I've learned a lot from porting Vecter to Linux. I'm writing this post on Manjaro because it's my laptop's main and only OS. Linux has come a long way and I'm very impressed so I'll continue using it on my laptop. But enough about that.
Vecter 0.9.5 is out and for the first time, it's cross-platform.
You can now play Vecter natively on Linux straight from Steam. It runs well as far as I can tell but there might be a few hiccups I missed. If there are, kindly shoot me an email to [email protected] and let me know what's wrong. Or open a discussion on the community as I monitor it closely. There's still 3 weeks of Beta left so there should be plenty of time to fix any lingering issues.
The Linux release has also brought along a few changes, most of them good, one of them bad and one of them sad which I'll get to at the end. So here's what else is new.
The in-game leaderboard now shows a little OS icon next to the player's name to illustrate what platform the score was set on. It's not the most useful thing it but with future versions of the game on various devices, it would be cool to know what the player set the score on. This will also be a feature on the website leaderboard I just haven't gotten around to it yet. http://vecter.online/leaderboard.html
The credit screen now also shows the game's version in the bottom left corner. This is useful in case you get the "You are running an older version of vecter" message in-game so you can check what version you are on and then let me know if you're having issues. "But why in the world is it on the credits screen?". Because nobody EVER looks at the credit screen, even though there's an achievement attached to it, and that makes me a little sad. A lot of people have contributed to Vecter over the years and they deserve to be known!
The save files have gotten a bit of an upgrade. Here's everything that changed:
- The save files are cross-compatible between Windows and Linux and I plan for them to be cross-compatible between every single version of Vecter.
- Steam cloud will sync your save files between Linux and windows so you can have the same stats regardless of platform
- Graphics settings are now also tied to your device, not just your save file, so the graphics settings you set on one PC do not get carried over to a different PC. This is to prevent situations where you set Ultra
- High on a bulky pc but then install vecter through Steam on a laptop and it can't run because it can't handle Ultra high.
The bad change: The Linux version of Vecter does not support playing YouTube videos. This is sadly due to Unity (the game engine that Vecter's made in) on Linux doesn't support any of the video formats that YouTube provides (MP4, or WEBM VP9. It only supports WEBM VP8 which is ancient). I, unfortunately, have no power to change this and it's up to the people at Unity to provide support for these very popular video formats. Maybe in a future version of Unity that will change and if it does I will be happy to bring it back in ASAP.
The sad change: I can no longer justify hosting vecter on small sites like GameJolt, Itch.io, Kartridge, discord, etc. They bring very little to no traffic these days and having to maintain the launcher just for them is painful to me, not to mention that it ads extra cost to have it talk to the servers, host all versions of the game, etc.
So, as of this update, The game will no longer be updated on these sites. I will put up a message to direct people to get it on Steam which does all the hosting and updating for me, but otherwise, it will, for now, be the only PC platform from where one can get it.
So yeah, that's pretty much it. Remember that we go out of Early Access and into a full version of the game on the 15th of October. If you've been playing during early access not much is going to change for you, just a milestone in the game's development.