Vecter News

Here I come with another wave of changes. I'm going to miss these huge updates once I go back to work... I like adding things to Vecter SO MUCH! Before I jump into the details of this update I'd like to let everyone know that I've found a new job, which is great for my survival prospects, not amazing for the amount of things I can do to Vecter before releasing it.

Also, I may launch out of Early Access two weeks earlier than planned. Cyberpunk releases on the 17th of September and releasing on the same day is an amazing way to get completely ignored. This is still not finalized as I'm unsure of what to do. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments actually. Should I release before, at the same time, or after Cyberpunk and by how much?

Okay enough blabber, onto the changes, oh and If you only want the release notes, scroll to the bottom of the article.

[h2]Speed Demon[/h2]

This is by far the biggest addition, yet I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to say what it is, where to find it etc. You need a score of 1 million in any game mode (Apart from casual) to unlock it, so get the million and see what it's about.

Edit: Okay fine, you can find full details about it here

[h2]Dissolve Animation [/h2]




Vecter is set in like a 80s Sci-Fi Cybemovie World and I want to capture that atmosphere as much as I can. Towards that end there is now a new World-generation animation that basically creates the world around you whenever you start a race. It took the better part of a week to get this working correctly and you only get to see it briefly but damn does it add a lot to the immersion and feel. Speaking of Immersion...

[h2]YouTube Immersion Mode[/h2]

I was a little opposed to this one at first because "Vecter is not a YouTube player".
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Combining the suggestion of one user + a video shared by a friend on twitter that really captivated my imagination, I removed all of the non-essential elements from the game and made this amazing experience where you just drive while surrounded by any YouTube video you desire.

The video makes or brakes this experience of course, but GOD DAMN does it feel amazing when you get it right. Seed 138000000 has one such video that really does it for me. Go check it out and let me know what it feels like for you.

[h2]New sound effects![/h2]

You know what people like? Sounds and random noises! You know what Vecter is missing? A Vita port Sounds and random noises!

I've been working with the awesome Stardust to get some audios going and it's been turning out awesome. Stardust is very talented and you should go follow his twitter. Maybe if there's more of us following him we can pressure him into posting more often. He did it for free as well wanting to support Vecter and I cannot thank him enough for that!

To properly show my appreciation, I've gone ahead and added a credits screen in-game where I show my appreciation for all those who've helped me on this journey.




[h2]Palm trees[/h2]

People have asked for more environments to break up the monotony. Well here's a new one, Palm trees! Makes it look like a very crowded beach. I actually made screenshots of how this environment was built and posted it on my Patreon .





If you follow me on Patreon I usually post articles, photos and videos of my work on Vecter and other stuff. I make some stuff available to everyone, or for $1 you can support me to build up the game and gain access to everything I post. You also gain direct access to talk to me about whatever you feel like.


And as part of this, I've created dynamically-changing stencil backgrounds for all of the environments, to make things seem a little more artificial than before.

[h2]Full Release notes[/h2]

[h3]New Stuff[/h3]

• Speed Demon (Get a score over 1,000,000 to find out what it is)
  
• YouTube View mode. You can toggle it on/off from the options menu or by pressing Ctrl + Y. It removes all the elements apart from the obstacles and road for a better YouTube experience. You can also toggle if you want the road transparent or not.
  
• New world-generation animation. You can change the colour of it through the colour picker menu.
  
• New environment: Palm-trees
  
• Environment Backgrounds: I've replaced the mountain with stencils representing each of the environments you come across in-game. The colour of this is editable too.
  
• Moar Steam Achievements
  
• Credits Screen
  
• New Keep Vecter Free screen.
  
• New "Support Vecter" Spinning screen(s)
  
• You can now edit the colour of the road surface
  
• New Dark Mode theme, if you're playing late at night.
  
• New video seed added: 138000000 because it is an excellent 10-minute video
  
• New sound effects added
  

[h3]Changed Stuff[/h3]

• The health of obstacles is now volume-based. I.E. the bigger the thing is, the more you have to hit it till it goes boom.
  
• Pillar width and depth starts getting rediculous at very high scores. They are also very hard to kill due to volume-based health.
  
• Spheres now have variable sizes.
  
• No more solitary mountain in the distance
  
• The minimum speed mechanic of skyways has been removed. You can now go as slow as you want on them.
  
• Physics loop increased from 60Hz to 100Hz. This means that collisions should work a little better.
  
• Collision detection slight re-write. It should now hopefully be more accurate and fair.
  
• Simplified logic that would keep the ship attached to the road
  
• Shadow playback has been disabled. This is because it's now completely broken and I have to re-write it from scratch. Until it's fixed you will get an in-game message telling you it's not available.
  
• The track reset timer will only appear in menus 1 hour before the reset happens.
  
• Walls now take bullet damage too.
  
• Bonus gate size has been doubled.
  

[h3]Fixed Stuff[/h3]

• Changed YouTube player so that it can read the new encrypted format videos (the white screen bug)
  
• YouTube black screen should no longer stick around after the video has started (the black screen bug)
  
• The first-person mode was not correctly applying the black screen effect on death
  
• Controllers should now select correctly for multiplayer
  
• Combo text no longer renders in front of the colour picker.
  
• Leaderboard now shows high scores for hardcore on the first load
  
• Tweaked UI for 4:3 aspect ratio
  
• Pause menu will no longer trigger during black screens when Alt+Tab-ing
  
• Casual mode max speed now showed correctly in STATS window.
  

This is an insanely big thing for me! I don't even know how to articulate it properly. Even this I didn't do right because technically it's got over 110,000 downloads I just lost count completely.

(For clarity, it's 110,000 in total from all sources, on steam alone it's 99,392 at the time of writing but Vecter is available in other places as well

I cannot contain my excitement, this is incredible! Thank you so much for making this happen you are all a great community and I deeply appreciate you all.

I really don't know what else to say. Update 0.4.0.0 is coming along nicely and development is on schedule. I mean it's hard not to be on schedule when you don't really have a schedule but it's coming along nicely.

Still furloughed sadly (I.E. the government is paying the company I work for to not fire me, and the company only pays a portion of my salary) so money is a little tight but nothing to worry about in my opinion.

Oh and a little secret announcement, though I don't know how much this is relevant to steam players but there you go: I've been given access to the Nintendo Switch developer portal, so things are on track to bring Vecter to the switch as well, hopefully for free there as well. But more on that later.

It's been a pretty eventful week! Vecter was included in the Opera GX Browser, we have a winner for our ColourCode competition, I've finished uploading the whole OST to YouTube it's been a good time! Let's dive in.

Note: If you're only interested in the game changes, skip to the end of the article for the change-log section.





It's been a pretty eventful week since the last update! Vecter got featured in the Opera GX Corner under their Free Games section among GTA 5, Quake and Cities Skylines. It feels like being an impersonator among titans but I'm really grateful for this inclusion. This had the awesome effect of taking vecter from 100-ish downloads per day to thousands! The peak so far has been the 22nd of may with 7580 downloads in just one day!

I very much thank Opera GX and their inclusion of Vecter in their Web Browser for gamers, very cool! But warn-a-brother next time! I had to panic change the game to reduce the load on the server. The back-end was holding up fine but the hosting price started going parabolic and I needed to do something before it hit its £100/month hard limit. If it hit that happened, all online functionality would have immediately stopped to prevent making me poor.



For those of you who don't know, this week we've been holding a competition on Vecter's Discord server over who has the best colour scheme, and the winner is Poliwagpi4554!



Congratulations again to them for winning! The code is: 420B4878009F043290090010003B80001545C00100002B26003368007065007569006600736800695F00000F0E003731A805B5023134510E5108092F0E514351490E17510E00F7FE232323 but don't bother remembering it and I'll explain why in a minute.

For winning, Poliwagpi4554 has received the following prizes:

• The last Video Clip for the Vector OST on YouTube is made using their colour-code and full credit goes to them for the visual
  
• They receive a shout-out in all of the social media posts related to this release to highlight their contribution to the game
  
• Their colour-code is added as one of the presets in the game with full credit to them
  
• They can ask me one question, whatever they desire, and I will answer truthfully.
  

The question they went with was the following: What inspired you to make Vecter and how do you actually feel about it's popularity now?

And, as promised, I answered truthfully which hurt a bit due to past events but a promise is a promise. The answer is a big wall of text so I won't include the whole thing here. If you would like to see it, join the discord server and unlock it following the instructions in the #welcome channel. After that Go to this link here or scroll a little bit up in the Announcements channel

Congratulations again to Poliwagpi4554 for winning! Follow them on twitter or instagram!



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Like the sound track? No! Love the soundtrack? Well why not give it a listen outside the game as well! Here it is now fully uploaded to YouTube with nice visuals to go along with it! Link here to the YouTube Playlist containing all of it.



And finally! Getting into the actual changes, the colour picker menu has received some serious modifications. Three quality of life improvements that should make your life a LOT easier:

1. Object previews! No longer guessing what something looks like if it's not on screen, the menu will show you a preview of almost each object so you know exactly what you're modifying and what it looks like



2. You can now select preset colour schemes in game. Just press the shoot button while in the colour menu to cycle through them. Currently there are only two: The Vecter Defaul scheme and Poliwagpi4554's winning scheme. More will be added over time but for now I wanted to keep options simple and limited.

Changing to a preset scheme does not affect your custom one and you can cycle back to it at any time. You cannot modify the presets, but you can export a preset, then import it over your custom scheme and modify that.



3. Holding down the Boost button will hid the UI so you can see what your changes look like behind the menus as well.





What's new:

• Added preset colours in the colour-picker. You cannot edit the preset colours, but you can still create a custom one by selecting the "Custom" option. You can also start from a preset if you like by selecting the preset, pressing the export button and then immediately pressing the import button. This will overwrite your custom scheme with that preset one.
  
• Colour picker now also has a preview object for almost each item in the list that you are modifying, with the exception of the scoreboard which is already on the screen when you are editing.
  
• There is now a button in the colour-picker menu that, if you hold it pressed, it will hide the menu so you can see exactly what your modifications look like
  
• Added three more seeds that have a pre-set youtube video. Good luck finding them ;)
  
• Game now picks up new songs added to the music folder automatically, no need to restart the game.
  
• The log has been changed to write out your GPU, CPU, RAM and Windows version when the game starts.
  
• There is now a button in the pause menu with a double function:
  - If no YouTube video is playing, it will say "Play YouTube" and will show you a box with instructions on how to load a YouTube video
  - If a YouTube video is playing, it will say Stop YouTube and if you press it it will immediately stop playing that video and return back to the normal soundtrack. The box at the bottom in this scenario will tell you the URL of the YouTube video that you are playing.
  

What's changed:

• The bonus points text colour is now linked to the scoreboard frame colour
  
• For new players only: Top Dog and Hardcore are now locked and you unlock them as a reward for getting over 50,000 points in Training mode. Full disclosure, this is a measure implemented to drive down server costs by not uploading and downloading shadow playbacks for new players that are only learning to play the game for the first time and die often in the first few seconds of a run.
  
• Options menu can now be accessed from the pause menu.
  
• The ship will always be in 3rd person in the main menu now, but once you start a run it will put you in your last selected camera mode
  
• All the settings in the options menu related to music now affect youtube videos as well (pause menu music, restart song, stop song on ship crash)
  
• YouTube video now scales with FOV to make for a better viewing experience.
  
• The colour picker menu now says "Enter" instead of "Return" for the enter key
  

What's Fixed

• The shadow uploader has been completely fixed and is now working exactly as intended.
  
• The 5 million upgrade now unlocks as expected
  
• Game no longer freezes for a few seconds when you die
  
• Camera FOV returns to normal when the game is paused, in order to make the pause menu a reasonable size.
  
• CRT option in options menu works again as intended
  
• YouTube video now loops again when it finishes playing
  
• Player 1 achievement works again.
  
• Fixed a bug where the UI would display outside of the ship's cockpit in first person mode
  
• Fixed a bug where the road would turn completely black while jumping in the city environment
  
• Normal sound track will not play for a split second between runs if you're listening to a YouTube video
  
• "Pause menu music: Off" no longer makes the music cycle endlessly
  
• When crashing, the score board should never disappear anymore
  
• Music volume adjustment bars are now visible again
  

I wish every update could be magical and bringer of new features, but sadly that's not always the case. Sometimes you have to sit down and work on making what's there more efficient and reliable so you can get a better experience overall. This is one of those updates.

Changelog

- Preparations have been made to change the render pipeline to a new technology called Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This is necessary to ensure consistency between PC version and eventual mobile versions post-launch. It's also necessary to get VR working properly.
- One of the effects of these changes is that now menu items are affected by the CRT effect and the change of FOV like every other element in the game.
- Scoreboard in multiplayer has been changed from the old version to each ship having its own score indicator above itself.
- Score submission algorithm completely rewritten to be better, fault tolerant and handle bad internet connections
- Modified one of the secret achievements to be a bit more achievable
- Moved the "Loading / Saving" spinner to the centre of the screen so it's more obvious
- Spinner only appears in menus (apart from the pause menu) since it's not overly useful during a run.
- Fixed a bug where, after changing the menu colour, the colour wouldn't stick until restarting the game.
- The spawn-in animation is now tied to the ship's speed so, in theory, the level generation should never lag behind the ship.
- Most reflection issues fixed
- Reflections turned off in multiplayer as there are some bugs with it I need to figure out with multiple perspectives
- The game will no longer let you exit while it's uploading a score. The exit button will change to say "Please wait" and it will exit the game for you when it's done uploading.
- The song credits text will no longer appear in the bottom left while watching a youtube video

Man

I've been working flat out this week... I really need a break. I keep saying I'll take one then I keep jumping back on to fix issues. I have no self control... Anyway here's what's changed/fixed

- Upgraded to the latest version of Unity 2019.3.13
- Fixed the vsync setting not being saved properly
- Fixed some minor code bugs that won't be noticeable to the user, but will make the game run a little better
- Updated the launcher so that if you now try to play vecter on a Intel HD Graphics card you will get a little warning message telling you that your card is not supported before you can start the game. You can turn this off by following the instructions in the message
- Massive memory leak fixed which was causing crashes after enough playtime
- Fixed a bug where the ship would just crash 5 seconds after starting a run
- The Spinners are now generating correctly and not too far to the side
- Gap Walls should no longer appear immediately before or after a spinner. Fake walls still do though
- Fixed a bug where the spinner with extended blades would push you the wrong way, causing you to loose all of your lives.
- Better tracking in the log for uploading scores so i can see what happens when people experience issues
- Attempted to fix a bug where the ship would die on a loop if you didn't accelerate in casual mode. I couldn't reproduce the issue but i attempted a fix anyway (maybe i get lucky)
- You can now press escape on the keyboard in the rebind controlls menu to cancel a rebind for a controller button (this does not work for rebinding the keyboard buttons)