VEIN News: In The Attic

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN News update. We've been busy hotfixing the game as fast as we can, and have released Hotfix 3 as of this post.

As always, unless otherwise noted, the feature updates described in these posts aren't in the main game yet, but they will be hopefully soon.

We shipped 0.025 Hotfix 2 on the 4th. That included various fixes such as fixing guardrails not appearing, fixing collision issues with arrows, and fixing vehicles falling through the ground on dedicated servers. The vehicle issue was caused by your game simulating physics on vehicles when dedicated servers weren't, causing them to fall through the landscape.

We've fixed an issue with vehicles falling through roads that are unloaded if you drive fast currently in the game for Hotfix 3.

We also fixed a pretty nasty bug affecting food decay. It turns out that regardless of your difficulty settings, most food would decay after 10 weeks in-game. That's been fixed with Hotfix 2. There are some other decay-related bugs currently in the game and have fixed most of these with Hotfix 3.

For Hotfix 3, we've also done a few optimizations for performance. Multiplayer should see performance slightly improved. We still have a long way to go though. Generally, we don't like doing too many optimizations in hotfixes, just because they can introduce bugs (which goes against the entire point of hotfixes).

Hotfix 3 also includes some UI fixes, crash fixes, some issues with e.g. grass coming through floors, and some item rebalancing. We've bumped up the capacity of some storage, such as utility cabinets, log storage containers, and wood plank containers. We've also tweaked decay for a lot of items and buffed the spawn chance of some key items in building repair and maintenance.

We're happy to welcome Boon onto the team full-time! He'll be animating all of our weapons for the next while, as well as some item use animations, throwing animations, etc. He's already gotten started on the new double-barrel animations.

Yan has more or less finished working on the new vehicle networking systems. They need a lot of testing, but we think they'll make vehicles desync far less and perform much better in multiplayer.

8z has been working on food drying systems. You can build a solar food dehydrator, which slowly dehydrates the contents when placed outdoors. Some food requires salt to dehydrate as an ingredient. Dehydrated food lasts far longer and has some unique condition/hunger satiation properties.

801 is continuing work on new road replacements and a more diverse road art set.

They're also working on the next vehicle replacement (the Hatchback).

Zoe's integrated the new churches, which have upper floors and accessible bell towers. She's now working on revitalizing the exterior details of Dannemora and Lyon Mountain.

Kyle's added a bunch of debug commands to test item balancing, so we can balance spawn rates a little bit better and check exactly how items are spawning. Tools are an important part of balancing a game of this scale. Using these, like we mentioned above, we've rebalanced the spawn rates of some important crafting parts.

Kyle's modified the zombie spawn system a bit. The eventual goal is to have zombies not 'spawn in' but simply exist in the world as permanent entities. For now though, some adjustments have been made. He's removed some unused systems in case they're causing bugs, and has increased the duration buildings are considered 'cleared' to 3 real-life hours.

For a long time, we've had two systems that we don't think any players noticed. The first has zombies become 'virtualized' when despawning. If you lock a zombie in a bathroom, leave and come back a while later, the zombie should respawn in the bathroom. Kyle doesn't think this has worked in a very long time. The second is that you can actually clear out zombies in an area, preventing them from spawning in for a while – but you'd need to kill thousands and thousands of zombies in an area to see anything noticeable.

Again, we're not intending for the current zombie spawn system to be the final one, but this will improve performance slightly without impacting gameplay (given they're not noticeable/functional).

Skyler's continuing work on new textured hair, and Astro is working on some corrective modifiers for animations for the new character.

Kyle's done some work on improving the placement algorithm in multiplayer to reduce desync when placing items and furniture on moving things, and has been doing work on refactoring how windows work in the game to get closer to controller support. He's also done some work on optimizations on the CPU side that allows the world to simulate faster when more stuff is loaded.

That's about it for this update.

VEIN is currently on sale for 35% off on a Steam weekend deal, so if you haven't picked it up, now's the time!

Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!