VEIN Weekly: Matches & Meth

Hi everyone! Welcome to another weekly update. We're getting closer to 0.021's release, and have of course been working hard on features and fixes.

We've made save games more asynchronous, so they should save much faster than before, especially for saves that have been around for a while. We also added an autosave notification when this happens. In testing we reduced the hitch time to save a game on the full Early Access map from 5.0 seconds to 0.25 seconds.

Vehicle textures have been fixed up to include glowing headlights, which was an omission from when we first implemented them.

We've added tool ammo. Some higher-level tools were designed to have exchangeable parts and wear down over time, so they're not infinitely usable. We finally implemented this system. For example, for heavy-tier sawblade tools, you'll need to replace the blade every so often due to wear. We haven't balanced the system yet, so tools currently have a very high number of uses before needing part replacement. We'll significantly nerf this once we've balanced it.

Car keys have been improved with wireless functionality. You can now lock and unlock cars wirelessly, trigger the horn, and trigger the car's alarm.

We added lifetime stats to the game. These track things like time survived, zombies killed, and steps taken, and show them when you die. We also track these separately for the entire duration of your character's existence, as well as for your player (e.g. for multiplayer servers where you might have multiple characters). We only show the ones for your character's current life though, but might make use of the total character/player stats later.

For server owners, we've been working on a read-only HTTP JSON API integrated directly into the game. We know some servers are using log scraping to track player stats, so this should make it a bit easier.

We've done a little bit of work on making VOIP more audible and clear. So far we've managed to fix the issue with VOIP being very quiet for some players.

We added the ability to repair broken windows. You can make a glass sheet in a forge using either glass scrap or the newly mineable sandstone, found in caves. Glass sheets can then be applied to broken window spaces to repair them.

We heard that gas pumps were damageable and people were abusing this on some multiplayer servers to grief. This was never meant to be the case – they are now invulnerable. I actually had no idea about this until I read it in a community Discord server in a comment from months ago. Please be sure to report issues like this, even if they seem obvious, because sometimes we genuinely are just not aware of problems the community is having!

We added a recipe list to forges. When we first made the system, the reasoning for not including one was just because we figured it was obvious - you smelt a certain type of metal scrap to get metal ingots of the same class. However, obviously this was an oversight on our part as we've probably received a thousand questions by now about how to make limestone. This is now sorted for the next update.

We've made a few changes to how zombies spawn indoors. There were a couple bugs with the system we've now combed out, and in the next update you should see zombies in buildings much more frequently than ever before.

We added camera functionality, mentioned in the last post, to convenience stores where camera placeholders existed.

We've done some more work on general performance and fixed some stuttering issues. For example, there was some code that was executing once per second or so that would take way longer to render, and we've optimized it. Hopefully you will see some performance benefits in 0.021.

We added matches to the game, which act as a source of light.

Matches, containing red phosphorus, will come in handy when we add drug manufacturing to the game. Speaking of which, we've added crystal meth to Vein, as well as cannabis seeds, which allow you to grow cannabis. The point of adding drugs like this has never been just for humor's sake – when we finally implement NPCs, factions, quests, and storylines, we expect drugs to facilitate a part of the economy. People living in the apocalypse will have vices.

We added an "Eighty Four" anti-tank weapon. Fired from the shoulder, it launches 84-mm explosive projectiles. It's certainly overkill for the zombie apocalypse, but I've wanted one of these in-game for a while. You'll likely not see this spawn naturally in the game for a while, but you're free to get it via the admin menu and try it out!

You can now shoot through chain link fences, something we should have caught a lot earlier.

Stuff now falls off your vehicle if it collides with something. The reasoning behind this having an effect at all is because we wanted to avoid people building giant elaborate platforms on their vehicles and using them as base raiding tools, so we had stuff on your vehicle get destroyed if they touched something. This was really frustrating when testing as many objects would accidentally get destroyed when driving, so they will now just fall off the vehicle if it gets impacted.

Fire now causes a Burned condition. You can get burns from fire or acid exposure. Burns do not increase or decrease over time until bandaged; while you have an unbandaged burn, you will take severe pain penalty.

That's about it from the programming side of things! Over to Azi.

Hi! Lets hop right into it.

To start things off, all vehicle spawns now initially spawn less damaged than before. You'll now find that most vehicles have a "normal" amount of health, somewhere around 30% - 70% overall. This will hopefully make finding working vehicles a lot less of a pain.

We've added temporary barriers on main roads near map edges. These are super simple, and are purely there to stop playing from driving head first into invisible walls. Expect these to be removed as those parts of the map are developed.

The barbed wire defense is now all set up and ready to go. As shown previously, this defensive structure will snap on top of fortified fences and act as a crude way to hurt any intruders climbing into your base.

Item spawners have been added on the shelves in the Redford & Saranac convenience stores. As expected, these'll spawn a variety of foods and drinks.

Weapon and ammo spawns have been spread out even more so you don't need to rely as much on finding weapon cases. Ranged weapons will still be rare, of course, with higher tiered weapons being even rarer – basically, we don't want to restrict them to just these weapon cases. Expect to see weapons spawn inside containers like residential desks and closets. We'll make tweaks for this as we go, so if you're finding that spawns are too common now, please let us know!

And as always, the map work for the initial Early Access launch is still chugging along. As of right now, about half of the map's unique interiors are now detailed and ready to be tested, with an exterior detail pass to follow.

Finally, it's been asked about for a while, but I'd like to have the in-game map for the initial Early Access launch be drawn like how it was in the past. For those who weren't around in the early days, VEIN's in-game map looked a little like this:

The new drawn map will likely have more markers, especially with the inclusion of more caves, but this is generally how it'll look.

That about it for me though, thanks for reading!

So that's about it for the column this week. A lot of you really like this new format so we're going to be moving forward with it indefinitely.

As usual, no dates for 0.021, but hopefully pretty soon. We hate shipping hotfix after hotfix, which usually occurs if we rush things, and want to make sure this one addresses as many major bugs as we can find.