Fix and DLC support for Atomic Heart (Patreon)

Ciao guys!

It took me a few days, but in the end I was able to fix my VR mod for Atomic Heart so that it is compatible with the latest official game update and with the Annihilation Instinct DLC that came out last week.

You can find the new 10.2.0 release attached at the bottom. As usual the same archive also supports all other games, including the latest VR mods for the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (see this post for details).

Note: I always develop and test my mods with the Steam version of the games, as Steam is the store that the vast majority of players use. Editions from other stores should normally work too, but I'm reaching a point where there are so many games, so many different versions and such a flood of constant updates that I can no longer find enough time to provide good support for anything but Steam :-(

Good news though! While I was updating my Atomic Heart support, I finally found a way to get rid of the 2D window that used to pop up in front of your view while interacting with some NPCs (especially during interactions that give you multiple-choice replies for your character). Those interactions should now be reliably detected and the HUD should be working normally with them.

I also went back and redesigned from scratch my code for supporting supertitles (the captions that appear over talking NPCs and in front of certain in-game objects like posters and wall-mounted screens), so they behave much more robustly now.

One minor issue remains: when navigating your skill tree (to buy upgrades and the such) you still need to switch to the mod's virtual 2D screen mode because otherwise the game won't recognize the cursor movement.

Previous versions of my Atomic Heart mod used the left thumbstick click to toggle the supertitles support, because leaving it on all the time made the multiple-choice interactions with NPCs look ugly. Now that's no longer the case, so I reassigned the left thumbstick click to be a shortcut for toggling the virtual 2D screen, to make accessing Nora easier. "Force supertitles on HUD" is still available in case you should need it, but it's now a checkbox in the "AH" tab of the mod overlay.

I know that some of you are bothered by the fact that the game forces a certain view during some (rare) moments in the story. Unfortunately that happens a lot during the initial scenes because although you have some control they are basically introductory cutscenes. I can't disable that "strongly suggested" view because it's a fundamental aspect of gameplay, but there is an easy workaround: if you press Start on the gamepad, thus bringing up the menus, the game will pause and the camera will be freed, so you can look around 360° without restrictions. Most of the time you'll find that the area behind you is incomplete though, because the game wasn't expecting you to peek ;-)