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 HUD elements which should result in reduced CPU/GPU usage, or at least better performance on smaller systems with integrated GPUs.

Thank you for supporting me on my journey to try and make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter. If you ever want to chat about Solaroids with myself or other players, or brag about your top scores and share tips, join the Solaroids Discord Server. It’s quiet there now, but maybe you can help change that!

I’ve also created a dedicated Early Access Page filled with, gifs, links, and a place where you can sign up to be notified at full launch.

New Features

• 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.
• 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
• 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).

Issues Addressed

• Huge optimizations to vector mode drawing.
• 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.