UnReal World News

On Thursday 24 February, president Putin launched a devastating attack on a sovereign country of Ukraine and ever since the Russian forces are continuing to pound Ukrainian cities, including residential areas, with missile strikes and artillery fire. There is no excuse for this war. The civilians, including children, are suffering to the extent where Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II has emerged.

We support Ukraine and have made contributions to relief efforts.
We support Russians that stand against the senseless actions of the Russian government.
We have players from all over the world, from Ukraine and Russia too.
The majority of common people are not to blame for the madness and destruction, but the common people are to suffer from Putin's war. It needs to stop. We ask you to raise awareness, and work for the peace.
Do not stand aside, do not tolerate this, and help if you can.

In nearly every country you can find organizations such as Red Cross and Unicef who accept donations for Ukraine. For news, if you haven't been following, for example The Guardian has summary article of Russia’s war in Ukraine with pictures, maps, and videos:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/russia-war-ukraine-complete-guide-maps-video-and-pictures

You are online, you can find more news sources too. If in your country the world events are being filtered by the propaganda, censorship, restriction of information or freedom of speech try to reach beyond that. It takes some effort, but we support your efforts.

And once more; raise awareness of what is happening, work for the peace, do not stand aside and help those in need.

This year, in 2022, we are celebrating the 30th Jubileum of UnReal World.
The game was first released in the summer of 1992, so the 30-year milestone will be reached this summer.
Now what will this special year of celebration bring upon us, and the game?

When it comes to coding and development, I will be taking it real easy. It is likely that we'll see some updates to the game, but mostly I'll be devoting my time for variety of other things. So I'll kind of celebrate the 30 years of development by taking a year off from the usual coding flurry. This also allows me to better contemplate on the future of the game as there some challenging overhauls in our sight. One is moving to higher resolution and modern aspect ratio. The year is early, and these thoughts are scattered, so more news on this front will follow later on. But yes, it is truly so that I will take a year off from the usual, practical, hands-on development. Planning, brainstorming and a little something easy paced remains, though.

Nevertheless, during this year of celebration we will be bringing you some recreational content from the North, out and away from the development chambers. What it will be exactly remains to be seen, but I'm sure this year off will bring along many occasions, incidents, experiments or artistic projects to share or publish. There are some ideas bubbling under already.

On this thursday, 27th of January, it will be my 47th birthday. I started working on UnReal World at the age of 15 and two years later, at the age of 17, the first version was released to the public. Now the 30th Jubileum, or 47th birthday, may feel like an occasion to offer me a drink or something, and for that purpose I quickly created "buy me a coffee" page.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/SamiMaaranen
It's a simple support channel I've been asked to allow even earlier. Now it's up and will remain so at least for this year. I'll reserve the right to decide the drink to buy with your support :) , but big cheers anyway!

So these are the news to start this year with. Feel free to comment or ask if something comes to your mind.

Yours,
Sami (UnReal World creator)

The developer is currently out the office ...

He's skiing in the woods following two elks...

He will be back occasionally and eventually.

The midwinter and holiday season is at hand, and Steam Winter sale is also about to start soon.

It is time to send you our warmest Season's Greetings with a few moody photos from this very day.
Thank you for 2021 to those who already roam the UnReal World, and welcome into the Far North, all you new adventurers.



We have just passed the Winter Solstice on northern hemisphere, and the amount of daylight now slowly starts increasing. Otherwise the winter in Eastern Finland continues in decent -20 degrees celsius temperatures with delightful amount of snow. Sami (UnReal World creator) heads towards the real world in horizon.


Merry Christmas, Tree. This mighty spruce grows beside the village road, not very far from the development chambers.


Now let's survive the midwinter, and see you again in 2022!

Nominations for Steam Awards 2021 has started together with Autumn Sale, so get involved now.



Labor of Love, that's the category that suits UnReal World the best.
First released in 1992 the game now sports 29 years of development with 140,000 lines of code - and counting.
UnReal World has two Guinness Gamer's World Records due to being...well...a labor of love - and it's made by two-man team deep in the Finnish wilderness...

Sami (UnReal World creator) coding in the woods. Well, actually the development mostly takes place indoors but you get the picture, right.

Now did you actually have another title in mind that suits the category better?
Be that as it may, this is our two cents suggestion for a true Labor of Love nominee.

A small bugfix patch has been released to address the following issues:

- fixed: some faulty animal snow penalty calculations

On few occasions the fatigue rate of animals moving in the deep snow wasn't calculated right. This could result either in animals tiring too easily, or too little.

- fixed: distributing offered traded items among foreign traders wasn't always working

You might still end up in "can't carry" trade situation, even though the trading party would have capacity to carry the offered goods. Hopefully this is fixed for good now.

- fixed: Crash/shutdown related character data loss on Windows systems

On Windows system crash or computer power loss might result in character corruption which at its worst erased character data to the extent of making them unrecoverable.
This issue has been now addressed with extra safety measures and internal backups which hopefully prevent the worst case data losses for good. Should you experience Windows crash the game now tries to recover character data automatically from internal backup files upon loading the character again. You may still loose some moments or few map loads in the character's life but the game hopefully goes on more reliably.

- fixed: UrW mobile controller not working on some systems

That's all folks! Happy adventures!
ːurw_sageː ːurw_fireː