VEIN News: Vehicle Parts

Hi everyone, and welcome to the new update! The start of July was a lot of bugfixing primarily as we're trying to reduce some of the more critical bugs while also keeping on track for 0.025.

For bugfixes, we fixed a bunch of physics issues and issues with misshapen prop physics. We fixed the placement angles of some weapons, fixed moving furniture resetting its scale (for example, moving larger flags) and fixed some flag placement issues. We fixed schematic 'not-high-enough-level' notifications sometimes being wrong, and fixed some issues with UI to do with firearm attachment UI, item weight displays, and performance issues. We fixed an infinitely looping sound from full sinks, fixed shot arrows being cleaned up regardless of being near a Utility Cabinet, and fixed some other miscellaneous crashes.

In terms of big fixes, we fixed the settings menu not always saving if you weren't using English or had a translation mod installed. This had been reported a lot, but reporting the language you use the game in is pretty rare when it comes to bug reports about settings.

We also fixed an issue causing vehicle parts and container contents to sometimes vanish. This was due to a fix issued for legacy saves sometimes having an incorrect ID in the save system, but the code inadvertently included an error in itself, so some legacy saves were affected by it. This would not have affected new saves. While it would be easier for us to just issue wipes with save-format-changing updates, we do try to keep save forward-compatibility whenever possible.

8z has been working diligently on more medical and condition refactors in the name of difficulty balance. It's one of many areas we're trying to improve to get balance working better. His changes are now live on the experimental beta branch on Steam. To complement this, we've added ice packs and suture packs for use with the new medical changes. I've also added some console variables for server owners to make hypothermia deadly as opposed to just causing frostbite and other condition effects, as requested by the community.

Yan continues work on overhauled vehicle networking.

I've done more work integrating Ani and Boon's new weapon animations. The Mosin-Nagant and bow/arrow now have appropriate high-level reload and use animations. I've also finished integrating the new 870 reload and inspect animations, and cleaned up some errors with it.

Zoe has been hard at work on the new map area. Some caves have been added, and work continues on exterior detailing and filling out buildings in the region. As a reminder, the new area will be smaller than the Franklin County area added in 0.024, with the purpose of getting updates with new locations out faster and more consistently. It's to the north of the existing Franklin County area. As part of this, I've been doing some support work on the side on a simple ski lift system.

I've done some minor changes on the feature side as well, such as significantly increasing the GPS' battery life, and adding notification grouping to prevent walls of notifications when receiving multiple similar ones (e.g. hunting results or dismantling results). 8z added a console command, ResetVehicleParts, to fix up vehicles missing parts from the save issues. I've done some behind the scenes work-in-progress work on procedural ADS for firearms, which will finally allow for weapon sight attachments to work. I've also added the ability to enter and exit box trucks from the side door.

We've increased the resolution of, and replaced some, low-quality building textures. This is work-in-progress. Our building textures have been the same since we started VEIN in 2022 and even then they were a few years out-of-date so hopefully we can upgrade them to be up to modern graphical standards without affecting performance. Zoe's integrated some new higher-resolution fences to replace our old placeholder ones as well.

I've done some sky lighting tweaks, specifically around dawn/dusk and night, to improve the appearance of fog and moonlight, as well as cloud coloring.

I've done more work on building maintenance. For 0.025, we want buildings themselves to require maintenance for upkeep; buildings degrade over time and will cause issues like brownouts, poor insulation, degraded water quality from sinks, etc. They'll require some small amount of scrap items to be maintained. Contrariwise, you will be able to scavenge materials from buildings that you're not using. We're also going to be using this system for custom-built buildings, which we're hoping to have in soon.

I've done some major performance work on vehicles. They're one of the primary contributors to bad dedicated server performance, and I've managed to decrease their performance impact by a factor of 3x. We still have to test to see how performance is affected on dedicated servers, but it should be ready to go in 0.025.

Remancer continues to work on the soundtrack and has produced two new night-themed tracks.

We're continuing work on upgrading our art. Our test vehicle, the Sokudo Commute sedan, has some new art we're integrating now. Our goal is to replace all of our vehicles with fully animated and modular ones: openable trunks, glove boxes, and hoods; animated steering wheels and gauges; removable seats, headlights, etc. We're in the process of going full throttle with this, starting with around 6 vehicles (including the school bus and RV).

We're also getting some new art in in the next little while; specifically for some unique buildings coming in the next few map updates. We're keeping a lid on what they are specifically though.

Ani is now working on double-barrel shotgun animations as well as some new bladed melee animations, and Boon is now working on blunt melee animations. We intend to replace most if not all of our melee animations with custom high-quality ones.

Skyler continues to work on new character art, and in particular, some new hair types. We're in the preliminary stages of integrating the new character into the game, which in and of itself is a very tedious process, but we're getting there.

Finally, we've started on updating translations for the game for the next update, as well as adding translations into Spanish (Spain), Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, and Traditional Chinese.

That's about it for news – time for us to get back to work!