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!

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/


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).

About a week ago, a poll was run on the Vecter Discord server on what to port Vecter to first: Linux or VR... and Linux one by a landslide



So, that's what I'm doing! Because that's how I develop Vecter.

Sneaky plug: If you want to take part in the voting, join Vecter Discord

aaand as of this morning, Vecter has run natively on Linux for the first time! And I had my phone handy to prove it, so watch it here run for the very first time!



If this goes well, I'm hoping to launch it within a month. No promises but I'll definitely aim to get it out by the full release on the 17th of September.

Supported OS'es are going to be:
- Ubuntu 20.04
- Manjaro Linux 20.0.3

I wish I could support more distros, I really do, but I'm just a dude with limited Linux knowledge, so I can't offer a lot of support. Still, I'm making it and hopefully it will run on most distros and versions.

Anyway, as I was coding I was torturing the poor souls on discord with constant messages because I was lonely at 4AM...



STOP ADVERTISING THE DAMN DISCORD SERVER

Okay okay I stop I stop!

So yeah, Linux version coming soon! For the small small price of $99,95

IT'S FREE DAMN IT THE GAME'S FREE! Tell your Linux friends! Do you have Linux friends? I dunno whatever...

Pace!

Sooo a lot of people, mainly ones with more sensible graphics cards, reported that their game is performing worse since the last update. This is because I did a stupid an left the SSAA on for every single graphics profile. It was only supposed to be on for Max and Custom (if turned on).

Sorry my bad apologies I fix! It's fix!

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. It's the signal that signals siganlity of... what am I even writing? Sorry I'm way too excited to do this well...

Today, Vecter goes into BETA, which means that in two months time, Vecter goes out of Early access and is a full flagged-game. But what else does Beta mean?

In the standard definition of the sense, it means that Vecter is feature complete, and we're now moving into a stage where I'm only focusing on bug-fixes and performance issues, prior to the game's full release. This is a very important and necessary stage, as people getting Vecter NOT in early access are expecting a fully polished and complete, bug-free experience, and I want to give them that.

There are no major differences between version 0.9 and version 0.4.4.9 that came out yesterday. It's just a version number thing to mark certain milestones.

That being said, to commemorate this event, I've made changes in-game to signal everywhere that it is indeed a BETA. I've also changed the Steam artworks slightly to reflect this.

But to summarise all of the above


Also to commemorate this occasion, there is now a new achievement and Easter egg. Generously provided by gambit from our discord community. If you want to find out how to get this Easter egg and achievement, go bug him on twitter, I'm not going to tell you

Today's update comes as a result of a few requests from last night, which I found to be pretty legit. So let's explore what we have:


I know I just added the "MAX" profile yesterday, but now we have another one: CUSTOM. There are plenty of players that have requested the ability to tweak these settings individually so here you go, but for the rest that don't want to bother, the old graphics profiles are still there. If you select a different profile, the custom settings are ignored, but are still saved in your save file so that if you switch back to custom, your customizations are still saved.




There is now a small, satisfying animation that triggers when you smack into something and consume a shield. The camera shakes and the bloom goes really bright for a split-second (if you have bloom turned on that is, otherwise you just get the camera shake). You can turn it off in the options menu if it's not to your liking, but it is turned on by default.




- Camera changes field of view when you accelerate your ship again.
- Fixed some achievements that ware not triggering as expected.
- Fixed an issue where the game was spamming the log unnecessarily with messages.

P.S.

I'm going to start working on some colourblind pre-made colour profiles for pepes with this issue. I'm not colour blind myself so it feels a little bit like making decisions that I shouldn't be making. If anyone has any resources that I could read so I can understand this problem better and help me implement correctly HMU in the comments.

P.P.S.

Tomorrow's a big day where I'm going to announce something big and it will be the first of a few bigger announcements of things that are going to happen in the next two months, so stay tuned!

Up until now, in the options menu you had:
Ultra Low
Low
Normal
High
Ultra High

Well there's a new kid on the block called "Max" and he has one job: To melt your GPU.

Max is a work in progress, and is not intended to work well on any hardware, even high-end. It's designed more as a benchmark to how pretty I can make Vecter look before it completely stops running.

So far I've only added one thing extra to it: Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing x2. This basically makes Vecter render at twice your screen's resolution and then scales down that image to make it fit your screen. This makes for some smoother looking lines overall but it incredibly taxing on the GPU.

My GTX 1080 struggles to get to 60fp on 3440x1440. People with like a 2080ti will probably be able to run it at full speed tho.

More features will come to that graphics profile as I'll think of them, but yeah use at your own risk.

My dumb ass, in the last update (0.4.4.6) made a few changes to the way the game gets the leader-board information from the server, so that it's updated in real time, or as close to it as possible.

This introduced frame drops when its trying to reach the server to see if there are any updates, as it waited for the server to reply before it continued. That was bad design on my side.

I fixed it now so there should be no more frame drops, hopefully.

I've also made a change so that if you're at max shields, and you loose a shield and are trying to pick up a new shield while the animation of the old one hasn't finished, now it will let you do so. Before you could not have a new shield until the animation of the old one had finished.

I can't begin to really express how sad I am to make this announcement, but... EGX 2020 has been cancelled.

This is especially hard on me since I've been working on this arcade machine for the better part of the year to show off to people at this event, and have them try out the game and play together with them (That's why it has two sets of controls, because I wanted to play alongside you guys for a few days) but now it's just sitting in my house collecting dust.

Just today I made a change to it and added a high score screen to it so it displays bits of information on a loop.



I also wanted to launch Vecter out of Early access and make some extra announcements during EGX regarding Vecter and future plans, but now that's all a bit out of whack... I really don't know what I'm going to do next. I'll write another update once I figure it out.

Damn pandemic...

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why it was cancelled, and it's very reasonable. We can't risk people's lives just for a 4-day event, but that doesn't make it any easier to take unfortunately...