Everyone at Vera Visions wishes our players a Happy New Year! It's been a long time since we've put out an official update in written form, so we'll start off strong by giving you a hard-date of when The Wastes 1.3 will ship: April 12th, the 4th anniversary of our game.

What's been going on?

The personal bits: The pandemic brought a lot of challenges. Since the beginning we haven't been able to work together in person. Only in November 2021 were foreigners admitted back into the United States. So we've been together again since December. This had mental consequences as well for most of us on the team. Things surrounding the game: One of the other severe truths that had to do with our game, was the realization of how desperately we needed to improve the net-code. Since we've published The Wastes we've learned a lot for sure - but if you're separated by the Atlantic Ocean it forces you to deal with high pings and other realities of Online-Play. Redoing a lot of this took some time; on top developing new AI and path-finding systems that deal with the Mission and Invasion game-modes. Throughout this post we will emphasize our current focus with some new screenshots. Some of you may already know what our focus has been over the past year, but it doesn't hurt to reiterate.
As always, more balancing and gameplay changes were done to the maps to reflect both internal and external feedback. Snowbound's bunker/vault door can now be closed, which will also nuke all outside players similar to HLDM's map 'Crossfire'. Vats has more visual variety for example. Most maps have been retouched and polished to add more model-based props over primitive brush-based ones - increasing the visual quality. In The Wastes 1.2 and earlier, vehicle code was not predicted. Weapons were also not predicted. This meant that you had to wait for the server to confirm you had fired a shot, or worse - you had to wait until you realized you were still turning the wheel of your vehicle. All of these issues have been addressed. Vehicles are now predicted and feel a lot better to drive as a result when playing over the network.
In the new map Silo, you'll be fighting more vertically for sure. You can even attempt to fire the dislodged missile... which will only result in the flaming death of everyone in that room. In the spring of 2020, we had shelved the then current code-base of The Wastes to re-base it on top of Nuclide - which was our research codebase at the time. This has been a slow process, as we're basically working on more than one game. We're constantly adding back features that have to play nice with everything else. Each game had their own conventions - this was the major setback: Basically re-implementing The Wastes. We were essentially rewriting the whole game-logic by doing this.
In the new codebase we have new special effects, like water leaking from pipes when shot, or even steam. Where are we at: Progress has been going strong. We're still not done with all of the components, but we've been play-testing a lot of Single-player missions. That's for sure. The vehicle specific modes and entities need more polish, but they're all working and predicted. This is giving us confidence that the update will go Gold before April.
The Mission-Editor is the showpiece for this update, alongside the Invasion mode. This will for the first time enable non-linear single-player and cooperative content. All the bundled missions will be made using this built-in editor.
Some missions can be very basic. Find a set of specific items; escape; defeat them all; capture buildings that prevent reinforcements from spawning; and more. Enemies may be found lurking behind every corner. We are very confident in this update. A multiplayer-only game relies solely on there being an active playerbase. Since we've shifted to developing content that can be played by yourself, as well as allowing players to host MP/COOP games without annoyances like port-forwarding, we'll be making the game infinitely more accessible. Where you can learn more: Most progress can be tracked over at Nuclide's GitHub repository: https://github.com/veravisions/nuclide The components specific to The Wastes are not public (yet), but it gives you a good idea of what we're working on and that we've been always working in the background. You've always been able to talk to us all personally about our game, suggestions or general video-game talk over at: irc.frag-net.com Join either #wastes or #lobby depending on if you want to talk the game or Off-Topic stuff! If you're planning on buying the game, we want to suggest you hold off on that until the release of our next update. We'll organize a discount upon release. Happy New Year, Vera Visions