Hi everyone! Welcome to our newly-bimonthly news post. Like we said last time, we're reducing the frequency of updates to bimonthly due to the time they take to write.
We want to spend as much time as possible working on the game, but also want to balance community updates – a lot of what we do is opaque until updates come out (outside of these updates), and we've been trying to be as transparent as possible throughout VEIN's development process.
Anyways, let's get into it!
I've been working on sub-inventories. These are essentially bags that can store items. They're now fully functional (for the next update). You can put items in them, drop the item, have someone else pick it up, and they'll see the contents. We've added a Zip Bag, named for copyright reasons, that can store one item and is waterproof; the idea is that if you want to take a flashlight or cell phone underwater, you can put it in this and it'll be safe. Backpacks and paper bag items now have the same functionality, so if you want to better organize your inventory or trade multiple items simultaneously, you can now do so.
I've done some work on waterfalls; in particular, the visual effects and interaction with the VEIN world. I wrote some code to prevent waterfalls from existing in winter, as well as some audio code; these are being utilized in the new Westwood area, coming hopefully with the next game update.
We've created a new buildable: extension ports. These are used to wire things greater distances. They're meant to be used like an extension cable, but we didn't want to name them that because they can also transfer water, gas, internet, etc. You should be able to wire two things together that are physically across the entire game world now by jury-rigging multiple extension plugs. We're excited to see what the community does with these!
We've integrated Mood's new art updates. These are branding and in-universe art changes to replace our marketplace assets. They include new assets for batteries, the staple gun, the broadcast radio, trauma bandages, bloodmeal and bonemeal, compost, the Wolfram 17, the Fifty-Seven, the jigsaw, many medical items, and more. These seem like really inconsequential changes, but immersion is cumulative, and all of these cement VEIN as existing in a real world. When you see a marketplace asset, it takes you out of the world, and this helps a lot with our preliminary worldbuilding that will transition into actual stories and characters.
Some small changes in the last couple of weeks have been a console variable to hide your character's muscularity for roleplay purposes (vein.Appearance.HideStrength), respirators now blocking smells, and screws being changed to only dismantle into one metal scrap. That's an exploit currently – you can get more metal than you put into crafting screws – so thank you to the players who reported it.
Remancer has composed some new music, this time for night-time in forests. He's currently working on some more radio station music for driving or working to.
I've started replacing all of our vehicles' sounds. We've had this on the todo list for a while and I've finally gotten around to it. They now all have unique (or nearly unique) engine sounds.
I started work on bot characters. These work like bots in any other game (except instead of actually doing anything right now they're quite stupid). The point of this is to start testing and fixing networking and multiplayer issues that require a ton of online players to test, such as server performance with 50+ players.
We did some work on generating HLODs, which are stand-ins in the distance for clusters of meshes (buildings, landscapes, whatever). In plain English they keep visual quality and allow us to render distant stuff while loading less into memory. That means faster level loading and unloading, reduced RAM use, and better multiplayer server performance. It's still very early on though as generating them takes a very long time. I've also been working on some tools for PSO generation; this reduces hitching and stuttering.
Yan has finished the new save systems, which I'll be integrating soon. This yields a ~50% filesize reduction while being way more hardened against engine changes. It in theory should prevent data loss when the game exits during a save. We want to be very clear and say that your saves are compatible with the new update; we've carefully included code to upgrade them to the new format.
Once integrated, Yan is going to be working on multiplayer optimization and better networking across the board, which is something that has been sorely needed for a while. We have some ideas of what's causing lag and rubberbanding, such as vehicle networking and inventory networking, so we'll be starting there.
I've started on some technical art that would block snow and rain under awnings dynamically. It's still work-in-progress.
Zoe has been hard at work on the new map. Work's been done on a golf course and golf items, some more caves, and general exterior work that gets applied to all locations, such as fences, signs, etc. The new region is nearly done and we're going to include a large chunk of it in 0.024.
Some new gameplay settings have been added for the next update. We added Ignore Construction Restrictions that allow you to e.g. place things normally on the ground on walls, like god mode; a Sleep Advances Time setting, which toggles if sleeping in a bed will move time forward, including in multiplayer; and moved some existing settings to a new Construction category.
Finally, for fixes, we've done a lot of bugfixing, thanks to Noname's QA work. We fixed chat filters not working properly; objects not making noise to zombies; incorrect rotations of item thumbnails; bathroom stall doors all opening simultaneously; some un-moveable tarps, rain indoors in some areas, overlapping fire alarms, the go-kart gas tank location, hitched vehicles in multiplayer not syncing properly/injuring you, the EBS not playing on TVs, persistent corpses on servers not syncing, etc. We also moved a bunch of blueprint code (visual scripting) to C++, which makes it less likely to break if we change stuff under the hood.
Skyler has been hard at work on the new VEIN base character which is coming along quite well. It'll still be a while until it's in-game as we have to still rig the character (give it bones that can move around) and re-compute animations for it, but they're doing a great job.
We're in the process of redoing our first vehicle. Unlike the way they function currently, vehicles will be completely modular and have moving parts, with breakable glass, openable trunks, etc. We're taking it slow and only have one being made right now as just like the new character it'll take a bit of programming time to set up the new features.
I've been doing some work on erosion maps, which add detail to the landscape for very little performance cost. It's still work-in-progress but will yield a more visually interesting terrain.
Translations have been completed for Chinese (simplified), French, Turkish, and Spanish (LatAm). We're continuing to localize the game into different languages based on outstanding wishlist counts from each region. These will be in 0.024.
That's about it for this update! We'll hopefully have 0.024 out soon. We need to thoroughly test it and fix any bugs with the new features we've been working on as hotfixes are never fun for anyone.
Thanks for reading!