VEIN News: Loon Lake

Hi everyone, and welcome to our regular VEIN News update! We're very close to 0.024, so most of the work in the last couple weeks has been polish and bugfixing as we are extremely close. Every update usually has this pattern - we try to reduce as many bugs as possible closer to updates to minimize hotfixing.

As usual, the contents of this post aren't in the main game branch yet and will be in for 0.024. They are in the experimental branch, however.

Specifically, some of the bugs we've fixed in the last couple weeks include:

• Werrenrath Island's house had some visual bugs in the winter, so we've corrected these.
• We fixed a lot of sleep animations for beds and couches that caused your character to clip below the bed.
• A few issues regarding chat UI sticking onscreen have been fixed.
• Some item names and art that were incorrectly set have been corrected.
• We did some fixes regarding furniture attaching to vehicles correctly.
• Soap smelled bad and portable toilets had no scent – all fixed.
• We fixed some cabinets opening the wrong way.
• We rebalanced a couple metal scrap exploits (e.g. you were able to craft some items for one metal scrap and dismantle them for 2-3).
• Some UI fixes have been made to the settings menu displaying incorrect settings.
• We fixed some problems with fishing where bait wasn't consumed.
• We've been working on reducing network bandwidth for a few costly methods.
• We fixed things like tents or objects you build not blocking wetness from rain.

There are others, such as crash fixes and more minor fixes, but they'll be available in the changelog once 0.024 drops.

Yan and I integrated the new save system. Outside of force killing the game, it is not possible at this point for a save to not fully write to disk. It's also faster, future-proof, and will probably be the way we handle saves forever. Your save games are future-compatible and you won't lose any data.

Yan is moving on to work on vehicle and inventory networking, the two major reasons for desync and lag. After that, he will be working on rubberbanding and character movement. As his specialty is networking, we are very excited for his incoming work!

New languages (Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, French) are integrated for the next update. We also fixed an issue with Cyrillic titles not rendering.

Zoe has been progressing with work on the Westwood/Loon Lake area. Exterior details, forests, street details, an apple orchard, docks, hunting stands, and various configs (zombie count, animal count, sounds, etc.) have been set up. We are very close to finishing the area and it will be in 0.024. I introduced a bug into the editor tools that I'm trying to fix that causes trees to appear on roads, so I have to fix that before the area is truly ready to go.

We added a restriction to console commands to disallow them executing if run by someone connected to multiplayer who isn't an admin. They wouldn't do anything anyways; for example you could give yourself an item but it would only be on your own PC, and trying to use it would do nothing but desync you and make you look crazy to anyone else. Regardless people were getting nervous about this sort of thing so we've just blocked it.

We added a "foliage pop-in" setting to the visual settings of the game. If you have a strong PC then you can crank this up to reduce tree pop-in.

I've done some polish on perennial plants and trees; they now have distinct art for having fruit vs. being fully grown vs. being a sapling.

I've de-hardcoded radio stations, which should be nice for modding in the future. We also added a new radio station with some of Remancer's new music.

Skyler has been continuing work on the new character art. They're creating preset head shapes and faces. We're still pretty early in the process but they're definitely coming along!

I wrote a tool to downscale textures that have a large memory cost that don't have enough data in them to justify it. So far it's saved around 5.5 GB of texture memory; I have yet to measure its impact on in-game VRAM usage. This should help for players with lower-end hardware.

So that about wraps up this update. Like I said, we're heads-down and are working as hard as we can to get the update out soon. There are a few more bugs to patch out but once that's done, the update's dropping.

See you next time!