Island 359 Status Update

Hi all, long time no see. I want to apologize to the community for falling off the face of the earth with supporting this game.

Over the past several months I’ve been attempting to update the game to Unreal version 4.27 to properly support Quest Link (not native quest). The game was previously built with Unreal 4.17, so this was an undertaking, but it’s getting there.

I’ve read the discussions, requests, and comments about the game, but let me tell you what is and is not possible for an update in order to set expectations.

Not in scope:

• Co-op - The game was never built for networked play, and the time investment to rebuild the game’s infrastructure is just not worth it for that kind of an upgrade.
• Manual reloading - I understand this is standard nowadays, 8 years ago when we started developing the game it was not and we were trying to figure out streamlined gameplay. I want to change the button mapping for reloading though, as I’ll touch on below.
• More content - I do not have the bandwidth to add more levels, weapons, or dinosaurs.

What I’m looking to update:

• Stability - the paramount reason for resurrecting this game would be to address the crashes and inability to open and properly play the game for many users
• Modern headset support - Quest didn’t exist when we released this game, it’s now the most popular headset on the market, so ensuring this works with Quest 2 and 3 over link is a priority, as well as better controls for Index Knuckles.
• Graphics - Modern PC hardware and graphics cards have vastly improved since this game was released. As this will always only ever be a PC VR game, I want to update High and Epic graphic settings to take advantage of that added graphical power: Better FX, foliage cover, lighting, etc. A general graphical polish. I am also considering upping the minimum specs for the game to a 1080/2070/3060.
• Interactions and weapon handling - the original game was designed to accommodate Vive controllers, with limited buttons. The standard nowadays seems to be continuous gripping to hold most objects, though this could be difficult with the guns, they still may need to have specific grab/drop buttons, but let’s discuss.
• Leaderboard back-end - the plugin we used back in the day is long gone, so I may need to tie into the Steam leaderboards or use the Epic Online Services backend for new leaderboards.

With that, I’d like to hear suggestions for the interactions and weapon handling aspects. Any other suggestions are welcome, please keep the scope limitations in mind.