Veck Special Edition
Just when you thought I was working on Veck 2, I hit you with another surprise - The Special Edition of the original Veck has been released! With girlfriend-amusing rumble effects and a starfield that makes you fall off your chair when you’re drunk and playing with the lights off, it’s as much fun as the original, but more Special.
This ought to hold you lot over while I put the finishing touches on V2 
April 8th, 2007 at 4:25 am
thx man
BUT can’t play it
got a access violation error at address 00461CD3 in module veck.exe
I can hear the music but can’t play
April 8th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Try playing with keys only. Any luck? It’s just a rush-job, using the old dodgy controller code.
Also try setting both of the rumble sliders to 0%, if your pad doesn’t support rumble. There’s no error checking, nor am I much inclined to actually go and put any in at this stage
It SHOULD fail silently but you never know.
April 8th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Awesome.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Same here - got a access violation error at address 00461CD3 in module veck.exe
Tried your fix - still no joy - help !
Looks good - wanna play - DOH !!!!!! ; )
Cheers.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Wow, I sure do suxs at teh coding.
Cheers for the feedback lads - I’ll slap some exception trapping stuff around the likely offending routines. Watch this space.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Whenever the game asks for “a key or a button”, and you press one of the sticks, it gives you the violation error. This goes for the title as well as the high-score screen. Hope that narrows it down some.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Yep, same violation here. Better fix it before it’s reviewed in RGCD issue 2! ;o)
April 10th, 2007 at 12:22 am
What does it do if you just set up for keyboard?
I might just give up and paste Veck 2’s much smarter code in at this stage
April 10th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Think there is a problem with the joy stick setup the second part. I can not get the direction fire setup to work right. But the game looks cool. Is the music in the game from an old Amiga demo? Sound very much so?
April 10th, 2007 at 12:43 am
i have tried it with keyboard but the same problems.
You can set up al the keys moving, shooting etc. but then when it comes to last screen where you can press f12 to reconfigure or enter to play the error pops up.
April 10th, 2007 at 12:46 am
Okay, I know exactly what’s going wrong, it’s a problem I fixed in Veck 2 quite a while back. I’ll just transplant the new controller code
I’ve no idea where the music is from, it’s just a couple of .xm’s I’ve had kicking around for years and years and years.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:17 am
All fixed. Re-download and have fun!
April 10th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
I ran the program, and hang on…
The music sounded in background (It was from the Commodore Amiga demo “State of the Art”), but an illegal instruction stop the main program.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:51 am
All the bits of the program that refer to DirectInput (which are buggy) are properly trapped. What are your machine specs? Are you running the latest version? What do you have the config options set to?
April 11th, 2007 at 6:03 am
You dah man Smayds s’all good now ! Thanks for a great blast !!
April 11th, 2007 at 6:06 am
That’s great
I’m a little concerned about the problems Javier’s having though. Hopefully it’ll be something simple.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Broken for me too, I’m afraid.
“Access violation at address 00000000 in module ‘veck.exe’. Read of address 00000000″ (helpful…) whenever I start fullscreened. Turning off fullscreen gives this recurring message instead: Access violation at address 0045D8A0 in module ‘veck.exe’. Read of address 00000008.
Turning off sound, music etc. doesn’t seem to make any difference, sadly. Win2000, DX9c, Athlon 1700XP+, GeForceMX Gfx card (which I suspect may be the problem due to its crapness!)
Still, looks bloody excellent!
April 11th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Thanks to Shiny, I’ve tracked this new crashy bollocks to the XInput routines I added. Suffice to say that XInput doesn’t behave according to the documentation
Fixed! FIXED! FIXED! BWA HA HA HA HAAAA!
April 12th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Yo! Looks cool but I downloaded “Fixed! FIXED! FIXED! BWA HA HA HA HAAAA!” and I still get: Access Violation at address 0×0045DAC0, read of address 0×0000008
I should …um… probably mention that I was running this under Linux but it would still be cool if you could get it to run with WINE. That is if you have a linux box lying around somewhere
April 13th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Start veck.exe with -log as a commandline parameter, and email the vecklog.txt file to smayds@gmail.com, please.
Because Veck uses DirectX 8, it should run under WINE no probs, but I don’t know how exception trapping is handled under Linux. That’s got to be what’s causing the problems, as the entire program is now trapped.
I can no longer spare much time for working on Veck SE, as I’ve got too much work to do on various other projects. Damned sure I’m not going on a witch-hunt for an error that doesn’t show up on the platform the game was designed for! At least I’ll know what’s causing the error, and I might be able to find a quick fix.
April 14th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Have done… the log ends just after ‘XInput Initialised’. Cheers!
April 14th, 2007 at 1:44 am
Right, it’s the exception handling then, getting stuck in the XInput startup routine (as the very next line in the log should either be ‘XBox 360 Pad detected’, ‘XInput not available’, or ‘XInput bypassed’). There’s no way to check if the machine supports XInput without trying to start it up and check pad status, and catching the exception if it fails (at least, no way I’ve found). I’ve put in a bypass - re-download the game and start it with -noxinput on the command line. That should fix it.
April 14th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Hey, I’m having an odd problem with my gamepad. I’m using a Logitech wireless PS2 controller through a EMS USB2 converter. Just when I thought I finally got the kinks out of getting the controller to work through it at all, as soon as I finish configuring the controls within Veck, the game runs with ridiculous amounts of lag, even at the title screen. before control configuration, it runs fine. Any ideas what the problem might be?
April 14th, 2007 at 6:46 am
No idea at all. I’m not buffering the controls in any way, simply fetching an update from DirectInput at the start of every frame. I take it you’re not having this problem with any other games?
If you run the game in a window, what are the two framerate values you get?
April 14th, 2007 at 6:55 am
I just tried Grid Assault and it seems to work flawlessly. Same thing happens when windowed.
April 14th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Well, no idea. There’s only one way to read inputs from DirectX and that’s the way I’m using. The only thing that can cause lag is if your process FPS drop below 75, but an old Celeron 533 could manage that…
April 14th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Well it’s not exactly lag, it’s like it runs smooth for 1 second, then freezes or stutters horribly for the next 5, rinse repeat.
April 14th, 2007 at 7:18 am
What’s it do playing with your gamepad disconnected and configured for keyboard?
April 14th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Runs fine. Honestly I think it’s got something to do with the converter. I’ve had other odd problems with it before… however, I just now remember that I’ve had it work fine when Veck was first released, so… I dono, very weird.
April 14th, 2007 at 7:47 am
That’s a very weird one. It’s definitely the input device, then, but I’ve got no idea what I could do about that. I’ll take a look over the DirectInput docs and see if there’s anything special about controller updates and the like. Might take a few days, but it’ll be worth it, as any results will be going straight into Veck 2.
Oh yeah - it’s looking like Dragon’s problem up there relates to his Linux machine not having a sound card - but I’m still waiting for a definitive reply
April 17th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Yay! It runs fine on linux (with a soundcard and the -noxinput switch). Wicked!
October 8th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Is it perhaps possible get the music from this game? The original had an .ogg file embedded into the executable but this one seems to use another file format entirely (.it maybe?). Either way it’d be nice to have the song as a separate download since it’s so awesome.