Vecter News

Small statement about the frequency of updates, and then patch notes bellow.

Recently I've received a few complaints about the number of recent updates I've been putting out. I would like to address those complaints with the following statement:

I realise that the number of updates has increased over the last few days, this is due to me turning on cloud crash reporting and thus receiving an influx of bugs that I wasn't aware of and got onto fixing so people don't have any issues playing Vecter. That being said, I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I do not apologise for being obsessive over fixing, maintaining and updating my game when it needs to be updated regardless of how often that is. I am a firm believer of games being fixed ASAP so that the maximum amount of people can have a pleasant experience. If, for any reason, this is an issue for you please play something else.

Right, with that out of the way, here's what changed since the last patch notes:

Summary of patch notes from 1.0.2.0 to 1.0.4.8

- Extra lives now tilt with the ship as requested
- Options menu now allows you to configure the quality at which YouTube videos are played. This is useful for people with slow internet or limited bandwith.
- Added in-game event tracking so I can see what buttons are pressed and how often. Don't worry I can't see who presses them as that would break GDPR regulation, this is just for me to understand what features get used and which don't
- Added cloud crash-tracking to hopefully see when people are having problems without them having to report the issues and try and fix them
- fixed an error that would generate in the code when it couldn't find discord to send its rich presence to
- fixed an error in the code that would happen when a player had no achievements
- Fixed spinners spawning too close sometimes to the player in casual mode
- When you exit the game, if you've played more than an hour and haven't purchased the donation pack you get a donation menu
- You can permanently dismiss it using the option at the bottom
- Fixed some more coding bugs to get the cloud reports down, forgot what they were
- Changed the main menu "learn more" button from "Shoot" to "Boost" as people were accidentally opening it by pressing Space
- Fixed a bug where the shiedls would no longer get picked up after the first race
- The skybox colour is now applied correctly when the colour template changed. It wasn't applying before.
- Fixed the new years achievement triggering today (03/11/2020)
- Removed unity splash screen and added unity logo on the epilepsy screen (As per the democratic #polls vote!)
- When selecting the "Seed" option in the play menu there is no longer a long pause
- Caching of leader board results has been re-enabled hoping to bring server costs down
- Since most people exit Vecter the Alt+F4 way, I've added code to prevent the game from crashing, allow it to not corrupt the save file and also show the support menu to those that haven't disabled it.
- Slight improvement on the youtube playlist support, hopefully less errors involved
- Flirting with the idea of adding real-time multiplayer of some description (No, I'm not joking, but this is only an experiment for now)
- Added code that would allow all clients to connect to a server running on my home pc to further develop online multiplayer
- Fixed colours not working / changing correctly in seeds
- Fixed bug with controller typing (it wouldn't cycle through the number/letters correctly when typing with the controller)
- Fixed a bug in the rebind menu that would get triggered if someone tried to rebind the controller name itself (people are creative, or mistaken, but fun to see notheless)
- Fixed a few instability errors caused in edge cases in gameplay

I recently discovered this new meme of the "Ievan Polkka - Street Drummer Cover" and the guy just ROCKS. Like seriously, I think he does an awesome job out of that song! Sooo I included him in Vecter with his own special seed:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Come play y'all, it's a banger!

Since y'all here I wanted to give a shoutout to Scribbs for his awesome video about Vecter. It's really funny and I recommend it!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I've been breaking my brain in two figuring out what to write here so it's not... disingenuous or cliché. I don't want to go down the route of "This Halloween, witness an event like you never seen in My Vecter!" cause everyone's doing that, n'or do I want to go down the route of mentioning the virus that shall not be mentioned and bring everyone down.

Meh, chill middle it is. Let's have some fun with an event! I've added a new achievement in game especially for Halloween, but you can only get it by playing and finishing the special Halloween seed on Halloween day between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC.

And the Halloween seed is: 3110311031

If you play it on Halloween day, you also get a little achievement ;)

UPDATE: I was today having a conversation with a player and they were making, correctly, the argument that Achievements have lost all meaning due to some steam games that throw them around like candy. Achievements should be something you work for, something you earn, something to be proud of, not just participation trophies. So let's up the stakes:

In order to get the Halloween achievement, you have to FINISH the Halloween seed. You don't have to be first, but you have to get to the end of the song / the end of the timer under your ship, otherwise "NO SOUP FOR YOU!"

Now that is an OOOOOOOOOOLD reference, I salute those of you who know it ;)

Until then, I guess I'll stick more dino Pictures and a video in the Donation DLC and will add even more when Halloween comes around, since I'll be Tyrannosaurus all day.

You can also get the DLC discounted during the Steam Halloween Sale that's on now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1219990/Vecter__Donation_Pack/

Cool, happy Halloween everyone!

So what's life been like recently? Well this:



I've made this announcement on the Vecter discord but I'm going to forward it on here as well since it didn't generate as many emails as I expected:

If you are experiencing the issue with YouTube not playing, but instead getting a full white background or just the video never starting, can you please immediately exit the game, go to this folder

"%userprofile%/AppData/LocalLow/Taranasus/vecter"

Put everything in there in an archive (zip, rar, 7zip whatever you like to use) and send me the files to [email protected]

The issue is still happening for some people but not for me and I need to collect and analyse data to see what is happening.

Thanks @everyone

Okay onto what's changed

- This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhfTBVRoRU0 Now plays with audio as well. There will have been a few other videos that suffered from this bug. I absolutely hated this bug and it took 2 hours to fix
- Road would loos transparency if the youtube video was removed from your clipboard, this has now been fixed
- Added a Halloween achievement, more details closer to the event
- Youtube Playlists were failing in some circumstances. This has been fixed
- Skyway transparency issue with the road bellow it has been fixed
- Added a learn more button to the tv on the main screen someone complained that it's inconvenient to have to go googling whatever's on the screen afterwards, which is fair enough
- Bug in multiplayer where for keyboard it would say [Button 7] instead of [Escape] has been fixed
- Fixed a rare but annoying instance where the game wouldn't play youtube, but instead would show a white screen that people would fix by restarting the game / their pc / deleting logs. Hopefully it never comes back.
- In case the fix above doesn't work 100% of the time, I've added some extra logging to help me figure out what's going wrong
- Video fade from nothingness and between eachother when playing a playlist has been quickened, smoothened and overall feels better
- Video will now fade to content when video actually starts playing as opposed to when video was requested to start playing. People with slow internet would get a few good seconds of white screen waiting for the video to buffer, this fixes that
- If you give it a link to a video that's been deleted, the game will now just cancel playing the video and proceed as normal rather than showing you a white background
- Made another fix for videos not playing sometimes for no seemingly good reason.
- Default controller mappings for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and DS4 have been added to Linux
- Fixed a ridiculous ammount of YouTube playlist-related bugs including:
--- Playing the audio from the previous video
--- Crashing when transitioning between videos
- Fixed a bug when the audio wouldn't pause for a youtube video when the video would pause.

Hello my little speed demons!

Well most of you know the story bot there's plenty of new people around so here's what happened: I wanted to attend EGX Rezzed 2020 at the beginning of the year, but then COVID-19 told me to ❤️❤️❤️❤️ off.

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1175140/view/3222823082710130916

Then I thought, you know what? It's fine, I'll just attend the full EGX later the same year. It's not too bad, there will be ore people, should be really cool! But then:

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1175140/view/2505639402209842814

Riiight... but it's okay because EGX are going to hold a 7 day online event in partnership with PAX! That's way better because I'll get to see even more people! Too bad for the arcade machine tho'... but it's fine Vecter gets to be seen by all and that's...

[h2]Booth prices start at £2400[/h2]

Never ❤️❤️❤️❤️ mind...

As such I was sad for a bit, but then Dev.Play to the rescue! Finally something is happening this year which I can attend. 3rd and 4th of November!

I'm going to have a booth and try and entertain people. I'm currently trying to take the 2 days off from work so I can do streams and stuff and chat to everyone Live (as that would be nice wouldn't it) maybe even do some videos of playing on the arcade machine. It all depends on weather work will give me the time off. More information on that will follow as... well as the situation develops really.

You can get your tickets from them, but this is a more dev-centric event than the others. There will however be a steam page, that will appear on the front page of steam (duh) with all the games participating in this event discounted or even free! So that's something to look out for.