Vecter News

Hi everyone! Back from my travels in the South of England, visiting various islands. Rested, relaxed and for some reason unable to sleep at 3AM, again... Maybe I should see a doctor about that. Anyway, walked on some rocks, took pictures of other rocks, sat on a throne made of rocks. I like rocks...





Out of the frying pan, into the fire though as I'm moving house this week. Thanks to the Boomer advice of no longer buying avocado on toast and Starbucks triple-shoot skinny caramel frappucinnos we were able to save up money to buy an apartment in cash!

Haha... no... Trisy and I actually have been saving for years to scrape together the 5% deposit we needed, to benefit from a government scheme that allowed us to get the mortgage we needed. As you can imagine COVID didn't make things any easier... But finally, after almost a decade of paying rent we can finally say that we live in an apartment of which we own 5% and the bank owns the rest!

Follow me on twitter and/or insta-ham if you want to see pictures of my new desk once I've finished building it.



So here's a day I never ever thought would come:



It's empty! Nothing reported nothing to fix. This isn't to say Vecter is 100% bug-free, nothing ever is, but I've ran out of stuff to fix. I'll be doing daily plays of the game to try and figure out if anything else is broken but please, if you know of something or have something that you know ain't right, report it. The more bug-free Vecter is on launch day the better.



So, I'll come clean now and make a proper announcement to let everyone know in the next few days but there will be a small launch delay by about a week. This is because my original launch plan was to have it during EGX on the 17th of September as that would have gotten a lot of attention, but since I won't be attending EGX Digital due to the absolutely unreal booth price of £2400 ($3198.64 USD) I think it's best to not launch during that time as the whole planet will be busy with news from EGX.

It's best to have as little competition on launch day as possible. Oh and for anyone wandering, the price fro a both at EGX Rezzed, the original thing I wanted to participate to back in Q2 before the RONA hit was £550. So yeah they hiked the price by %436... cause that's certainly reasonable and affordable. Cheers...

I will be using that money to instead buy a Nintendo Switch dev kit and port Vecter to the switch so more people can enjoy it.

Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for reading! Thanks for playing! Thanks for being awesome! I'll see you around.

I'm not replying as much, being as active, or posting any new updates until after August 30, it's because I'm off to some island somewhere resting. Funny enough, not taking a break from Vecter, but from life itself with all the pandemic madness.

If you want to keep up with my travels I'll be active on my twitter account @taranasus and will post the occasional picture. Sometimes I post to Instagram too, @taranasus_dev . Do not worry, I am following all social distancing guidelines and health practices, even though most people don't seem to.

JESUS CHRIST a lot changed since the last update :| I did not realise how much stuff I do in like 5 days fuck... Sorry I really don't mean to toot my own horn but FFFFUUUUUU. Anyway this is what changed since 14 of August

- Shuffle songs toggle in options menu. When you turn it on, it will shuffle all the songs in the music folder so it plays them in a random order. They are still in a list however, so next and preivious buttons will work as intended
- Reflections now also work in multiplayer, which is great, BUT THEY WILL MELT YOUR GPU. Each camera has to receive a reflection from a different perspective and that's a lot to render.
- Pressing next song and previous song buttons, together, will play a random song in your playlist
- Fixed a bug where it would say "- disabled -" in the pause menu after a multiplayer game and switched back to single player
- Achievement Zero should be fixed now and triggered correctly.
- Stencil background should no longer be visible when YouTube video mode is on
- The score chart on the bottom right in the main menu has been reeducated on counting
- So have been the shadow players
- Video seed death timer now pauses when the game is paused
- Shadow name colour has been given its own entry in the colour picker
- Shadows no longer cause a slight performance drop when they load in
- Playing right after the track resets should no longer cause the road to disappear 30 seconds into the run
- Video seeds can now also have a pre-assigned colour scheme that cannot be changed for that seed. Check seed 1000000007 as an example of this
- Bug where discord game state was not showing the full information on someone's run has been fixed
- If player is playing a seed, discord game state will now show which seed
- In the colour picker if you try to change a colour and are not on the "Custom" profile, the game will automatically move you to that profile so it no longer causes confusion on why the colours are not changing when moving the sliders
- Jump pads, bonus gates, extra lives should no longer appear off-track at all
- Spheres no longer clip through the track
- Fixed so that the sun and audio bars also change when a seed with a video and a colourscheme is played
- The death billboards have been educated on counting
- Fixed a load of bugs in the colour picker menu (some things disappearing, some things not being visiable at all)
- Removed the square that was flickering in the gameboy colour scheme
- Added gameboy colour scheme as a preset
- You no longer spawn extremely close to obstacles in casual mode
- Changing music volume while a youtube video is playing should no longer make the game music turn back on
- Fixed a coding bug for the traffic in casual mode
- There is now a colour picker preset called "Random". When you choose this, every time you start a race it will pick a new colour scheme from the presets and the video seeds at random to use.
- Play menu -> Seed now shows a history of the last 5 seeds you have played starting with the latest.
- Play menu scores now update quicker and more reliable
- If installing the game for the first time, you will no longer see seed 000000001 as the default seed, instead it will give you a random seed. This is to mitigate the fact that seed 000000001 has 5000 score entries on it
- Dissolve colour was not applying to the spinning model in the colour picker as you were changing it. This has now been fixed
- After you reach 5 million score in a run in TD, Training and Seed, the extra lives given to you start to reduce in frequency. By the time you get to 10 million, the game will no longer give you extra lives.
- The game now sends a new signal to the backend when a seed is started. This is so I can start gathering data on what seed is most popular and show everyone that information.
- The Play -> Seed menu has been further enhanced to:
- Display the last 6 played seeds in your history instead of 5
- Display the most popular seeds online played in the last 7 days
- Shadow names are no longer as big when shadows are close to the player so you can see where you're going
- FIxed bug for level 0000000001 which had so many death boards it made the game unplayable. It's still not ideal but better
- When playing a youtube video, details about that video will appear on screen (like the song details do)
- When playing a video seed, you will also get details bout who suggested said seed, to give credit
- Fixed "Seed" not working for first time players
- A word
- Added a distance counter behind the ship
- Added a timer behind the ship when playing a seed with the video so you know when you're about to go pop

It's been a busy week! Just on Wednesday alone I pushed 3 game updates and upgraded the backend to the latest version of Microsoft Azure (v3). I am BEAT!

But it all ends in a massive victory! 2 Month-old bug has been SQUASHED! So here's the changes since the meme notes:

- Fixed casual mode not loading as intended
- Fixed game not drawing properly when setting the draw distance to max
- Fixed a display bug in the stats panel where the right text was not aligned with the left text
- Game now deletes some log files generated by the youtube component that never get deleted otherwise
- Fixed audio not working on some YT videos
- Removed a lot of logging messages that weren't needed
- Fixed an issue where scores were not downloaded correctly
- Fixed an issue where if you added too many songs tot he music folder the game would run at 1fps
- Increased the song limit from 100 to 1000
- Shadows will now only start when when your ship starts moving
- Leaderboard starts counting from 1 instead of 2 again
- Speed demon no longer starts like you're shooting from a slingshot
- IT'S FINALLY FIXED! THE REFLECTIONS BUG IS FINALLY FIXED! (Yes i'm still crying) (see gif if you don't know what i'm talking about)
- The song's title no longer cuts out on the left side of the screen in multiplayer
- Music volume slider now works correctly in the options menu again (bet y'all didn't even notice it's broken)
- The race is now paused in the options menu as well
- You can no longer move your ship before the race starts, however I left the ship animations enabled so you can still do something while waiting
- You can now input the seed number using the number pad
- Tutorial has been disabled in multiplayer because you have a friend and that's all the tutorial you need (lucky bastard...)
- The seeds with videos like 1380000000 and 3000000003 have been changed to end the race on a timer and not when the video ends. The timer has been set to the length of the video. This is important as to not give an unfair advantage to those who have slow internet, causing the video to buffer, thus giving them more time to race.
- Updated to Unity version 2020.1.2f1