends! Tell them! Politely ask your favourite streamer to check it out! Join the discord and have fun! Leave a review! Genuinely, reviews make a massive difference to Steam's understanding of whether a game is 'real' or just random shovelware.
On that topic, OVRLRD has recently garnered a couple of negative reviews. This is fine: negative reviews are generally a good thing. Nobody likes getting them, but they're an important part of the ecosystem and developers need to know if things aren't working.
That being said, if you experience a bug in OVRLRD, I would strongly recommend you use the new ingame bug reporter! This immediately sends me an (anonymised) email with a full log file, and I fix a lot of bugs thanks to people sending in reports. This is way more likely to result in a bugfix than a review is, because reviews don't include the log files.
Thanks again for your support, patience and understanding while I worked on this! It took way longer than I expected, and I'm super relieved that it's mostly out of the way now and I can get back to gameplay and content.
That's all, massive changelog below.
Love ya,
xoxo nige
CHANGELOG 25 MARCH 2025
CHANGES
- Terrain and foliage rendering has been completely overhauled. It will perform better in some ways and worse in others, but should look significantly nicer.
- Terrain now tesselates for performance gains and supports rendering millions of grass tufts as well as more trees and blended road textures.
- New graphics settings allow you to control grass rendering, draw distance and general quality.
- The best way to increase FPS is to set graphics quality to 'compromise', toggle off 'render grass', and reduce draw distance to 3000m.
- 'Basic' quality setting is not recommended for a first time player, as it may cause issues with camera feeds.
- Draw distance setting will still allow you to see things past the draw distance using your weapon camera.
- New spline-based workflow improves the look and shape of terrains, with no more weird jagged roads.
- Random terrain generation for skirmish is gone. Now skirmish and career missions will take place on large maps designed by hand.
- The new map, Zaliznyy, is a (fictional) 15x15km island located in the Black Sea.
- This island is a work-in-progress and will continue to be refined and changed as the game develops.
- Every campaign map has been rebuilt from scratch to use the new terrain system.
- Some of these maps may have issues I missed - please report them so I can fix them.
- The artillery campaign is temporarily closed for repairs.
- Building meshes have been replaced with better, more fitting ones, with higher resolution textures.
- NPC mechs can now use remote drones to hunt and spot for enemies.
- More audio level remixing - please adjust volume sliders in the main menu to ensure your ears don't get destroyed.
- Reduced the number of render passes significantly, improving performance on some machines.
- Made helicopter crash effects more dramatic.
- Smoothed out zoom transitions for weapon cameras.
- Weapon camera render distance is now dynamic - higher zoom levels will render things further away.
- Silence Alarms switch will now silence holohud alarms such as fall warning and overheat warning.
- NPC mechs set to 'roam' mode will now only roam within a sensible radius of their start point.
- NPCs - both friendly and hostile - can now call for backup when under attack. HUD icons will indicate this.
- NPCs now randomly select a 'fighting style' on start, which should result in more varied combat behaviours.
- Temporarily disabled decals and textured footprints while I rewrite this system to work with the new terrains.
- However, footprints, tanks and explosions will now still modify terrain textures and delete grass, rocks and bushes.
- Beam weapons can now delete grass and bushes, as well as modify terrain textures.
- Damage display now clamps condition of parts to main HP, to give more warning if you're about to get killed.
- Damage display shows a big warning if you are currently taking overheat damage.
- Improved the behaviour of scrolling menus - you should be able to scroll more reliably using thumbsticks or touchpads.
- Nerfed the heat beam so it doesn't melt mechs in a second.
- Increased range of target tagger from 3km to 9km.
- Changed pre-mission fadein to have a nifty typewriter effect, as a treat.
- Drones can now be targeted and destroyed by enemies.
- The holohud will now indicate when a targeted unit is retreating.
- Made night-time much darker to make night vision goggles more useful.
- Career mode now starts you with positive money instead of stuck in crippling debt.
- Career mode loan interest rates reduced from 0.05% to 0.01%.
- Mowed the lawn so tanks are visible in the grass now.
FIXES
- Fixed a bug preventing operator and mech selection on second career mission of a session.
- Fixed a couple of other UI bugs to do with the hangar.
- Fixed a bug where helicopter explosions could be heard anywhere in the map with no distance falloff.
- Fixed a bug where not all relevant info was rendering above HUD target boxes.
- Fixed a bug where skirmish parameters such as time of day and weather would not be applied.
- Finally fixed a bug where mechs would bounce and stagger if the frame rate dipped, which was making it annoying to travel large distances.
- UPDATE: actually fixed that bug - it was in fact caused by checking out-of-date terrain colliders immediately after origin shift.
- Fixed a bug to do with getting a random position on the terrain, which was causing a lot of odd NPC behaviour.
- Mitigated a few issues that were making leg animations extra goofy.
- Fixed some issues to do with operator and platform select in hangar.
- Fixed incorrect fog color when transitioning to nighttime.
- Fixed a bug where enemies would not notice they were getting shot with certain weapons.
- Fixed a bug where the mission-load fade-in would render incorrectly, or not render at all.
- Fixed a bug where sprites would rotate with the camera instead of based on to-camera vector.
- Fixd a bug where the 'media' MFD feed would render pure white without any button prompts.
- Fixed a controller ID typo which broke tracking for Samsung Odyssey+ controllers.
- I am unable to verify this fix myself so please let me know if you are still having issues!
- Fixed an old bug where the HoloHUD reticule would roll left and right to match your head orientation.
- Fixed comms audio being spatialized too far away from player head.
- Replaced end-debriefing lever with a UI button that will hopefully fix an issue with hand grabs breaking.
- Fixed a bug where if you hit 'launch' more than once, the mission would load more than once, resulting in long load times and an incorrect starting squad.
- Fixed after-action report not showing anything.
- Fixed a significant number of bugs all over the place.
KNOWN ISSUES
- Bootcamp is abandoned and overgrown, needs work.
- Sometimes trees will flicker due to an occlusion culling issue. This should resolve itself if you quit the mission and restart it.
- Some UI elements that appear on MFDs may become 'pinked out', replaced with solid blocks of pink. Please let me know if you see this.
- The 'Basic' graphics option may cause secondary cameras (such as the TGP weapon camera) to stop rendering.
- Explosions and footprints may, on some maps, turn mud into grass instead of the other way round.
- Performance may be reduced on some machines due to rebalanced CPU/GPU load. Please report serious frame drops and I will investigate.
- Some explosion, smoke and dust effects may flicker when overlapping each other.
- Some controllers may not track. If your controllers are not supported, notify me and send an error log and I will add them!
- Having a gamepad plugged in may suppress VR controller input. Unplug your gamepad if you get stuck in the menus!
- If you die, the post-death spectator mode places your hands slightly too far away from your IRL wrists.
- Sometimes, very rarely, the shaders will be completely broken on startup, with invisible terrain.
- Restarting the game fixes this.
Don't forget to join the discord! OVRLRD OFFICIAL DISCORD!