Hi Everyone!
We've been looking forward to migrating Alien Dawn to the newest version of Unreal for a while and have determined now is a good time to do so.
OpenXR
One of the main advantages to making this upgrade is the addition of a production ready version of OpenXR, which is the unified software standard that all VR manufactures have agreed on. This means far fewer compatibility issues as a VR software developer, in particular as new headsets are released.
Developing software in VR since 2015, I can say one of the biggest issues was constantly adapting to the new standards that would come out every year, and each hardware company had their own way of doing things, so this helps simplify things for developers like us.
As most VR headsets and drivers have moved to this new standard, this should also help some of the rare instances of the game not working on some people's computers.
Unreal 4.27
Upgrading from Unreal 4.26 to 4.27 also has its own set of advantages, and is the next step in ultimately moving to Unreal 5 when that becomes production ready for VR.
The hope with upgrading to 4.27 is that you will get a higher quality and smoother experience overall in game.
We're making a preview of this new version available today, which is really meant for people who want to help us test and refine this new upgrade with us.
A decent amount of the transition has been done, but you'll definitely find some issues that were previously working that now need to be tweaked again.
We've migrated our projects to new versions of Unreal in the past and sometimes it's a relatively simple process that takes a week, and sometimes depending on the amount of changes to the Engine it can be a month.
We're excited about what this update will help us do and hope to have it out on the default branch ASAP.
Test The Update Preview
If you would like to try it and help us test, just go to the Alien Dawn "Properties" in Steam, select "Betas" and choose "update-preview".
I'll be making a Discord channel for this topic as well as reactivating the Trello to track down bugs, ect.
Looking forward to working with anyone who wants to help out, thank you!
Christian