VEIN Weekly: Moonlight, Bugfixes & Containers

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. In the last week, I've mostly been doing bug fixes and performance work as we gear up for 0.021, but there have been some feature changes.

I've reduced the time for items to be considered 'newly acquired' to 5 minutes, down from 30. A 'newly acquired' item was guaranteed to be lost on death – the idea was that we want to prevent people from raiding you, immediately killing themselves, and having a 50/50 chance to keep your stuff despite technically failing a raid. We came up with the 30 minute number really early on in VEIN's development so we've reduced it.

We've changed ladder movement so that going forward is always up, and going backward is always down – for most people, that's W and S keys.

We've done some work behind the scenes on water quality. Water purification plant functionality will be coming at some point, so we need to do some work on making sure that'll work when it's ready.

We've fixed a bug where you could use anything (such as milk) as engine oil.

I've changed around the algorithm that puts you in the back of box trucks. It should be a bit more lenient about if the truck is blocked or not in the next VEIN update.

I've done some work on reducing the amount of GPU memory (VRAM) used by our game. It now consumes much less video memory without any cost to visual quality.

Use options now display weights and stack quantities for items you're looking at.

I've done a bit of work on the sky performance. It now runs much better at dawn and dusk, and we dynamically adjust shadow quality based on performance settings and in-game weather.

The main menu now reads news from this site, https://news.vein.gg.

Night-time lighting has received a pass. Moonlight is now more realistic and we've brightened the baseline night lighting so it shouldn't be completely pitch black anymore.

The status of the heater/air conditioner has been added to the driving user interface.

Dryers now have a similar user interface to washers, and you can toggle them from the container window.

Apart from that, like I've wrote, I've been working on bug-fixing more than anything. We'd like to get 0.021 out soon but want to avoid too many hotfixes.

That's about it from me!

Hello! Let's jump into what I've been working on this past week.

I've added some community requests such as tire and battery shelf containers. These will only store specific items, in this case tires and batteries, but they'll visually change based on how full they are!

Another tiny request I've added is the ability to use bones to make broth.

I've rebalanced some of the in-world container inventory sizes, particularly crates found in warehouses. It was reported that some smaller-looking crates had more space than larger-looking ones, so I've balanced this out a bit. As always, if there's more inventory sizes in the world that seem a little off, please tell us!

The window snaps for the Saranac Bar 'n' Grill have been adjusted and now fit the frames a lot better. You shouldn't be seeing overly extended fortified windows now. If you happen to find any other fortification snaps that are either way to large or too small, let us know! We don't want window fortifications to extend super far into the building's wall, but we also don't want small gaps other players can peek through.

Foliage level-of-detail mesh distances have been made a little more aggressive. This is a small change to help a little with performance, especially when you're in higher elevation locations.

On the map-side of things, the initial Early Access map continues to be worked on and we're making good progress! Nothing much more to say on that side of things yet.

That's it for me as well!

As always, we're continuing to work towards 0.021, which hopefully shouldn't be too far out. See you next week!