VEIN News: Planks, Pylons, and Patches

Hi everyone! It's the 15th, which means it's time for our news update.

We released Hotfix 1 shortly after our last news post, and we're currently working towards Hotfix 2, which should come soon. There are quite a few fixes in it, such as correcting zombie inventories being infinitely large, fixes for some settings glitches, correcting sawmills giving way too many planks when full, a fix for forage-able plants respawning too fast, etc. as well as a couple fixes for issues that have existed for a while, such as the inability to destroy fences that have had other fences snap to them. There's also some network optimizations coming in Hotfix 2 as well.

Speaking of which, we'd like to welcome 8z to the team, our newest programmer. 8z will be helping out with bug fixing and some feature work down the line.

The programming team (including myself) has been mostly focused on bugfixes for the last while, as we want to get the hotfix out before working on new features and content.

Yan is continuing work on the a new vehicle networking system. It's being written from scratch, as vehicles are one of the biggest reasons for networking delay and desync right now. It's very close to being finished and we hope to have it in for 0.025. He is also working on fixing furniture placement desync (e.g. placing furniture in multiplayer not always 'going through', or positional desync of furniture placed on vehicles). After this he will be working on inventory networking (the second biggest reason for networking issues/lag) and then on rubberbanding/movement desync.

Some new custom churches are being developed to replace our current church, which is used repeatedly. These new ones have different layouts, sizes, and interiors, and have an accessible bell tower as well.

Remancer has finished work on the new radio station for now and will be adding more music to the main game as usual.

Skyler and Astro have been working together on the new character. The base character is rigged now thanks to Astro, and hair is in development by Skyler. It'll still be a few months before we see them in-game as there's a lot of animation work that has to be redone for the new character. I think everyone in the community knows how bad the current character/zombies look, and the new characters will be a welcome change.

Here's a default male character. In total there are 24 face presets as shown in the last news update. Believe it or not, there are about 1/4 as many polygons in this character as there are in our current unoptimized one, so performance will be improved when they're implemented in-game.

Boon has been continuing work on animations for the Mosin rifle.

For Hotfix 2, we've upgraded Nvidia's DLSS to the newest version (4.5).

I've worked a bit on getting Ani's new 870 shotgun animations in-game. It's work-in-progress; please ignore the warped wrist/forearm as like we've said above, the new characters are coming soon.

We've been working on the new utility cabinet system coming in 0.025. Currently utility cabinets control a radius around them, or if they're in a building, they cover the building and a bit of the area bordering it. In the new system, you manually put down flags or pylons to mark the area, and your maintenance cost is scaled by the area (so claiming a smaller area will reduce the maintenance cost).

The problem we're trying to solve with this is that a lot of players need to put down two utility cabinets to cover their entire claimed house and yard, and the boundary of a utility cabinet is difficult to determine at a glance. We're hoping this makes utility cabinets a bit easier to figure out.

I've also been working a bit on controller/gamepad support, and have made significant progress towards this, so hopefully it will be ready for 0.025. We're not promising anything though.

That's about it for this week - thanks for reading, and we'll see you next time!