Virtual Skate news & patch notes

Winter Update is Out!

Better late then never they say, right? Merry late-Chrimbus and happy holidays! This update adds a new map, gear mod support, winter version of Seattle, legs! and more.

Here's what's been added:

• New MiniMega Map

• Winter Seattle Update

• Mod Gear Support

• Legs!

• Vert Overhaul Part 1

• Pumping (throw your hands downwards when going up or down ramps to speed up)

• Added Player List to Session Info Tab

• Added Mute Player and Self Function to Session Info Tab

• Added Player Names (Multiplayer > Session > Enter Name)

• Added Host Disconnect Message When Host Ends Session

This update marks a huge change in the game and underlying physics, some jank is to be expected. A multitude of bug fixes, and maybe some new bugs. If you enable Sync Mods in the settings, or download too many mods, you may experience an out of memory crash on Quest 2 or 3. We'll be working to patch this and more in the near future. But if you don't go too crazy with it, it's very stable. Enough that we felt it was time to let it out there. Hope you enjoy and join us in our discord if you have questions. Also Virtual Skate is on sale for $13.99 on Steam and Meta for a few more days!!

We've been hard at work for the first big content update coming next month so we really didn't plan to update for Halloween originally. We're a little late to the party but we're here with a little update while you all wait. Seattle has gotten a little spooky upgrade. This version of the map will stay until the next patch (late November), we may keep it as an optional night version of Seattle without the pumpkins later, but that's still tbd. Unity Security Patch This is probably a little overdue but we patched the game with the latest Unity security fix that resolves a vulnerability in the Unity Engine (and therefore Unity based games). You've probably noticed other developers doing the same recently. So What's Next? We're hoping to have a major update every 3 months. November 21st is our slated date for the first real update and we're working hard to hit that deadline. Not all that will be in the patch is locked down yet so here is what we can talk about. - A new mega ramp style desert map - First wave of vert/transition physics updates including a primitive form of pumping - Mod gear support (custom boards and clothing) - Various quality of life improvements (more on that later) - Maybe a secret or two We appreciate your patience during these long times in between major updates. We're a small team (it's basically me and Mike these days, but mostly it's just me), so things take time. Working as much as I can to make an awesome update worth the wait! Thanks again to everyone who's shredding and posting clips. If you haven't, join us on Discord!

Patch 0.0.2.1.6.0

- Connection Freeze and Disconnect Bug Fixed: Players who would join lobbies and see frozen people and get disconnected a few seconds later should now be able to connect and play without issues.

- Export Video: Export replays as videos directly to your Documents/Videos/Virtual Skate folder. Export button can be found in the Replays menu when you playback a replay.

- Causal Mode Added: Catch the board at any angle, auto catch when you hit something. If you fail the flip trick tutorial 3 times this automatically turns on, preventing people from getting stuck in the tutorial.

- Grind Pop Slider Initialization Bug Fixed: Grind pop slider value did not update properly when selecting one of the presets.

- Bail Respawn Removed: Bailing now causes you to stay offboard where you bailed instead of respawning you.

- Accidental Pop Fixed: Reduced occurrence of accidental pops and pushes after landing.

- Language Bug Fixed: Language is saved now and loaded upon start.

NOTE 1: The connection bugs will not work if you join someone who has not updated yet. So it may take some time after the patch rolls out for everyone to update. NOTE 2: Host migration is still not a thing yet, this means if the host disconnects, everyone disconnects. We're stuck on outdated Relay and Lobby packages and it's not natively supported in that version, but we'll keep working on a solution we just didn't want to hold up other fixes for everyone else.

Virtual Skate enters Early Access! It's been a long two years of development and we couldn't be more stoked to let you guys get a hold of what we've been working on. Virtual Skate is our ultimate vision for a skateboarding game, but we still have a long way to go. We just wanted to touch base before you guys thrash around and set expectations ahead of time. We'll also answer a lot of questions you might have in a little FAQ here. What is Virtual Skate? Virtual Skate is a multiplayer VR physics based skateboarding game where your hands control your feet. How many people can skate online in a session? Up to 4 people in a session at the moment. We'd love to increase this but due to the Filmer Mode which effectively doubles our rendering cost, and wanting to maintain cross-play and parity with the Quest versions of the game, we have to set a pretty harsh limit at the moment. We'll definitely look into this over time. What is the Filmer Mode Filmer Mode lets you pause time, rewind, then film yourself and your friends using a camera that you hold in your hands. You can follow skaters, zoom in and out, record, and even re-record replays before you save them. No more keyframes though, filming is a skill all of its own in Virtual Skate. I saved a replay, where is it? Replays are currently saved as non-destructible replay files, and they are saved per map. This enables us to let you refilm replays in case you messed it up, as long as you haven't saved it yet. We intend to let players refilm any replay in the future, hence the need to keep them as non-destructible files. Why can't I export my replays? We don't currently have a way to export your replays to mp4 format. But it's high priority for us to find some way for players to get their replay in a video format so they can share and edit them. On PC you can film much easier. When in Filmer Mode you can press the Right Stick in and the desktop/monitor will show what the camera shows, making it easy to film via OBS or other software. This is how we filmed all of our trailers. I keep accidentally flipping my board The designed way to not flip your board is when you pop, you have to move your non-pop hand towards the nose (or tail if you popped on the nose), just like in real life when you pop an ollie, you have to slide your foot up the nose. If you turn before doing that it'll flip. However we understand that this isn't a fail safe so we built a mechanic to get full control of the board at any time, which guarantees you won't flip it. Hold both triggers before you pop to make sure you don't flip the board. Why do they have no legs and arms? In Virtual Skate, we give you an unprecedented amount of board control. This means it's easy to twist so much that knees and spines break backwards, not to mention the hand grabbing the board can stretch far beyond the arms length pretty easily. So we need to put in a lot more polish and constraints in before we're ready to roll out full body avatars. When will full body avatars come? It's a pretty high priority but not the highest. It's a big undertaking but we aim to get it in well before 1.0 full launch. Will XYZ trick be added? Probably. We're obsessed with skateboarding and skate games just like you guys are. We definitely want to add darkslides, primos, late flips, no complies, bonelesses and more. Some will come quickly others will take a lot of time as they require a lot more physics work. Roadmap? We have a very good idea of what features we want to add on our road to 1.0, however we're just starting our journey and we need to see how players take to the game, what they find important, and what makes sense in terms of where and how to allocate our time. The roadmap will get more clear and locked in over time and we'll share our updates when we feel it's ready. Lastly.. it's early access. There will be bugs. Maybe even critical game breaking bugs. But we have to push it out there to see how it holds under pressure. This will help us make the game even more stable and get it ready for all the awesome stuff we want to pile on top of it. Instead of getting upset due to bugs in our early access title, please consider sharing those issues with us in our Discord so we can work on making the game better for everyone. You may run into performance issues when in Filmer Mode, we're workin' on it. We hope you all have a blast skating and making friends online. Join our amazing community on discord, share session codes, and post your clips! Thank you all for joining us on this journey!

With less than 3 weeks until Virtual Skate goes live, we'd like to thank our growing community for supporting the game and helping us get ready for the big day! I'm amazed at the budding mod community and at how helpful and welcoming everyone's been in our discord and socials, you guys are awesome! We will be inviting content creators and a few active members of the community to test the game prelaunch in the next week or so. But there's one thing we hope to get in first... We can't make any promises it'll be ready for launch, and frankly it's a bold move... but we want to at least provide map mod support for all platforms to avoid the headaches of installing mods and help foster the modding community and longevity of the game while we build out more content. We've been working on it for a little while now and it's looking promising... but anything can happen and it's risky to be pushing last minute features in. We have our safety build approved and ready for launch and if it seems problematic, we'll fall back to that.

Now on to the bad news... Multiplayer is not free or necessarily cheap. The demo was supposed to have online multiplayer only throughout Next Fest. Due to the surge of new players that kept coming in, we opted to keep it live to let them get the full social experience. But due to costs (with no way to recoup from the demo), multiplayer in the demo will be shutdown after launch on August 21st. It went live almost two months longer than we announced originally. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up, hope you understand. Anyways, looking forward to skating with everyone later this month! (Oh and if you haven't seen the announcement trailer...)