Solaroids News

Happy Holidays! Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the Holiday season here in the US as well as from various parts of the world. A shout out to those that played this November even with the Steam Autumn sale in full swing.



Congratulations this month goes to morg556 with a top score of 154.6M playing with the Classic control style! I myself managed to end up in the 2nd slot with a mere 17.3M. Rounding out the top 4 over 10 million were R'kik D'nec and new player Astelan both neck and neck around 14.5M each playing with Modern (a.k.a Geometry Wars) control style.



You may have wondered why no recent updates, so let me take a minute to ensure you that work does continue on the game. Solaroids is a side project of mine, and this year we took on the challenge to do some major remodeling on our house, some of which we are doing ourselves. This has taken up a lot of my extra time and slowed development considerably. For a while I didn't even have my main development area in my studio setup as that had to be completely taken down and moved temporarily into storage in order to re-surface the concrete in our basement. I'm glad to report that I'm typing this from that workstation, and it is "mostly" set back up after new concrete and flooring has been installed.

I do have a few updates that are at various stages of completion and I hope to be able to get some of them out soon.

The first is that I've increased the amount of content that works with the experimental Vector mode. Things such as keyboard prompts, explosions, and particle systems have been converted. Vector stars have also been added and options tweaked so that you can play it in a fashion that is more faithful to the original Vector machines if you choose, for example, without bitmap stars and backgrounds.



Additionally, I've begun the process to re-do the options menu to support a future "theme" system, and expose additional options for vector mode rendering. As a part of this I've started implementing some CRT effects for additional nostalgia. Here's a sample showing an aperture grille style effect and scanlines.





Come join the (Solaroids Discord Server), exercise some much needed bragging rights, say high to other players, share some tips, and give me your thoughts about what would make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter on the planet.


Sign up on my Early Access Page to be notified at full launch across all platforms, not just Steam.

Cheers and as always Happy Blasting!!

Chad (kiates)

Hope you had a great October and a Happy Halloween! October high scores are here!



Congratulations this month goes to R'kik D'nec with a top score of 14.5M playing with the Modern control style! Kugelblitz, a player frequented in the leaderboards and a long time player, comes in 2nd this month trailing by over 5M with a score of almost 10M using the Classic Asteroids "Tank" control style.

Lot's of runners up in the over 1 Million category using various control styles. I look forward to the coming competition!

Come join the (Solaroids Discord Server), exercise some much needed bragging rights, say high to other players, share some tips, and give me your thoughts about what would make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter on the planet.

Sign up on my Early Access Page to be notified at full launch across all platforms, not just Steam.

Cheers and as always Happy Blasting!!

Chad (kiates)

Welcome Fall for the Northern hemisphere. September high scores are here!



Flu Orid is back and reclaimed the title of best player for month this round with 252M. Morg556 with great score of 107M takes the runner up slot. My attempt this round, and a bit late none-the-less, still got me a 3rd place score - not my finest for sure.

I see some new players this month breaking the 10M barrier with the Modern (Dual-stick) control style. Welcome!

Come join the (Solaroids Discord Server), exercise some much needed bragging rights, say high to other players, share some tips, and give me your thoughts about what would make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter on the planet.

Sign up on my Early Access Page to be notified at full launch across all platforms, not just Steam.

Cheers and as always Happy Blasting!!

Chad (kiates)

Another month and another set of high scores for Solaroids. Hope everyone is enjoying the hot summer warmth in the northern hemisphere and getting lots of vacations and summer activities in. If you're down south, hopefully there's a light at the end of the tunnel and Spring is on its way soon!!



The all-time champs have deferred this month to make way for some of the rising challengers - I didn't pay them I promise!

Last month Morg556 had achieved a top score of 73M and this month takes the lead slot with their new personal best of almost 138M. Congratulations!!

In addition to high scores, I've also been busy working on Solaroids in between trips and other summer fun. Not much in the way of visual features lately, but a lot of performance optimizations and internal changes to get ready for some new features this fall. To be honest some of the optimizations were driven by trying to run Solaroids on a mobile device - iOS in particular, but these are things I'll need for "other" mobile platforms and Xbox One too. But everyone wins, as now Solaroids is much more efficient at drawing Vector shapes, and HUD elements which should result in reduced CPU/GPU usage equating to better performance on smaller systems with integrated GPUs.

Come join the (Solaroids Discord Server), exercise some much needed bragging rights, say high to other players, share some tips, and give me your thoughts about what would make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter on the planet.

Sign up on my Early Access Page to be notified at full launch across all platforms, not just Steam.

Cheers and as always Happy Blasting!!

Chad (kiates)

• Fire on Aim can be adjusted via the player HUD when joining using the Modern control style.
  
• Adjustments to vector mode line thickness. In the future this will be configurable.
  
• Adjustments to vector mode "shimmer" effect.
  
• Fully separate Full Screen and Borderless option (on windows). They now work independently.
  
• Free Play mode can be "selected", so the descriptive text is shown even when locked.
  
• Locked features (i.e. Free Play) show an unlocked icon.
  
• Added Random Stage option (the new default) which will give you a different backdrop from the currently available 3 (soon to be more).
  
• Huge optimizations to vector mode drawing.
  
• Massively improved performance of drawing HUD elements. They should be much more CPU/GPU friendly on all platforms.
  
• Improved memory management which should show some small performance improvement.
  
• Updated framework libraries used under the hood, which includes bug fixes and performance improvements.
  
• Solaroids now runs with high priority instead of normal which will potentially help on systems that are running multiple applications/games.
  
• Better handling of language changes. This is mostly internal behind the scenes stuff.
  
• Re-designed internals of the option menu system in preparation for new options coming soon.
  
• Reduced continue timer from 20 back down to 10.
  

• Fix split screen vectors
  
• Better handling of vector mode characters. Still lots of characters that can't be drawn.
  
• Fix intermittent crash when switching back and forth between full-screen border-less and "true" full-screen.
  

• Vector mode is still very much an experimental mode. For example, some power-up prompts aren't showing the vector equivalents and keyboard keys, buttons, controllers, backgrounds, explosions, and missile trails/smoke do not yet have vector equivalents.
  
• Borderless window option is only implemented for Windows right now.
  
• Disconnecting an external audio device being used by the game will cause a crash/freeze on Linux/OSX.
  
• Some options and more recent prompts are English only or machine translated right now. If machine translated, they are indicated with an asterisk (*).
  

July has come and gone, and with that another time to reflect on recent high scores! Things have been a little less competitive at the high end, with the warm weather and myriad of other activities that abound, but some great scores and budding pilots none-the-less.



With no sight of previous two time champion GreyWolf, the montly title has fallen to none other than long time player Flu Orid with a mind blowing score just shy of 326M. While not topping their previous best of 436M, or the all time high still held by GreyWolf, it is still nothing short of an amazing score and still over double my top.

New challengers are rising up to face the toughest pilots at the top of the boards. げ with a solid 136M and Morg556 with almost 73M round out the contenders this month.

Come join the (Solaroids Discord Server), exercise some much needed bragging rights, say high to other players, share some tips, and give me your thoughts about what would make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter on the planet.

Sign up on my Early Access Page to be notified at full launch across all platforms, not just Steam.

Cheers and as always Happy Blasting!!

Chad (kiates)