VEIN News: Stunlocks & Speedometers

Hi everyone! Welcome to another bimonthly update. We've mostly been working on visual related features, but have done a few gameplay changes here and there, as well as some changes to zombies.

We're hoping to get out a final hotfix for 0.024 out in the next little while, so that'll probably be the focus for us on the gameplay side of things, but we continue to march towards 0.025's release.

As always the changes described in this post aren't in the main game yet. They'll be on the experimental Steam beta branch, but it's heavily work-in-progress.

First off, bugfixes. We've actually done quite a bit over the last two weeks, but usually we omit bugfixes from these updates because a lot of them are irrelevant to most people, and there's no point wasting time. However, here are some of the selected bugfixes from the last two weeks:

• We've fixed a bunch of issues with permadeath games, such as respawning UI, the death screen not fully working, your dead character's location getting stuck on the HUD, etc.
• We've significantly improved the intelligence of zombie pathfinding inside and through buildings. Zombies that previously got stuck trying to enter buildings have a much easier time navigating to you.
• A lot of UI bugs have been fixed, such as group menu UI issues, the medical menu jittering, and item key-values on the selected item screen not wrapping properly.
• We refactored and did quite a lot of work on positional VOIP in-game. We're very close to the point where it's properly usable. We've added buffering and quality improvements to it. We also removed beeps from the handheld radio when receiving voice, and improved the handheld radio audio quality.
• We fixed an issue causing you to float if you sat or lied down while crouched (e.g. in tents).
• We only display other players on the map when you're a host/admin if you have "See All" toggled on in the admin settings.

Like we said in the intro, we're going to be doing a lot of these over the next couple weeks.

8z has finished his new greenhouse systems. The greenhouses that you see dotted around backyards are now functional and will work to keep plants growing throughout the winter, so long as the glass is intact on them. We're hoping to allow you to build your own greenhouses soon enough.

I've been doing some work on HLODs. If you don't know what these are, they're like whole-map stand-ins for unloaded, very-far-away buildings/trees/mountains. They're working right now on the experimental Steam beta branch. HLODs mean we can significantly reduce how much of the world is loaded without sacrificing visual quality, which means way better performance. This especially applies to dedicated servers or in local multiplayer, simply because the host has to load less stuff.

Zoe has been working on adding building maintenance components to every building. These are how you check the status of, and repair, buildings. They may take up existing space where your stuff was, so apologies if that happens – you can move your furniture out of the way despite this.

I've finally finished adding round-by-round reload support to the .38 Special, so you don't have to play the entire reload loop from zero.

A lot of work has been done on the new vehicles. To start off, there's a new, much less grating car horn sound. Also, sounds like impacts, horns, and car alarms are properly muffled when inside a car. We've started integrating the new car art, which has an openable trunk/hood/glove box, animated gear shifting, an animated steering wheel/speedometer/tachometer, and more. Doors are open and closeable. It's still heavily work-in-progress though.

We did a few changes to zombies to make them smarter. They no longer prioritize animals as much as humans. They no longer collide with each other like players, so they can get closer to each other to squeeze through doors and windows easier. They also no longer stagger or stunlock each other when swinging at a target. We're continuing to improve their pathing.

Zoe's worked on some loft buildables. A lot of players are using items or pallets (or similar furniture) to build multi-level bases. While we are mid-development on art to allow this officially (with multiple tiers of self-built bases), we've added a few replacements for pallets that should be ready to be built soon.

She's also poking around save files submitted using the in-game feedback reporter for ideas for creative/decorative structures you guys have put together in your bases, such as walls and dividers.

We've redesigned map location markers to be higher contrast and more visible on the world map despite the map details in the background.

Some support has been added behind the scenes for weight-variant items. In 0.025 you'll be able to wield e.g. dumbbells as melee weapons, which have different damage and swing times based on their weight. We also added melee effectiveness: you need a certain Strength stat to effectively wield some heavy melee items. If you don't meet it you can still use the item as a weapon, but it'll just swing twice as slow and do half the damage.

Remancer is wondering what kind of radio station music you'd like to hear next. Here's a survey, be sure to check the boxes for what you'd like when you have a chance!

Ani has finished work on a set of bladed melee animations (specifically for machete-styled weapons). They're continuing on to work on an animation set for the double-barreled shotgun.

Boon's melee animations for long & blunt melee weapons is integrated into the game! I still have to do some work to add them to similar weapons, which will be a process, but we're happy to have them. They're moving on to animations for the Fifty-Seven pistol.

We've done some work on the landscape material during winter. Different regions (like forest floors or grassy areas) will have some variation in the snow material.

8z's finished his work on physical stress and structural supports. If you stack things on top of each other too high without any sort of support, it'll collapse the entire structure. In addition, strong enough vehicle impacts will detach things from the vehicle.

Zoe has been continuing on map work for 0.025. She's been finishing up unique point-of-interest interiors, items, and furniture. She's currently doing exterior detailing for the new area (such as fences, parking lots and streetlights).

Finally, in other news, we've opened up community translations for the game. A lot of non-English players have expressed concern that our translations are incomplete, apparently AI-translated, using wrong words, etc. We don't use AI in any part of development, and do use a translation agency for translations. However, they do sometimes miss context as they aren't active players of the game. There were also some errors (for example, in the settings menu, "No" was translated as "Yes" in Russian for some reason). In any case, this should help correct some of those; we'll be updating it regularly. You can find the Crowdin page here.

That's about it for this week! We're hoping to get 0.025 out soon as usual but there are a number of incomplete features that have to be rounded out before we do.

Did you know there's an official VEIN wiki? It's located here: https://vein.wiki.gg/. If you want to help out, there's a lot of incomplete info here.

If you'd like to help on the game itself, we're going to be hiring another intermediate-level programmer and a UI/UX designer soon, so if you have those skills, please send an email to jobs@ramjetstudios.com.

See you in September!