*DECODED:....
...TRANSMISSION BEGIN:*

Greetings agent!
I'm sure by now your skills to observe and deduce are infallible. But have you been training your speed and reflexes adequately?

One of us at HQ developed something that could prove a great exercise for you: WarpThrough!

This "Two dimensional action platformer" may be a bit different than the assignments we've given you so far, but I hope you'll give it a try!

You can find WarpThrough over here on Steam

I've heard there's a "Demo" available for free to try out, but that's probably just communist propaganda...

Stay vigilant agent!

HQ out.

*TRANSMISSION END.*

Good news everybody!

Valve has now fixed the issues in SteamVR that were causing performance issues and crashes in The Red Stare. The game should work correctly with motion smoothing as of SteamVR 1.3.19! Previously, the fix was only in the SteamVR Beta version from 1.3.2. This also increases stability for people with lower spec hardware.

From the patch notes: Fixed a memory leak in Motion Smoothing when the application’s resolution is rapidly changing.

Let us know if you run into any other issues,

HQ out

Edit: The good people at Valve have found a fix and submitted it to the SteamVR Beta (1.3.2)! We'll make a new announcement once the fix makes it into the main version of SteamVR.

Hello there agents,

Some of you have reported issues - major frame drops and even crashes. After some of you did a number of tests (Thanks MonkeyMike and others!) it turns out that the HTC Vive's fairly new feature 'Motion smoothing' is causing most it. This is a feature that is automatically turned on, but causes big problems in The Red Stare. So you could try turning that off in the SteamVR settings.

If that doesn't work however, pressing Alt+Enter to make the game run in a window rather than fullscreen has also fixed issues for some people.

We're contacting Valve to see if we can find a fix for it, but in the meantime the best way to avoid issues like this is to turn off motion smoothing in SteamVR.

Good luck out there!

HQ out

Hello there agents!

It's been 13 months since our program went live, and we thought it'd be a good time to report on how we're doing.

Right now TRS has a little over 38k downloads which, given that having a roomscale setup for VR is not common for everyone, we're very proud of.
What makes us even happier however, are the reviews. That we're at 93% positive reviews on Steam is awesome, but actually reading what people wrote, which is often either super encouraging or extremely meme worthy, has made our day numerous times.
The team has spread out across numerous countries and studios, but having worked on The Red Stare has been, and continues to be, an amazing experience for all of us.

Thank you all so much for being part of this :)

HQ out

The Dutch Game Awards 2017 happened last Friday, and The Red Stare won 2 out of 3 awards it was nominated for: 'Best Student Art Direction' and 'Best Student Game Design'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7qNP0L6HOM&feature=youtu.be

We are extremely excited and humbled to receive both of these awards for the game that we spent so much time on.

The Red Stare has been a foundational project for all of us. We learnt and developed our skills quite a lot by working on this game: it has definitely been one of the best, but certainly also one of the most challenging things many of us have worked on.

Obviously, there is much more that can be said about the The Red Stare, its future, us as a team, and how this will affect us-- but for now, we will be reflecting on what is arguably one of our proudest achievements so far!

Thanks from everyone at Play:D!

Relevant links:

• http://dutchgameawards.nl/2017/games-2017/winnaars-dutch-game-awards-2017/

#transmission established#

Greetings agents,

A few days ago, our radio operators intercepted secret messages originating from The Netherlands. After a few days of painstakingly decrypting these radio messages, we have deduced that The Red Stare has been nominated in 3 categories for the Dutch Game Awards this year!

The Dutch Game Awards is the annual celebration of the best games developed in The Netherlands.

The categories The Red Stare is nominated for are:

• Best Student Game Design
  
• Best Student Art Direction
  
• Best Student Technical Achievement

Or in other words, it's nominated for all categories it was eligible for!

The awards ceremony will be held at a secret location somewhere in The Netherlands on October 6th of this year, and several members of our network will attempt to enter the complex with a low-profile.

The decrypted message also contains an odd character-set that we have been unable to decrypt so far, but we assume that it will yield more information regarding the event: http://dutchgameawards.nl/2017/alle-nominaties-voor-2017/ If someone is able to decrypt this, please let us know!

We'll keep you updated on the latest. Keep catching those communist spies, agents!

HQ Out

#transmission terminated#

#transmission established#

HQ here,

More and more agents are joining the cause. With the following changes, hopefully even more people will join the fight! We’ve been working a lot on improving Oculus integration, and some quality of life changes!

Oculus

• 2-Sensor Oculus setup now supported! (recommended to use the Oculus 2-sensor 360° experimental setup[scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net])
  
• Resolved a lot of initialisation errors specific to Oculus.
  
• Fixed a bug where the objects sometimes spawned in mid-air, in the middle of the room, and/or not be properly rotated on the board upon starting either mission.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when using Oculus with specific room sizes, the respawning system was not adjusted properly, causing objects to prematurely cull/teleport/disappear.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when using Oculus with specific room sizes, pictures and intel attached to the board would disappear when looking away and the menu cards would be completely invisible in the main menu.
  
• The The Red Stare logo is now displayed in the Oculus Home menu (as of the latest Oculus update)!

Gameplay

• Resolved issue where characters in Mission L could hide behind walls for extensive periods of time, rendering the player unable to progress.
  
• Completely reworked and improved the folder and its interaction; fixed clipping issues.

Players spawning outside of the room:
Some players have reported starting outside of the room, instead of inside. This is a bug we’ve been able to reproduce, and the cause being third-party software interfering with the standard room setup. If you are encountering these problems, please only use the official setup through either SteamVR (when using HTC Vive or Oculus) or the Oculus application (when using Oculus).

Things we are working on:
We are currently working on an adaptive rendering system that will scale the graphics settings based on the hardware available. The ultimate goal is that this will provide you with the best image quality at the best performance tailored to you!


Have you encountered a bug on this list that still happens, or did you catch a new bug? Make sure to fax in the details below!
If you wanna tell us that one of the bugs you’ve previously experienced has been fixed, that’d also be great to hear!

For now, stay vigilant, Agent...



HQ signing off

#transmission terminated#

#transmission established#

Greetings from HQ,

We’ve been monitoring the situation and have found a couple of things to fix. So hereby:

• We fixed an issue with the navmesh for the AI that caused none of the characters to move for certain players (including norma, which broke the beginning of mission R). You may have to use the ‘Wipe Data’ card before starting a mission if you previously played the game, but encountered this bug.
  
• Audio now still plays when out of focus (We thought this would be too difficult to solve right now, turns out it wasn’t!)
  
• Fixed a bug where the camera would sometimes fly around when a mission had been loaded.
  
• Added mission names on the blackboard to emphasize that there are two different playable missions.
  
• Folder interaction is now a lot more reliable. Changed ‘Suspect info’ folder to only allow grabbing. It previously allowed swiping as well (Waving your hand across it to flip pages) but both of those systems enabled interfered with each other.
  
• We made sure the playerstart is always present, it used to be loaded in. This might solve issues for people that spawned outside of the apartment.

Room orientation

We also received some requests for changing the orientation of the room for Oculus players. This can be done outside of The Red Stare, by using the ‘Reset View in App’ function in the Oculus menu. So if you are getting dead zones in important areas of the game, use this option to resolve it!

Things we are working on:

• Right now we’re fixing a bug for Oculus when you’re playing with two sensors. We initially planned to only support three sensors, but hopefully will fix some issues for people with two sensors with the next update.
  
• Fixing bug where the menu cards are not displayed on the blackboard properly using Oculus (this may also cause pictures and intel that are stuck to the board to disappear when you look away from it).

Things you can do to bypass this while we work on a fix:

• If you are still experiencing problems with Oculus, you could try and get rid of the Guardian System through the Oculus setup (skipping the play area drawing step). This will force the game to fallback to the minimum roomsize.
  
• You can also try to setup the playarea to be just optimal (2.0m x 1.5m) through the Oculus setup.
  
• You can try and use SteamVR when using Oculus and setup the playarea through the SteamVR setup, instead of the Oculus application.

If you catch any bugs (or communists) that we failed to find, please let us know!


Thanks,

HQ out

#transmission terminated#

#transmission established#

Greetings agent!

We’re very happy with the initial feedback our missions received, and would like to elaborate on what we just added to accommodate your spying activities, based on tips from you guys:

• Fixed roomsize bug for Oculus with a Guardian System (room setup) that is less than 2.0m x 1.5m, which would make the room very thin. It now falls back to the default minimum room size.
  
• If the game is not in focus, voice audio (from the phone) will not play. Other audio will. Simple fix is focusing on the game (either clicking on it or alt-tabbing to it)
  This is sadly not something we can fix right now.

Please let us know if you find anything else to improve, and let us know what you think.

Thanks!

HQ out.

#transmission terminated#