Friday Blog 127 - Steam Workshop Live but still Private

The flat world, created by a testmod that will probably be available as a default

This week, we created our very own Steam Workshop page! Screenshot available below. It's only available internally, but it's relatively functional. Integration of the Workshop was slightly easier than expected. A lot of the required settings can be adjusted in default Steam Workshop menus, so we don't need to develop our own UI for them. In our private testbuild, it's now possible to upload mods to Steam Workshop from Colony Survival, and we can also download them into the game again. And of course, another important new functionality is the fact that it's now possible to select only specific mods to use in a world, making it a lot easier to regularly play both modded and unmodded worlds, and to experiment with combining multiple mods.

We've received multiple reports of people who missed the flatness of 0.6.3 worlds. As a result, Zun's testmod is an adjustment of the world generation, resulting in a nearly entirely flat world. We might make this option available as a default mod. For 0.7.2, we'd like to make extra settings available to modders, which will allow us to upgrade the flat-world mod into a full terrain generation customizer.

A release date of Friday next week is a definitive possibility. The Monday afterwards is another option (December 1) or the following Friday. This will give modders the possibility to configure their Workshop pages in time for Christmas :)

To make myself more useful for updates that rely mainly on programming/Unity skills instead of new textures and objects, I've continued to 'level' these skills and I really do feel like I'm making progress. I got quite a lot of encouragement as a result of last week's blog so thanks a lot :D

My little project is far from perfect or complete but I'd like to share some GIFs again:

I did run into some persistent shadow issues that we haven't been able to figure out this week. They're most obvious in the last GIF. If anybody knows a solution, I'd love to know!

Finally, the Half-Life Alyx trailer released this week! Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2W0N3uKXmo
It looks like a revolutionairy and impressive experience. The way you can use your hands to grab and manipulate objects and to shoot looks very intuitive. There's one problem that makes us hesitant in regards to VR.

In VR, you can do some limited moving around by physically walking through your room. But my room is a bit smaller than for example Los Santos in GTAV, or the pretty much infinite world of Colony Survival. Which would require you to still use buttons/joysticks to move around, but that might be jarring in VR.

Nearly all of the gameplay scenes in the trailer are stationairy, or at least confined to an area of a couple of square meters. There is no walking through long streets, no climbing stairs, no running through corridors. And in most games, such activities are essential. That might be a coincedence, but it might also indicate that movement is still problematic.

So that makes us feel uncertain about the future of VR.
Perhaps the issue is fixed, and VR becomes as essential to gaming as the mouse, or as color is for movies.
Perhaps VR will create entirely new genres of games, causing regular gaming and VR gaming to coexist for a long time, like flight simulator games that require flightsticks.
Or last and least, VR is mostly a gimmick that will decline in the future, like 3D movies or the Kinect. We'll see! We'd love to have your opinion.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord