Messages

Few days ago I've sent an e-mail to Terry, describing some bugs and telling some suggestions. He directed me to this forum for a patch, and then I think it's more efficient if I post my stuff here too, so Simon can also see it.

I've already played the game on Ubuntu 12.10 system running on my Lenovo ThinkCentre M51 8141 (3.2 GHz processor).

I've noticed some problems, but I don't know if they're caused by my poor integrated graphics card or Unity bugs.

- I can't seem to be able to put the game to full screen. If I try, the screen doesn't fit on my monitor. It happens with all resolutions. So I found the optimal way to run VVVVVV is in x4 windowed mode. Additional note: it seems to happen to ALL games those try to set a resolution which is smaller than my monitor's native 1920x1080, so it's probably not a VVVVVV-specific problem - BUT I think it would be nice to support 1920x1080 and other widescreen resolutions then.
- But then the game fails to memorize that it should switch to x4 windowed mode when I quit and start the game again. (Strange, however, because it shows x4 selected in the settings, but it's not x4-sized actually.) It is addressed with the V2.1 patch which I didn't know about by the time, but it raised this bug instead.
- The game crashes when I press Alt-PrintScreen. Doesn't seem to happen in V2.1, and probably it was a random unreproducible bug anyway.

Also, I noticed the game seems to run with different speeds on better and slower machines, and this is odd. That's one thing that my laptop always overheats and thus the game becomes slower (so I practically cheated the whole game when I was playing on my laptop ), but my laptop is an unsupported hardware. I assume that VVVVVV runs with normal speed on my 3 GHz machine. But then, I installed VVVVVV somewhere on a really fast machine, and there the game was SUPER INHUMAN FAST!!! It was almost unplayable, since my neurons are too slow to process what's happening. Although it's still possible that that's the game's normal speed, and it runs slower than normal on my ThinkCentre. I don't know. If I see YouTube videos, however, it backs up my suspicion, that the normal speed is what I perceive on my ThinkCentre.

The point is that (aside from really sucky hardware like my laptop) you should optimize the game to run with the same speed on slightly older and super modern hardware too. Honestly, I don't know how the game is timed, and so what you could do to fix this. And I'm not even sure if others have this problem too or it's just me.

Anyway, I don't know when does Valve plan to release Steam on Linux; but if I got it correctly from your e-mail, you're also planning to prepare a Linux version for Linux Steam users, which is really great! \o/ I'm just curious, are you planning to celebrate the Linux Steam release like how you celebrated the C port of the game? I mean things like:
- Adding new content (levels, music, easter eggs, etc.).
- Adding Steam achievements. (That would be awesome! \o/)
- Implementing Steam cloud. (Personally, I don't really like that service for I find it annoying, but other players may like it. You can hold a voting on your forum or somewhere if you're in doubt.)

[V2.1]

Hi there,

I've reported a bug to Terry that the game doesn't remember the set Window size after I close the game. ("...the game fails to memorize that it should switch to x4 windowed mode when I quit and start the game again. (Strange, however, because it shows x4 selected in the settings, but it's not x4-sized actually.") Then Terry directed me to this thread to apply the V2.1 patch which addresses this problem.

Now the game seems to remember the window size... but the content in the window doesn't get scaled appropriately. No matter how I try to set another window size in the "graphics options" menu, the window size changes, but the content never gets rescaled appropriately. This problem didn't appear in V2.0.

A screenshot should appear below (if not, either it is not loaded yet, or my server went down again).



UPDATE: The content gets rescaled appropriately when I disable OpenGL support. Then I can resize the window with OpenGL support disabled, and the content gets resized correctly. Then I can even re-enable OpenGL, the content size stays the same. BUT when I change the window size again with OpenGL enabled, the problem is present again: the window size changes, but the content size stays the same (whatever size I set before re-enabling OpenGL). Phew! Quite complicated. Just ask if something is not clear!