Vecter News

Okay seriously enough with the performance improvements they are going to drive me insane. I've stared so much at this stupid graph i'm having full-on nightmares with it.

Last night at stupid AM I woke up panicked because I was dreaming about some Update loop hanging for 100ms every minute or so and I jumped to my computer to fix it... that is until I came to my senses, realized it's 3AM and that Unity's not open and I was just having a dream... I'm sick of this graph:



Anyway, I've made a lot of changes since the last update and I'll summarise them here. More updates are still to come to fix bugs and such but I wanted to keep you all in the loop on what I've been doing (and I really wanted to use the Trump Interview Meme format before it dies):

• Stats in the stats screen (under the play menu) were not working correctly at all. They have been fixed and enhanced to also show seconds for the total time played for each mode
  
• Music bars have been made less hyperactive
  
• Some extra logging in the log file to easier identify future issues
  
• Youtube View mode now works as intended (the background elements were not disappearing as expected)
  
• Fixed some achievements that were reported to be broken
  
• Vecter only supports a maximum of 100 mp3s now. This is because unlimited songs was causing performance issues
  
• Game no longer hangs when going to the next/previous songs
  
• Framerate limiter has been re-enabled to 110% of you screen's refresh rate. So a 60Hz screen will be locked at 66fps. This has been done to reduce GPU usage on higher-end GPUs
  
• The game no longer freezes the first time you open the play menu (or shouldn't anyway)
  
• Fixed the stencils so you don't get city on top of mountains on top of palm trees anymore
  
• Tutorial text no longer overlaping
  
• Texts no longer shaking on the screen
  
• Cityscape should have less of a performance impact
  
• Massive performance improvement after moving some code around
  
• Hopefully no more hangs of any kind, even when picking up extra lives
  
• Updated to unity 2020.1.1
  

To drive the point home about all the performance improvements, this is Vecter running on my dev machine. Specs are in the video and the framerate is SOLID:

EDIT: Video currently disabled to remove some sound from it. Sorry about that, will be back shortly.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hi! Yeah... It runs better now! Go try it out!

EDIT: YouTube View Mode is broken, it will be fixed next update. I wanted to get this out quickly so people can experience the game smoother.

I've also increased the draw distance by a bit and may increase it further if I can make some more tweaks and improvements.

Oh I've also unlocked the frame-rate. If you want to keep it locked at your screen's refresh rate turn on V-sync in the options menu.

One dude in one Steam thread asked for Vecter to support screens in portrait mode because he has an arcade machine which has the screen in portrait. As a big fan of arcade machines myself, as you all know, I want to honour this brave individual, so now the UI scales to fit pretty much any aspect ratio, portrait or landscape or even square.

I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't always look good in portrait as I wanted a quick-ish solution. But over time I hope to work a little more on it so it better uses the screen in that format.



In the process, I also upgraded from Unity 2019 to Unity 2020. I wouldn't be able to tell you what's new and different in 2020 vs 2019, hopefully, it doesn't have a Pandemic mode in there. However, I like keeping Vecter on the latest version as it makes it a lot easier on me to upgrade often and quickly then do an upgrade every year or so and find out that 20 million things are no longer compatible and I have to fix half the game.



Did you know I have a Twitter account? Follow me on twitter! Why? I dunno man why does anyone follow anyone on Twitter...

If the menus look a little different than they used to, this is a consequence of the new portrait support. Please let me know if there are menus you cant read / use because they are too big/small / don't fit.

On a totally unrelated note, have you guys seen the Bitcoin prices recently? Crazy...



Aright... well it's a Sunday so have a great remainder of the weekend everyone. Hopefully, it all goes nice and quiet for you. I'm going to spend the rest of it probably in bed with my feet up and eating ice cream.

All the best!
"Tara's Anus"

So I've been doing some updates behind the scenes, nothing major just normal Beta work and thought I accumulated enough to post an update on how things are going. But before that I want to celebrate 666 reviews on Steam!!!

Thank you all for submitting your reviews of Vecter, they are much appreciated and help the game grow and gain more visibility on steam. It also helps people a lot, once we go out of Early Access, to make an informed decision on what they're downloading. I know it's free but sometimes even free is too big a cost when you have no time and need to know what you're getting into before downloading.

To celebrate this arbitrary milestone I've picked, I've made seed 6666666666 be a special seed with a special YouTube video that describes my feelings towards 666 perfectly.



So what else have I been doing?

If you were playing two or three days ago you might have noticed that the YouTube videos weren't working particularly well. There was a change in how YouTube works, but luckily the guy that made the plugin Vecter uses to play videos (Kelvin) fixed it within a few hours of me reporting the issue and we got Vecter back to normal really quickly. Thank you Kelvin once again, and here's a link to the asset I use to play videos in-game. It's good, it works and the dev is awesome!

What else what else?

Oh yeah! There's a new easter egg submitted by "missingusername" from discord. I'm not going to tell you how to get it tho' go on Discord and ask him yourself. Oh and there's an achievement tied to it if you do get it, because achievements are cool.



And apart from that a few bug fixes:
- Fixed the game running at 1 fps in the play menu if your system date was different than the server date.
- Fixed resolution picker in options menu not working correctly

And that's it really. Hope you enjoy and let me know what else is broken...

Pace!

P.S. I know it's not my best meme-work but I still wanted a meme! Bad meme better than no meme!

[h2]TL;DR:[/h2] A few people have requested Vecter on GeForce Now. I'd like to see it on there as well, so if you agree help by voting and commenting on the links bellow.

Upvote this comment: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/gfn-game-requests/44/255981/request-a-new-game/2787671/

Comment on this thread, mentioning that you'd like Vecter on GeForce Now: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/discover/255981/request-a-new-game/

[h2]Too Long but I'd like to read it anyway:[/h2]

A few people on discord, and twitter, and from the GeForce Now surbreddit have expressed their desire to have Vecter on the GeForce Now game streaming platform.

WTH is GeForce Now: It's a service provided by Nvidia, that also has a free tier, which allows you to play your Steam games on their servers and stream the video to your computer or phone (or Nvidia Shield, if you have one).

However, you can't play any game you want due to licensing issues with the various publishers of AAA titles, so Nvidia have made it a popularity contest: Only developers that apply and games that are very popular and requested by the community get added to their servers.

I've done everything I needed to on my side to apply, but now I need you guys to help me out and create some noise. This would allow people with good internet but slow computers or no computers at all to give Vecter a try, still for free!

So please upvote my comment, and comment yourselves as well to get Nvidia's attention. Hopefully if enough of us do it we'll manage to stream Vecter to random computer devices we own Soon (TM).