Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly, the first of the year! We're getting back into the swing of things now. Hopefully Hotfix 17 will be out soon; it's getting pretty big so we want to get it out as soon as we're cleaned up with major bugs. We don't want to ship another hotfix where we have to immediately hotfix that hotfix, which is why we're taking our time with this one.

As always the changes below are going to be in the next hotfix or update and are not currently live in your game.

Bugs

We fixed a big visual issue - during night, windshields should no longer flicker from headlights after the next hotfix.

We fixed being unable to withdraw fluid from rain collectors and fluid tanks into an item. There was a small logic bug in the code that we've patched for the next hotfix.

New persistent corpse art has been added, which should no longer flicker/decompose when you walk away from them. It also upgrades their art to our current zombies as the old ones were made years ago.

We fixed rain coming through domed warehouses (the metal prefab sheds).

A couple bugs have been fixed for the next hotfix to do with winter – you can't refill containers from frozen lakes anymore, and you can't wash yourself using fluid containers that are frozen.

We fixed a bad sofa that caused your character to float when sitting in it.

An amusing bug was reported that we fixed: if you loot a decapitated zombie's clothes, their hair will reappear above them.

We sorted through a couple of items and furniture that caused vehicles to flip out when you place them. This bug isn't finished yet though and we're still researching a good solution to it. The reason this bug exists is because we want items you place on vehicles to be physical in some way (if they weren't physical, you could place a chair on the vehicle and it would phase through walls). However, the engine doesn't give us a very good way to make them physical while not affecting the vehicle itself. We will find a solution to this eventually. It's also difficult to reproduce, so videos are welcome as they help us figure this out/give us test cases to try.

We fixed an age-old bug where suppressors on weapons on your back or hip would duplicate and float around forever.

We fixed some of the snap points on the car dealership being backwards. As with the vehicle bug, reporting specific screenshots of locations helps a lot.

We fixed the character selection window appearing after creating a character on dedicated servers.

Your last death location should appear on compasses in the next hotfix. I don't know how long that was broken for, but when players reported not being able to find their old corpses, I had to check.

We fixed a host of utility cabinet and base decay bugs. We fixed perks that affect base maintenance requirements not applying in some places in the UI (like in the utility cabinet management menu). We also fixed the utility cabinet visualizer not being correct upon the first build for specifically interior cabinets, and we've increased the resolution of the visualizer slightly.

We fixed a particularly bad bug where if you had two UCs overlapping one fortification/piece of furniture, and one of them was outside, the furniture would 'listen' to the exterior one regardless of distance. We think this is the cause of a host of reports of peoples' bases decaying despite utility cabinets being well-satisfied.

Finally, we fixed "insert battery" not being visible on items if you have no batteries.

Features

Drying racks will be able to dry towels as of the next hotfix. This is technically a feature, but it's small enough that we figured we could throw it in with the next hotfix.

We're continuing to work on lighting and foliage work. We've been tweaking lighting on the experimental branch just about daily as we're trying to keep the game bright enough to see in dark forests, but also not blown out during the day or too bright at night. We're also optimizing foliage slowly as we want to make sure it is better-performing than our old foliage.

We added some new music courtesy of Remancer. Specifically, it's themed around receiving and succumbing to the zombie virus, so you're more likely to hear it when infected.

We added unique soda branding and vending machine branding, courtesy of our 2D artist (and zombie voice actor) Mood. Mood is also responsible for the new magazine art, so props to him.

I've been updating and cleaning up localization throughout the game in preparation to have the game translated.

We added an upkeep UI to the HUD when you're inside your base. It tells you how many hours or minutes you have until the base starts decaying, based on the UC contents. We also added a 'decaying' tooltip to built stuff and furniture so you can tell if something's losing health or not in your base. These will be in the hotfix, because we think it's important (and we don't think we're explaining how utility cabinets and base decay works very well in-game).

As an aside, utility cabinets were only ever made for multiplayer bases, so that bases that are unused/abandoned get cleaned up. I don't know if having utility cabinets for decay in singleplayer is appropriate, but their secondary use is to mark a place as 'your base'. That way, zombies won't appear around them, players can't break in, and in the future, NPCs might come and attack them. Is there a better way in singleplayer? We could just say "if you've built something here, it's your base", but then because of how the systems in code work, moving a single piece of furniture would then mark a place as "a base". Also, having deviations in how game systems work between single- and multiplayer causes confusion. After that, there's questions of how large your base becomes based on moving a single piece of furniture vs. moving many of them, and where you put them, etc. There are many game design considerations here for us to think about.

We added some new UI animations (fades and tweens) for the next major update, such as on condition weights and some usable elements. UI currently uses a lot of Unreal Blueprint code, and we want to reduce our dependency on this as much as possible for future-proofing. If we get a UI designer on the team, or have to do future work on UI (like upgrading the visuals or animations), we want that to be effortless. We're also continuing work on supporting text scaling & making the text more readable.

Trophies are now equippable as melee weapons.

Finally, we now force a third-person view when exercising, as keeping you in an unmoving first-person camera while doing push-ups looks weird.

Design

We've boosted the explosive damage to metal scrap fortifications by 6 times for the next hotfix. It was reported that they were impervious to the point of requiring 120+ sticks of dynamite to destroy, which is ridiculous, so we're hoping this balances things out in multiplayer.

When moving items and furniture, Strength and Vitality XP is now scaled by the mass of the object you're moving.

We've reduced the change speed of the temperature of fluid containers (like rain collectors, fluid barrels, etc). They will now take 10 times longer to freeze or thaw.

Hydraulic tools are now waterproof, and we've added a new tool type for welding in high-pressure environments – the hyperbaric welder. This can be used for underwater work. Speaking of which, Azi has added a few more underwater points of interest to the lakes of the Champlain Valley. Expect a few sunken boats with unique loot. Once we add functional boats to the game, you can scavenge these sunken boats for rare boat parts that can help with repairs to your own boat. Boats are going to be much more difficult to find parts for than standard cars, and we want it to be a bit of a challenge, due to how boat bases would technically be impervious to zombies and raider attacks.

Finally, Azi has been doing some work on new fish additions to the game. We want fishing to be a complex system as noted a couple weekly updates ago, and the current minigame is unsatisfying, so we're redoing it. As a part of that, we're adding a few dozen varieties of fish to the game which appear at different times, in different seasons, and under different conditions. This is a part of our hunting overhaul which we're hoping to have in (at least partially) for 0.023.

In summary, it's been a pretty busy week for us. Again, we're hoping to get the hotfix out soon, as it's got a lot of major fixes for a few game breaking issues.

Over the next few months, we're hoping to get 0.023 out as well. We initially planned a few specific features for it, but it's been a couple months since we launched into Early Access, and we want to keep content updates coming. At the minimum, we want it to have controller support as well as Steam Deck verification. The current changelog for it is already pretty large; you can view the experimental branch changelog here, which can function as the precursor to the 0.023 changelog.

Bugfixes have taken priority since Early Access' launch, because there are a lot of bugs to fix. However, after the next hotfix or two, we'll probably stop hotfixes for 0.022 and focus exclusively on 0.023 work. 0.023 also includes bugfixes for major, systemic bugs and performance problems. For example, we rewrote most of the persistent corpse system to be way more network-efficient (and with GPU performance benefits too), and rewrote chunks of the zombie spawning system to not spawn zombies for a long time in places you've already cleared out. We don't want to add these in hotfixes as they might have huge issues that we haven't found yet (as we haven't playtested them thoroughly enough yet).

Finally we are still collecting portfolios and resumes for pretty much all roles. If you are looking for work and have skill in character animation, first-person animation, hard surface modelling, character modelling, QA, programming, or really anything, please feel free to send your portfolio to jobs@ramjetstudios.com. We are going to be expanding the team over the next few months and save every application we get, so don't be shy!

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!