VEIN Weekly: 44,011 Points

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. We're currently pushing forward for our 0.023 release, and have more or less stopped working on new features outside of last minute bugfixes. We're aiming to get the update out very soon. With that in mind, our weekly updates are going to be fairly small as we are mostly just working on bugfixes or performance at this point.

As a reminder, all changes listed below will not be in a hotfix, but are on the experimental Steam beta branch and will be in the 0.023 update.

We've removed the watermark from the top right corner; it's now only visible in experimental in the bottom left. This should improve immersion fractionally.

We implemented a new utility cabinet building detection algorithm. Utility cabinets function differently if they're in a building vs. on their own; for smaller buildings, their radius utilizes the building size. We've altered how the algorithm to detect a building works to be more stable and fast.

We now smooth the third-person camera slightly.

Items that you've locked in your inventory will give you a prompt when you try to dismantle it. We figure that if you lock an item, you generally don't want to dismantle it.

We added buttons to the bed menu to delete spawnpoints/beds you aren't using anymore.

Items that are usable as 'general' items in crafting and hunting, like fry-able meat, general metal, or fish bait now tell you that in their item properties.

We fixed a very old bug where there was an invisible post on railroads that would stop your car dead when driving on them.

A lot of work has been invested in fixing lighting issues and sky light performance. We fixed splotchy wall artifacts by re-examining brightness levels and adjusting them to correct levels. We're also optimizing shadows, which are the most expensive (slowest) part for your GPU to compute. This is still work-in-progress.

Loot tables have been adjusted as usual to account for balance changes. Also as usual, there's been some work on the new map area, particularly regarding water bodies, rivers, and waterfalls.

Did you know hunger and thirst have been bugged for a while and actually do nothing at all? We've just fixed it. I don't think we ever received a single report for this. Extreme hunger and thirst will now damage you.

We also added a readout for the overall health recovery amount in the medical menu, so you can see if you're recovering health at all or losing it.

As part of our optimization pass I've gone through the landscapes in game. It turns out they were all rendering a lower-resolution version, and it was impossible to see the 'real' high definition landscape. I've also tweaked the landscape loading behavior to increase performance significantly (we've cut the number of polygons your graphics card has to process in half when outdoors).

Dead animals and corpses are now not removed if there are players nearby. You should never see persistent corpse pop-in anymore.

Finally, we added new stat book art, courtesy of Mood.

So that's about it for this week! Like we wrote in the intro, we are really close to 0.023's release, so weekly updates until that is out will be fairly sparse as most of what we're doing is final last-minute polish and performance work, which is largely invisible.

It's also tax time in Canada, so there's a lot of other administrative things we're doing on top of hiring for open art and programming roles.

We're also happy to say that some of the team is heading to GDC in a couple weeks, so if you're there, feel free to send us a message and say hi.

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!