Greetings, operators.
Your copy of OVRLRD has been upgraded with improved visuals and a new physically-simulated building destruction system. Read on for more details, or scroll to the bottom for a tl;dr and the full changelog.
Those of you who were there back in the day will remember that OVRLRD has always been ugly - I'm hoping this is the final graphical overhaul. Here's OVRLRD's development history in three images:
OVRLRD's terrain system has been a constant bugbear - it needs to support large environments, big differences in scale, and physical interaction with the player (not to mention VR rendering). I've had to go back and forth on these systems a lot in the past to try and strike a good balance between performance, clarity, lookin-nice and being workable as a developer.
Lookin-nice has taken a back seat for a while now, so I took some time this month to fix that.
These results are partially down to technical improvements, allowing for better shadow rendering and post-processing; and partially down to auditing all the environment textures and replacing many of them with more coherent texture sets.
I'm hoping that OVRLRD is now very clearly set in a brisk European taiga, and not a half-finished Super Monkey Ball bonus level.
All the existing maps have been overhauled to work with this new system (except Weapons Training, which I'd like to take a proper swing at soon). Performance may be degraded on some GPUs, but broadly should improve on most systems due to requiring significantly less memory.
My development machine is a mid-range laptop and I can't afford an upgrade, so my aim is not to increase system requirements, it's to do a better job with the resources available. I'm seeing good performance on this build, but please notify me via the bug reporter or the Discord if you experience significant performance drops.
I was supposed to be working on the destruction update (during which I was supposed to be working on something else), and went down a rabbit hole doing the graphical overhaul instead. I don't know why I keep going down these rabbit holes and no doctor has so far managed to diagnose or recapture me.
Luckily I did also get the destruction update working, in an attempt to make building destruction more weighty and satisfying. I gave an overview of this system in the last news post.
Because I hopped back and forth between tasks, some of this footage uses the old graphics. Don't be fooled. I strongly recommend watching the youtube video to get a sense of how this system works:
In short: larger structures will now take localised damage and their internals can be exposed. Damage a building badly enough, and it may collapse, damaging and destroying anything it falls onto.
These buildings have a stress simulation running in the background which allows them to tilt and fall based on physical impacts. They buildings can topple into each other and cause chain reactions.
Also, the holes you punch in these buildings aren't cosmetic. They are physically real, so you can use them as sightlines, or even fire weapons through them to hit things on the other side. NPCs also have full awareness of your these holes, so keep your head on a swivel.
Two facts:
You can run into and through buildings if you're going fast, and you're heavy, and you're sturdy.
A building collapsing on a mech is bad for the mech.
Please do not report a bug because you died from a building falling on you. You deserved it. I'm not sorry and I hope it happens again. Buy OVRLRD.
I'll be iterating on this system as time goes on, populating Zaliznyy with more buildings and integrating them more closely into the gameplay. For the time being, the best ways to get into a game and start smashing things are:
Hop into the new 'CONTRACTS' campaign and select the 'DEMOLITION' contract. This will drop you into a large spacious environment with lots of buildings to play with.
Embark on a career mode mission and head towards towns and villages. The highest density of structures is in Osnovne, in the North-East quarter of the island.
I'm eager to hear your feedback on how these systems feel. Hop over to the Discord and let me know your thoughts.
I've set up a Patreon to help support development. I was very reluctant to do this, since I couldn't think of anything valuable to offer in exchange for people's extra support, but what I do have is pages and pages of notes on the game's development.
I figured if people really want to support the game, it might be nice to offer a behind-the-scenes look at development. I'll be posting technical breakdowns of how systems work, devlogs of the process of building out the game, retrospectives and the kind of loose future-planning stuff that I wouldn't feel comfortable posting publicly.
There's a full breakdown of how I built the destruction system:
https://www.patreon.com/NigeyNige/posts/destruction-165262902/
A walkthrough of how I put together the old time-of-day system:
https://www.patreon.com/NigeyNige/posts/time-of-day-161519347
And a fairly long log of how development has gone since the beginning (this one's public, so you don't need to subscribe to read it:
https://www.patreon.com/NigeyNige/posts/ovrlrd-early-160116370
This is really just a place for me to post things I don't really want to share widely, and a method for true sickos to help fund development.
If you don't like it, then just remember that I need money for beer and for electricity to make the laptop go. Then give me your money. Thank you.
More of Graphics
bBuilding fall over
I was going to put a discount here, like I usually do with updates, but unfortunately I ballsed up the discounting calendar so I'm actually not allowed to do any more discounts for a short period. So to celebrate the increased level of violence now possible ingame, OVRLRD is 0% off for the next two weeks! That's the worst discount OVRLRD has ever had.
"Hang on a minute!" I hear you cry. "That's not even a discount!"
I press a rag to your face. "Money," I whisper. "Need money." You smell the chloroform and drift off into darkness. Using your phone, I purchase ten copies of OVRLRD for 0% off. Thank you.
Join the discord
As well as the visuals and the destruction, there's also a fair few visual changes in this update regarding UI and lighting, which should make environments more readable and combat more viable.
Night vision has been overhauled, bloom has been retuned and there's a huge number of listed and unlisted bugfixes regarding combat AI, loadout flow and physics. Plus the default joystick positions have been adjusted to be less weird.
Oh, and I fixed the mission editor. You previously couldn't place the player object, which meant literally none of the rest of the editor worked. Sorry about that.
Basically, OVRLRD should now (once the inevitable post-update hotfixes go out) be in the best, most playable, least janky state it's ever been. If you've been waiting for it to cook a little more, now's a great time to get back in. Have fun!
ADDITIONS
- New building destruction system. Large structures can be destroyed gradually and topple over.
- Includes a physics-based stress system so buildings will collapse if you destroy their supports.
- Toppling buildings shatter and break apart, becoming physical themselves, and can crash into each other in a chain reaction.
- Buildings are internally simulated, so you can punch holes in them to create new lines of sight.
- These aren't fake holes - NPCs can see and fire through them too.
- You can physically charge through buildings to break them apart.
- Added weird 'noclip' debug function to help with testing. If you use this I cannot be held responsible for what happens.
- Added startup loading screen to smooth out initialisation process.
- NPC ally HUD elements now display more information about NPC's intentions. CHANGES
- Overhauled terrain rendering.
- Replaced most terrain textures.
- New normal, displacement and roughness mapping for terrain textures.
- New mesh-based vegetation and detailing system, looks and performs better.
- Replaced all trees with new visually coherent asses.
- Improved realtime shadowing. Applied SSAO and ACES tonemapping.
- Redesigned some environments to take advantage of new systems.
- Tweaked design of HUD target reticules for better readability.
- Improved TGP thermal display to clearly pick out heat signatures in all lighting conditions.
- Adjusted default joystick positions to be more reasonable.
- Improved time-of-day system to support tinted fog, night skies and proper reduced visibility at night.
- Further iteration on Zaliznyy to improve layout, visuals and performance.
- Changed how NPC loadouts get generated, to ensure they always spawn with a minimum fo combat-viable equipment.
- NPC mechs should now correctly cover their retreat with appropriate modules, like smoke launchers and dumbfire rockets.
- Jump jets and cruise control can no longer be used if main power is off.
- Improved NVG visibility and range of external spotlight.
- Optimised grass and cloud rendering.
- New audio pooling system improves performance during busy battles.
- Replaced over-compressed 'radio chatter' clip on volume menu.
- Reduced memory allocations throughout the codebase, improving performance.
- Reworked SENSORS display to make it disregard time-of-day and always render at a consistent brightness.
- Cleaned up a number of unused assets and legacy code issues. This doesn't affect players but helps me sleep at night.
FIXES
- Fixed an issue where the player could not be placed in the scenario editor.
- Fixed an issue where weapons could not be slewed while holoHUD was disabled.
- Fixed several pathfinding issues for NPCs (running into the ocean again).
- Fixed some combat AI glitches where unarmed NPCs would attempt to fight anyway.
- Fixed an error where NPC loadouts would automatically get added to the player inventory on spawn.
- Fixed several strange background issues causing missing or duplicate modules in the career inventories.
- Fixed a critical pathing issue for NPCs.
- Fixed an issue causing incorrect loadouts and squadmates on subsequent missions.
- Fixed an issue where the TGP crosshair would disappear when aiming at the sky.
- Fixed an issue where sniping NPCs would seek high ground that was below their current position.
- Fixed an issue where the Goyangi had a vertical-first torso gimbal config, which was harming its ability to aim weapons.
- For now, removed horizontal rotation restrictions on Goyangi and Starling, as NPCs were struggling to compensate for it.
- Fixed an issue where NPC mechs would spawn without weapons.
- Fixed an issue where clouds and foliage would 'jump' positions on origin shift.
- This bug has been haunting me for three years.
- Fixed an issue where player would have no mech assigned in campaign missions (like Guttersnipes).
- Fixed an issue where the TGP crosshair could be very inaccurate if aiming at something silhouetted against the sky.
- Fixed an issue in legacy missions (e.g. Overwatch) where NPC mechs would have no weapons and panic.
- Fixed an issue where tanks would sometimes jolt while idling.
- Fixed some broken player triggers in Overwatch that were blocking progress in the mission.
KNOWN ISSUES (Working on it!)
- Sometimes large buildings will disappear suddenly in a burst of debris due to a physics overload.
- Trees disappear from the TGP view if they aren't in your head's field of vision.
- The player mech has rarely been observed teleporting large distances while colliding with buildings. Please report a bug if you see this.
- Using keyboard controls on an ingame throttle which is already bound to an IRL throttle will cause jitter. Pick one or the other.
- Sometimes toggling the cinematic camera will cause FPS to tank. Toggle it again to fix.
- The cinematic camera will behave weirdly in VR mode - stick to non-VR for now if you're making movies.
- Some controllers may not track. If your controllers are not supported, notify me and send an error log and I will add them!
Join the discord!