If you're a fan of the Workshop in Overwatch, this new update — available on the PTR — should please you. The new features are huge, and really important to many creators. New test maps and new tools are available but that's not all. In order to offer creators more freedom and more power, the teams have decided to remove heavy restrictions that were present until now to protect creators from errors causing crashes.
Dan Reed and Zach Metcalf — two gameplay engineers — talked about all the new features on the official Overwatch website.
Reed and Metcalf are two of Blizzard's engineers who worked on the Workshop. As feedback from users came in, they thought about how to make it as good as possible, resulting in this patch. Their main motivation was to correct the elements that could lead to frustration.
New maps
They were created in the way the creators used the existing maps. The two engineers realized that many popular game modes occur in places outside the map boundaries. A roof of the map of Havana could then serve as a flat space to create their game modes.
To make things easier for them, three new maps have been made available exclusively in custom games — thanks to the collaboration of the Overwatch map team:
- Workshop Chamber: closed room of 40x40 meters
- Workshop Island: a square of 40x40 without wall or roof.
- Workshop Expanse: a blank plane of 900x900 meters. This is the largest map the Overwatch team has ever made.
Subroutine
Another source of frustration was the lack of a subroutine pointed out by the creators. This is now corrected with this new PTR patch where they have been added. They are separate functions, which can be run at the same time as other parts of the script. Without it, the solutions were risky and made the scripts more complex and larger.
It was this change that motivated all the others, including the script diagnostic panel that will allow a Workshop creator to know how close they are to the script size limit, making it easier to anticipate and avoid script rejects.
A great deal of trust seems to have been placed by the teams in the content creators. A new feature brought by the patch — and which will surely speak to insiders — is to remove the requirement that each loop be preceded by a Wait action. This restriction had the effect of reducing the probability of an infinite loop, causing the game to crash. It limited the scripts that the most skilled creators could perform.
These changes are just the beginning. The developers hope that this patch will give players more freedom to explore the Workshop, and they assure that new features will be added in the future.
Hero Pool are now available on the test servers! That's not the only new feature of patch 1.45, which also brings many changes to the Workshop — including three new maps and bug fixes.
