VEIN Weekly: A-Frames

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly. It's been a relatively slow week for us as we work on more backend fixes and behind-the-scenes improvements, so this is going to be a short one.

We've been adding a bunch of new art assets in preparation for the new region of the Champlain Valley. This means we have to go through art, check that it's configured properly, and fix performance problems with it for every object that gets added to the game.

I fixed some bugs with trees that caused planted trees to not harvest properly. I also added the ability for plants to be perennial (growing back every so often).

We've done some more work on weather based visual effects to make them blend in more with the environment you're in. They no longer have effects indoors.

All the levels have been updated to no longer reference missing runtime grids, which improves level loading speed behind the scenes.

Zoe has been working on more buildings in the new map area, Westwood.

I've been working on some online connectivity work which will allow servers to have priority join queues and improved ping readouts in the server browser. It's still preliminary work but it's coming along.

One of the biggest changes we've added this week is the ability to spawn furniture and containers from the admin menu. This has been requested for a long time from the community and we're happy to add it. It may have bugs, but it seems to work alright for now. I think in the future we'll improve the UI for spawning these as well as items by making it more visual.

We've been working on some new features related to sleep and dreaming. We're keeping them secret because we don't want to reveal anything too early.

I did some work on the medical systems. Bandages will now get dirty while worn, and will need to be changed, or the risk of infection severely goes up. Condition effects like this now have the ability to have a percent of severity, so an infected wound or sterilization of wounds now has that attached. Different sanitizers have different sterilization effects, so liquor is less effective at sterilizing wounds than an actual sanitizer.

Skyler continues to work on characters, in particular texture maps and skin tones. They've also been working on female characters.

Yan continues to work on integrating the new save game systems, which will be much more robust than our current save game systems.

That's it for this week. Again, this has been a pretty slow week as a lot of the work has been internal and behind the scenes.

Also, we're going to be reducing the frequency of these updates to biweekly, because they (usually) take a lot of time to write and produce; time which would be better spent working on Vein. They'll now be posted on the first and 15th of each month.

See you next time!