Hijong Park's Defender Patrol News

I had been receiving some requests for Meta Quest Standalone port of Defender Patrol. I never had any experience in developing a standalone VR, let alone an android app, but nonetheless I also thought it would be awesome to play in standalone headset and decided to give it a try in this week.

Unfortunately, The porting attempt was not successful. The android devices were far more weaker than I expected. No matter how many features I strip down to make it work on weaker machines, the game was simply unplayable in Quest 2, and barely worked in Quest 3.

It ran alright in completely empty maps, but once the engagement happens with any enemies, which is the crucial part of the combat flight simulator, the framerate dropped rock bottom. When I removed all the important features of the game just to make it work on meta quest, the game could no longer be called 'Defender Patrol'.

After many efforts on trying to port my game to Standalone VR, I concluded that delivering the experience of 'Defender Patrol' to Standalone is IMPOSSIBLE. This had nothing to do with the graphics fidelty alone, but the complex level of simulations in my game and the missile engagements where a targeting pod is required to snipe the enemies several kilometers away.

The specs of the VR headsets alone are not to blame. It's mostly my lack of skill and experience on Android development and optimization that prevents me from porting this game one-to-one.

Someday, when i become more clever at android development and optimizations, I'd like to make a new helicopter simulator spinoff tailored for Standalone VR from ground, set in Vietnam war era. The simpler tech level of Vietnam war where there's no targeting pods and missiles but just guns, grenades and rockets will work much better in Standalone VR.

But for now, I'll no longer touch standalone port. Instead I'll start working on the sequel of this helicopter simulator, set in pre-apache cold war era featuring TOW firing AH-1 Cobra, for PC as promised.

— Hijong Park

It had been over 2 years since I started working on this small flight sim. it was truely awesome to make my own dream game and share it with others in the community, and eventually make it to steam release!

At this point, my dream of flying MD-500 defender in VR had now been accomplished and the project is far beyond my initial scope.

But i do not want to just stay here forever. Now I want bigger choppers(e.g. AH-1 Cobra), better scenery, and some engaging campaigns with pilot career progression to fully utilize all the features I have created in "Hijong Park's Defender Patrol".

Recent v2.5 'Last Service' patch was the final major update for Defender Patrol. After this, I'll start focusing my development time on the sequel, 'Low Level Hunters'. The only updates for Defender Patrol will now be some fatal bug fixes and additional localizations. (German, Russian, and French localizations are on the way)

As I make Low Level Hunters with all the support I got from making Defender Patrol, I'll occasionally upload some important devlogs about 'Low Level Hunters' in the news.

The first one will gonna be showcasing a functional AH-1S Cobra attack helicopter. If possible, I want to showcase it in this Christmas, so I'll work hard on this sequel from now.

Thanks for playing my flight sim, and I hope I can deliver the bigger wonder some day!

— Hijong Park