Vecter News

About a week ago, a poll was run on the Vecter Discord server on what to port Vecter to first: Linux or VR... and Linux one by a landslide



So, that's what I'm doing! Because that's how I develop Vecter.

Sneaky plug: If you want to take part in the voting, join Vecter Discord

aaand as of this morning, Vecter has run natively on Linux for the first time! And I had my phone handy to prove it, so watch it here run for the very first time!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If this goes well, I'm hoping to launch it within a month. No promises but I'll definitely aim to get it out by the full release on the 17th of September.

Supported OS'es are going to be:
- Ubuntu 20.04
- Manjaro Linux 20.0.3

I wish I could support more distros, I really do, but I'm just a dude with limited Linux knowledge, so I can't offer a lot of support. Still, I'm making it and hopefully it will run on most distros and versions.

Anyway, as I was coding I was torturing the poor souls on discord with constant messages because I was lonely at 4AM...



STOP ADVERTISING THE DAMN DISCORD SERVER

Okay okay I stop I stop!

So yeah, Linux version coming soon! For the small small price of $99,95

IT'S FREE DAMN IT THE GAME'S FREE! Tell your Linux friends! Do you have Linux friends? I dunno whatever...

Pace!

Sooo a lot of people, mainly ones with more sensible graphics cards, reported that their game is performing worse since the last update. This is because I did a stupid an left the SSAA on for every single graphics profile. It was only supposed to be on for Max and Custom (if turned on).

Sorry my bad apologies I fix! It's fix!

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. It's the signal that signals siganlity of... what am I even writing? Sorry I'm way too excited to do this well...

Today, Vecter goes into BETA, which means that in two months time, Vecter goes out of Early access and is a full flagged-game. But what else does Beta mean?

In the standard definition of the sense, it means that Vecter is feature complete, and we're now moving into a stage where I'm only focusing on bug-fixes and performance issues, prior to the game's full release. This is a very important and necessary stage, as people getting Vecter NOT in early access are expecting a fully polished and complete, bug-free experience, and I want to give them that.

There are no major differences between version 0.9 and version 0.4.4.9 that came out yesterday. It's just a version number thing to mark certain milestones.

That being said, to commemorate this event, I've made changes in-game to signal everywhere that it is indeed a BETA. I've also changed the Steam artworks slightly to reflect this.

But to summarise all of the above



Also to commemorate this occasion, there is now a new achievement and Easter egg. Generously provided by gambit from our discord community. If you want to find out how to get this Easter egg and achievement, go bug him on twitter, I'm not going to tell you

Today's update comes as a result of a few requests from last night, which I found to be pretty legit. So let's explore what we have:

[h2]Detailed Graphics Settings[/h2]

I know I just added the "MAX" profile yesterday, but now we have another one: CUSTOM. There are plenty of players that have requested the ability to tweak these settings individually so here you go, but for the rest that don't want to bother, the old graphics profiles are still there. If you select a different profile, the custom settings are ignored, but are still saved in your save file so that if you switch back to custom, your customizations are still saved.



[h2] Life lost indicator [/h2]

There is now a small, satisfying animation that triggers when you smack into something and consume a shield. The camera shakes and the bloom goes really bright for a split-second (if you have bloom turned on that is, otherwise you just get the camera shake). You can turn it off in the options menu if it's not to your liking, but it is turned on by default.



[h2] Fixes [/h2]

- Camera changes field of view when you accelerate your ship again.
- Fixed some achievements that ware not triggering as expected.
- Fixed an issue where the game was spamming the log unnecessarily with messages.

P.S.

I'm going to start working on some colourblind pre-made colour profiles for pepes with this issue. I'm not colour blind myself so it feels a little bit like making decisions that I shouldn't be making. If anyone has any resources that I could read so I can understand this problem better and help me implement correctly HMU in the comments.

P.P.S.

Tomorrow's a big day where I'm going to announce something big and it will be the first of a few bigger announcements of things that are going to happen in the next two months, so stay tuned!

Up until now, in the options menu you had:
Ultra Low
Low
Normal
High
Ultra High

Well there's a new kid on the block called "Max" and he has one job: To melt your GPU.

Max is a work in progress, and is not intended to work well on any hardware, even high-end. It's designed more as a benchmark to how pretty I can make Vecter look before it completely stops running.

So far I've only added one thing extra to it: Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing x2. This basically makes Vecter render at twice your screen's resolution and then scales down that image to make it fit your screen. This makes for some smoother looking lines overall but it incredibly taxing on the GPU.

My GTX 1080 struggles to get to 60fp on 3440x1440. People with like a 2080ti will probably be able to run it at full speed tho.

More features will come to that graphics profile as I'll think of them, but yeah use at your own risk.