VEIN News: Above The Treeline

Hi everyone! Welcome to another news post.

The most notable thing in the last couple weeks is of course the release of VEIN 0.025. It's been a long time coming; it was around 4 months since our prior content update. A lot of that time was working on hotfixes and performance upgrades which were released along the way, but we're glad we got it out and can start to plan the next update.

The update was mostly well-received. Long-time players really didn't like our weight rebalances to some crafting items; a lot of crates that were full of e.g. leather are now over-full and will need to be reorganized. When it comes to changes like this, we understand the frustration, but during Early Access we do want to rebalance sooner rather than later. We occasionally encounter parts of the game that are simply errors (such as an animal skin weighing 0.1 lbs.), and want that corrected.

Either way, we released Hotfix 1 a couple days later. We fixed an error with door locks desyncing on dedicated servers, meaning you'd open a door and on the server it'd still be locked, and you couldn't walk through it. This was due to us working on networking improvements and accidentally causing that part to not be networked correctly.

Also in the hotfix, we fixed some UI issues with the admin menu and server browser UI, which are due to us working on controller support & needing to remake some UI elements. Finally, we rebalanced some weights and increased the capacity of some player built containers to help a little with the new crafting item weights.

You should expect another hotfix in the next few days. We've fixed a notable number of issues, including some long-standing ones. We fixed some map elements in the new area not showing up (such as guardrails along roads); corrected vehicles not always spawning properly; more UI issues; fixed the melee view punch setting not affecting new melee animations; fixed prison gates loading in slowly; fixed destroyed corpses still smelling in multiplayer; fixed stuff decaying way faster than it should (including e.g. preservatives and stuff that doesn't decay); and more. We're very acutely aware of a couple desync issues introduced with 0.025 that we're working on as well.

In terms of new features, we've continued work on controller support. We're going to be shifting some UI elements around for 0.026, such as moving the stats and character menus to the Journal. We're also working on some new UI elements, like checkboxes. Nothing glamorous there, but it's what we're working on.

Kyle's done some work refactoring how zombies navigate to people. We're still working on this actively as zombies are quite dumb at times, and we want them to be more threatening.

8z has been working on procedural ironsights and scopes. If you've come across a red-dot sight or similar, you may know that in 0.025 and earlier, they don't function. They do now & are ready for the next update. If you're playing on the experimental beta branch, you may also be lucky enough to find some of the new scopes as well. He's also added the ability to toggle between different scopes, if you have multiple attachments on your gun.

Yan's been hard at work fixing bugs. He's done some misc. work on the 0.025 update, like making vending machines moveable, for example. Recently, he's been refactoring the 'indoors vs. outdoors' system. In 0.025 and prior, when determining if a water container can fill with rainwater after being placed outside, or determining if you hear wind, etc. we used a single flag to reflect if a player or item is outdoors. Now there is a system that computes e.g. if a point in the world is exposed to wind, or has sunlight, etc. which will make gameplay a bit more realistic.

He's returned to working on rewriting vehicle networking, which should reduce lag significantly once complete.

Skyler continues work on the new character hairs, and has completed optimizations for a large set of hair. I'm really excited to get the new guy in-game, as we get comments multiple times a day about our current character art.

Astro's continuing with rigging work (that is, getting the new character art ready for in-game use). We're hoping to have the new veinguy partially in-game for 0.026. He won't be in by default, but we'll have a console command you can run to swap over to the new art.

Zoe's started work on replacing our old church buildings with the new ones. We've had these ready for a while, but didn't want to do anything major too close to 0.025 dropping; working on the new area was higher priority than replacing old art. She's also doing some work on some new types of houses, which will replace some other lakeside houses in a coming update.

Adam's been continuing work on replacing placeholder art, and finished scrap metal sheets just in time for the update. He's going to be working on some yard/shop signs. We realized that a lot of our buildings, especially commercial ones, lack any indication of what's in them; the buildings are a bit non-descript. Mood will be working on some specific signs as well for our buildings once these are ready.

Boon's finished a set of throw animations. We have never really had any kind of throw animations prior to this, and our 'throw' is really just a heavy hammer swing down animation. In addition, these include grenade and dynamite animations, which we're looking forward to integrating soon.

Kyle and Yan have been experimenting a bit with integrating Lua into the game. Kyle's done experiments on this before, but we think we're going to be moving forward with this. Yan's been working on a plugin that brings Lua into Unreal Engine pretty seamlessly, and we think this is how we're going to start with modding. It's very early days though, and we do have bigger things to focus on (like bugfixing, network performance, and replacing placeholders).

801 has been continuing work on road art replacements. Our current low-res road sucks, and the new set includes things like attached sidewalks and intersections; we're excited to get it in-game. They're also working on the next vehicle replacement, the hatchback, which is going to be based on a Toyota Corolla Hatchback.

We've commissioned a set of female zombie sounds, which I think will add a bit of variety to them. It's been kind of silently accepted that all the zombies sound the same, but we'd like a bit more variance in them.

That's about it for this update! We continue to accept applications for programmers and UI/UX designers at jobs@ramjetstudios.com. We will likely also be hiring a 3D hard-surface artist soon.

If you want to contribute but don't possess the above skills, you can always help with translating the game at https://crowdin.com/project/vein, or fill in details on the official wiki at https://vein.wiki.gg/.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!