VEIN Weekly: Truck Surfing

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly! It's been largely more of the same: bugfixing and dealing with post-launch issues. We'll be out of the woods soon but we're just trying to balance fixing as much as we can with not spamming everyone with hotfixes, and trying to balance fixing bugs with working on new content.

Some of the notable bugs we've fixed:

• Some players would save a game and be unable to load it. This issue has been fixed and you can load them now!
• We added a bunch of dedicated server tools, like limiting the number of Utility Cabinets players can place, and more logs in multiple places.
• We fixed an issue where players would fall through vehicles they're standing on that were going faster than 10 m/s. This sounds like an odd bug but it was from some code that helped prevent cars getting stuck when running over a zombie.
• We fixed a bunch of font rendering issues for non-Latin languages, like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai.

• We fixed hands and arms being intensely bright in some scenarios.
• A bunch of items' dismantling results have been changed. If you dismantled saw blades you'd get animal bones for some reason.
• We renamed Well Fed to Ate Tasty Meal. There was a lot of confusion about this – it just meant you ate something hearty, not that you were full.
• You can now outright destroy loot bags if you don't want the contents.
• We fixed people getting stuck in tractors.
• We fixed vehicle trunks not spawning anything. This had the unfortunate side effect of wiping peoples' existing cars' trunks. We issued a hotfix the day after so you should now be able to load that old save properly if you have it.

There's a lot more, so please check the patch notes for hotfixes on Steam. We'll be continuing to work on hotfixes until the major issues have been resolved. For example, as of this writing, the next hotfix includes a fix for the water in the world not turning off on time, lockpick XP changes, and significantly faster power and water grid functionality.

On the content side of things, we've been working on some minor features as we're still scrambling with the launch & continued post-launch growth. All of these are work in progress but you can look at them on the Experimental branch if you like. They'll probably be included in 0.023.

We added the ability to take your own life with a firearm. Many people have requested this as there is no cure to the infection and people would rather do this instead of running into a crowd of zombies and standing there.

We've been working on a more efficient server browser updating method for dedicated servers.

Maps, records, video discs, etc. can go into document storage.

Zombie limbs that fall off them are floppy now and have appropriate art.

A direct connect button has been added to the server browser, so you can just enter an IP and port to connect to.

We added the ability for server hosts to send a notification to everyone online via the HTTP API. We also added a whitelist functionality for dedicated servers, where you can whitelist certain player IDs in lieu of a password.

We added a setting for the in-game clock to read 24-hour time instead of 12-hour.

Dismantling XP gain has been reduced, and scavenging XP is now based on searching containers, not looting. These are just for balance changes, so we'll see if they work out OK.

I've written an experimental new algorithm for loading into multiplayer. It should be a decent bit faster than the current algorithm, but it needs testing.

I've been experimenting a little with boats and bicycles. They're nowhere near ready yet but they're more of a "side project" for me at the end of the day after I've done my "real work", as they're pretty low priority in comparison to other stuff we have to do.

There's now a UI for stat boosts and addictions in the character menu.

We added notes, flyers, and pamphlet support, for things like newspaper clippings or in-game lore.

We've been doing some algorithmic changes for the next update. We've added a bunch of new stuff to the zombie spawn algorithm (e.g. they should no longer spawn inside buildings you've searched) and we've tweaked various parameters around it.

I've been doing some other experimenting with gamepad support. This is going to take a lot of work, so I don't want to get too far into it while there are still pretty rough bugs in the game and while performance can be made better.

We've done some engine modifications for dedicated servers. They should see a boost in performance across the board for the next update.

So that's about it for this update! Thanks for reading. Your continued support is super valuable to us. We've received so many positive comments, so it's good to know we have a solid foundation for future work on the game.

It's been extremely overwhelming for us, especially with the limited team size right now; we receive on average 308 pieces of feedback per day from the in-game reporter alone and around 500-1,000 crash reports per day. We're doing what we can to manage it all though. I've spent a little bit of time writing some internal tools to help manage these.

Regardless, thank you all so much for your continued support as we trek through this launch period. See you next week!