VEIN Weekly: Vehicle Bases

Hi everyone, and welcome to another VEIN Weekly! It's been a pretty standard week for us, so this update isn't super exciting, but that's a part of the process.

We've been setting up business stuff behind the scenes, so that's taken up a significant part of our time unfortunately, but it should be all sorted by some point in December. I also took my first weekend off in a year so that was nice! Anyways, let's get to the changes.

We've added the ability for admins to directly give items to other players.

We fixed a bug with plants where they would not grow if you're far away from your base. It'll be in the next hotfix.

We added a command to the dedicated server's launch options that will automatically record a few minutes' worth of performance and network statistics and send it directly to us. It's off by default of course. The idea is that if a server host wants, they can volunteer their network traffic, which we can then analyze and check for performance improvements. We've received a lot of feedback regarding multiplayer performance and laggy gameplay, and if servers enable this, we can figure out the problems easily and fix them.

We also added a button to the admin menu, under the Server tab. If you press it it will record the above for three seconds and send that to us. If you have a really popular server with many players online, pressing this will send us performance info, so we can address and fix it (both CPU and networking issues). We'd really appreciate it! This will be in the next hotfix.

We added the ability to mount weapon cases on walls.

We've added an option to fill fluid containers, like water barrels, from the closest gas pump or water tower, similar to how vehicle gas tanks work. This was a highly requested feature. We're working on simplifying how fluid transfers work in general as there are a few gaps in the design currently.

Hazmat suits and rebreathers now block smells.

We're continuing work on new foliage and forest art. It may or may not be in the next game update depending on how far we get with it.

We've fixed a couple dozen or so crashes that players submitted using the crash reporter.

We fixed getting stuck in beds or tractors. The issue was that as an anti-cheating measure, the game was checking if a player can move in a straight line from where they are to where they want to get up to. However, for some furniture or vehicles, they would get blocked by the door.

We've been doing some experimental UI performance changes. Specifically, we're trying to improve the performance of some menus like the crafting menu or inventory, where a lot of things are displayed at the same time.

We've done some significant item changes. We're rebalancing and fixing a ton of item properties, like dismantling results and weights. Weight adjustments have been done to many items to make them more realistic.

We fixed cold medicine not showing as a possible treatment option in the medical UI.

Saving the game will now alert you if the game save failed. We also do a couple steps to prevent save games from failing to save.

We added a possible fix for players waking up in the sky after being dragged after going unconscious.

We fixed fans disappearing after being moved. Broken building parts (fence debris) no longer blocks construction. Water no longer obstructs things under it, so you can pick stuff up dropped in shallow water. Smoke from forges no longer instantly vanish when they turn off.

We did some fixes for moving vehicles breaking stuff in and around them. Vehicles can no longer damage things that are attached to them, and we fixed stuff becoming detached from vehicles in some cases after loading in.

We've started on power-requiring fluid sources. Gas tanks will require power in 0.023. This is still work-in-progress though. In addition, you can now play the church pianos with a MIDI keyboard, and we added an Always Show Hotbar setting for 0.023.

So that's about it for this update! Apologies if it looks a bit short, but like we wrote, there's a lot of behind the scenes work and business setup things that need to be done before we start expanding the team, which is something we're prioritizing over the coming months. Thank you for your understanding!

Also, just to be clear, the fixes in this column will be in the next hotfix and are not yet live.

See you next week!