Just wanted to compile all the changes that have happened since the 9.4.0.0 update so they are clear and documented.

- Controller input fixed, controllers work again as intended
- Speed Demon issue with the ship looking broken has been resolved
- Non-menu texts (Scoreboard, Song Name, tv displays) now have their own colour in the colour picker. This is to prevent some users getting a black text in the scoreboard so they couldn't see their score
- Fixed shoot and boost not working on controllers
- Fixed a couple of coding bugs which would make crashing a bit strange...
- Fixed the camera issue on first load after the update that a few people have reported
- fixed a few more coding bugs that were generating errors in the log
- Traffic velocity on the X and Y axis has been limited. What this means is that a ship won't suddenly change direction at 10000 km/h and smack you into orbit without any chance of defending yourself
- Reflection bug where random lines would appear in reflections has been fixed (as far as I can tell)
- Combo score no longer appears in front of the colour picker (again)
- Track reset timer now lives in the top right corner-ish position when it's visible and adapts with screen ratio.
- Palmtrees won't disappear before being off-screen anymore
- Coding bugs fixed which should reduce framedrops
- Not all the pillars move in late-game anymore, only 1 in 5 making your life a little easier (hopefully)
- The palm now merge into up to groups of 5 in order to attempt to save some resources and improve framerates
- Scraping the back edge of a jump pad should now make you jump and not loose a life
- When changing colours it should no longer bring up the background if it's turned off and it should no longer dismiss the youtube video
- Two environment backgrounds should no longer appear at the same time on top of eachother
- The donation achievement will no longer be given without reason and it will be turned off for those who got it by mistake.
- Next and previous song buttons now work for youtube videos too if you are playing a playlist
- If you copy a youtube playlist and you have selected a specific video to start from in youtube (i.e. not the first video in the list) It SHOULD start from that video in the game as well
- Game should no longer error out if you're trying to play a private youtube playlist, it will just ignore it since it doesn't have access to it
- Optimized cityscape to have all the buildings in a row merged into one object to, hopefully increase performance
- Fixed bug where afterburner wings and backplate would not be totally black, but some other random-ish colour
- Fixed bug where afterburner animation would trigger for all ships in multiplayer
- Options and colour picker menu disabled in multiplayer pause menu because it doesn't fit on the screen.
- Hopefully fixed the slow-mo audio Hyper was experiencing
- Dissolve effect fixed on mountains and palm trees
- Extra logging when ship dies / crashes for future troubleshooting
- Fixed mountains being no tall enough
- The pillar generation has been changed to:
- Reduce the number of pillars overall
- Dynamically change how many pillars are generated semi-frequently
- The big wall has been altered to contain a wider gap but harder to destroy slightly
(both of the above were done to improve performance a bit)
- The backgrounds city and palm trees have been optimized a bit more
- Some other minor performance optimizations
- Cityscape no longer uses palm tree colour
- Palm trees and cities no longer appear briefly before being generated.
- Fixes to the big wall cause it was not behaving.
- Potential fix to ship being stuck on death
- Speheres should now hit you in hardcore
- Mountains and palm trees and buildings should no longer overlap

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.


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





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...


I was a little opposed to this one at first because "Vecter is not a YouTube player". <- This is the exact behaviour developers (all of them, not just game developers) should stride to completely remove from their personality. Humility is extremely important and I'm really happy to say: I was wrong.



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.


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.





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 .




<shamelessPlug>
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.
</shamelessPlug>

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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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!




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)

Made enough changes and fixes! Time for another patch update to explain what's been happening. Some of these were requested by you guys through the Community Hub and I am happy to oblige wherever possible.

- Fixed tutorial bug where the tutorial text would appear all at once on screen.
- Made the tutorial texts look a little better
- There is now a Sound Volume option in the options menu. It's called SFX Volume for Sound effects volume. So now you can adjust your music and sound effects separately.
- Fixed a bug where the game would hang after someone destroyed their ship.
- A tiny optimization that probably wont' be noticed at all in FPS but it made me happy
- Visualizer now reacts to youtube sound when playing a youtube video in game.
- Changed the visualizer to be longer so its more visible
- Made the mountains and city less tall so they don't occupy so much of the screen
- Moved the mountain a bit to the left so that it's peak is in the centre of the screen
- City generator has been modified so that cities now look better
- Spinners (The big washing machines in later-game) will now no longer let you enter their walls and pass through them
- First person extra lives now displayed correctly
- Indicator in the play menu to show if a youtube video was detected in memory and if it will be played in the background
- Option so the in-game music doesn't stop when you crash your ship
- Option to not roll the camera with the ship
- Option to turn vsync on/off
- Lines on the road no longer disappear on very narrow roads
- Youtube video now spins with the camera and stays in place which makes visibility more plesant

• You can no longer roll when accelerating when using the double tap dash mode. This is to prevent people accidentally dashing when they don't mean to
  
• The double tap window has been reduced, also to hopefully prevent people from dashing by accident
  
• Stuff now flashes when hit by bullets to signal that they are destructable
  
• Bullet travel distance has been doubled
  
• Started a redesign of the tutorial prompts. They are a bit ugly now and will probably look even worse in multiplayer, but at least they appear 100% of the time. Sorry this feature is a bit incomplete but need to push out this bugfix
  
• Fixed a bug where the drawer would get bored and no longer draw the road randomly
  
• Dashing using the break should behave now like it used to
  
• Guns are working in casual
  
• Extra lives in casual no longer give you insane speed
  
• STEAM CLOUD SAVE TURNED ON AND WORKING! (Wolooloo)
  
• Fixed a bug where you would get infinite max speed in some seeds
  
• Tweaked the controls a bit to make the ship handling sharper
  
• Dashes are now interruptible. If you release the arrow key it will pretty much cancel the dash. The animation of ship spinning will still play tho'
  
• Road bits flying away to form a gap will no longer kill you if they hit you
  
• Adjusted the colliders on traffic as they were too big, causing unfair deaths
  
• Screensaver ship no longer shows during shadow playback
  
• Fixed a rare bug where the ship would "Drop its middle section" at the beginning of a run
  
• Positions in the Play Menu in the top right now start from 1 and not 0
  
• Extra lives will no longer get stuck in their expanded form, blocking a player's view

If you're interested just in the release notes, you can find them at the bottom of this post, but if you're also interested in my excitement and feelings + some in-game hidden gems, read on.



I finally happened! I finally found a way to integrate guns in a way I'm happy with that affects the game-play but not change it completely. I can finally change the game's description in steam and everywhere else on the internet. It's an amazing day!

Oh dear... I just realized I have to add a whole new section to the user guide... Damn... In case you don't know of the user guide's existance, there is a button in the game's main menu to reach it. You could also click here to get to it, but might want to finish reading this first. I'll add all the new bits to it after this update goes live.



The guns are bound by default to Space Bar on the Keyboard, and Right Bumper on Xbox / PS controllers (or R2 as PlayStation refers to it).

The guns are powerful, especially at later upgrade levels, however their usage comes at a considerable cost: Each bullet drains your high score, and the more guns you have, the more bullets you fire, the faster your score goes down. So being stingy is a really good strategy, or not? What do I know.

However, guns are not the only thing I've added ;) There's one more new mechanic.

Sometimes, all you need in life is a good kick in the ass. This is the button that applies that! At ship Level 3 you will unlock the Afterburner. Press the Left Control or down on the Left Stick on your controller and you will shoot off at double your max speed, and start slowing down from there.

However, this little trick costs a whole extra life to activate, so time it wrong and it just might be the end of your run.



A LOT of people have been asking for Spotify integration. Listen, I would really love to give you that, I would, but Spotify have a very strict policy on using their platform in other software. So it's probably not going to happen.

So here's something better: Start the game, start a run, Pause, Alt+Tab, open a youtube video, copy the url, Alt+Tab back into the game. Video in the sky!!!

Now you don't have to do it in that order. All you need to do is copy a video url and the game will pick it up from memory if it's the last thing you copied.

Sadly, right now it doesn't support YouTube streams as they appear to work a little different to youtube videos. But it's something I have my eye on for adding in the future as it would be absolutely insane to just stream "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" straight in-game.

In case you don't know what I'm on about:

• New mechanic: Guns
  
• Pillars, Windmills, The pillars on the bonus gates, Traffic and Spheres can be destroyed with guns.
  
• New mechanic: Afterburner
  
• New feature: You can now play YouTube videos in the background of levels in the sky. Just go to YouTube, copy the url from your browser tab and then switch back to the game, it should pick it up automatically.
  
• New obstacles: Spinners
  
• Polls have learned how to levitate and dance.
  
• Screen added in the main menu to show what your next ship upgrade is and how much points you need to get it
  
• Draw distance increased by 30%
  
• You now get more extra lives the more your ship gets upgraded.
  
• New tutorial prompts added for shoot and boost mechanics.
  
• Shadow names above players simplified for performance improvements, but are now less readable. Will look at fixing this in a patch.
  
• Button combination "Select + Shoot" now turns the UI on/off just like Ctrl+U does, so you can turn off the UI from a controller as well
  
• There is now a little text under each controller in the "Play" Menu which tells you which button to hold in order to activate multiplayer
  
• The window that shows your scores in the play menu now also shows your position on the leaderboard
  
• Textboxes now have a blinking cursor position indicator so that you know they are textboxes
  
• You can now copy and paste seeds into the seed textbox in the play menu, so you no longer have to type them in manually.
  
• Skyways no longer appear as often

• Player Names menu updated to new UI and fixed.
  
• Change Colour Scheme achievement now works again.
  
• Shadow playbacks no longer interrupt early
  
• You can't get on the leaderboard by watching a shadow playback anymore
  
• Added some loading screens here and there when the internet connection is causing delays
  
• Fixed a little knob thing floating in your face in first person mode inside of the ship

• Rewrite of the code that detected ship steering to improve performance
  
• Caching done on the input detector code per frame since there is no need to call the same logic a million times to get the same result
  
• Spawn-in animations are turned off for Low and UltraLow graphics settings to get some performance improvements for lower-end machines.

I don't want to give anything away, I just want you guys to watch and hopefully get excited like me right now.