VEIN News: Sokudo Commute

Hi everyone, and welcome to our bimonthly news update. We've been making steady progress towards integrating some of the new art, doing some 0.025 work, and as usual, bugfixes.

As is normal, the updates in this column are not live but are in the experimental Steam beta branch. Let's get into it.

This week we dropped Hotfix 5/6. These had a host of bugfixes, which you can read in the Steam announcements here and here. Our main reason for releasing these was just because we had a host of bugfixes piled up in the month since the last hotfix, and figured we may as well push it out. We also found a compression method for game content that worked significantly better than the one we were using, so the game content filesize has been cut in half losslessly.

We're continuing to work on controller support. We've separated gamepad and keyboard/mouse keybinds in the settings menu, and added slider and focus support to a lot of UI elements. We still have a lot of work to do though before gamepad support is up to parity with other modern games. There is a lot of UI in Vein.

I've done some work on HLODs. These are low-render-quality blobs that look similar to buildings or mountains that are meant to stand in for far-away details. If you're far away we show the HLOD to save on performance, and if you get close enough they're hidden and replaced with the real thing. We've been doing something similar to show distant mountains, but these are much more accurate to the real image and can include things like trees and buildings. If we do these correctly we should be able to have dense forests and landscape viewable from far away without performance cost.

Zoe has been continuing work on the north section of Westwood and has been working on detailing some unique interiors for the new buildings.

I've done some work on utility cabinet performance. For singleplayer, this doesn't really affect much, but it should definitely help with multiplayer server performance. Whenever anything was built or destroyed, all UCs would have to recompute if they're 'covering' the built or destroyed thing, so that the thing would decay. On a dedicated server with dozens of UCs, this performance cost added up quickly and we noticed it was a major bottleneck. It should be fixed for the next update. Having the server perform well is a preliminary step in improving desync and rubberbanding.

Zoe has done design work on the vehicles in preparation for replacing all of their art. All the vehicles in the game now have real-life analogues; some have been renamed to support this. I've been working on getting the new vehicle art ready to integrate. In case you missed it, the new vehicles have animated dash readouts and steering wheels, glove boxes, hoods, trunks, gas covers, doors, removable seats, etc. but this all takes a bit of time to integrate into the game itself. They also have dynamic rust/dirt/scratches that will build up over time.

8z has been working on some structural support and physical object work. We've said in a previous weekly update that we're going to be adding standalone buildings, e.g. you can build a cabin in the woods if you like. However we want to avoid the Rust effect of having silly towers built up in the middle of a town that detract from immersion, without just telling you 'you cant do that'. So placed objects now have physical load bearing ability that when exceeded will cause the structure to collapse. It's still work-in-progress but will be in 0.025 if nothing changes.

Included in the physics changes are physical objects on vehicles, so now if you crash your vehicle into something we won't destroy the attached furniture; it simply becomes physical.

Zoe has done some work on damage profile rebalancing. To be specific, what zombies can and can't damage has been audited and rebalanced properly. We've also done some work on auditing zombie behavior in general and have a cleaned up to-do list for them (at least before the new character art is done and before we have the necessary new animations for them that we want).

I've done some work on integrating the new character. We've cleaned up some hair/clothing code for when the new character is ready, and I've been working on porting over weapon attachment positions (otherwise, things will float in the general vicinity of your hands instead of being held).

We've added a bunch of new zombie variants. There are about thirty zombie types now. You'll see zombies wearing sports equipment, zombies that worked specific jobs, various outdoor clothing types, etc.

8z has done some work on greenhouse functionality. Greenhouses with intact glass will keep temperatures warm throughout the seasons, and plants can grow relatively well inside of them. You can't build greenhouses yet, but the pre-existing ones should function well.

I've continued work on the new building maintenance systems. A building's dirtiness/mold buildup is now caused by its maintenance quality. You'll be able to maintain buildings by repairing them with salvaged items.

Boon has finished his set of blunt melee animations. These are much nicer and more impactful than the placeholder ones we were using. He's moving on to doing new animations for our Fifty-Seven pistol.

That's about it, thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.