Devblog 70

Pump Jack

I added the pumpjack to the game! This new piece of mining equipment works just like the quarry. Use a survey charge to see if an area has oil and plop this sucker down. It takes low grade fuel to run and will extract “Crude Oil” which you can use in the...

Small Refinery

Put crude oil in and turn it on. After a while it’ll boil and create low grade fuel which should help provide a consistent fuel source for your quarries. Note that you must place this on terrain, not inside buildings. This should help with the...

Big Changes

I’ve made some huge changes to the game which some of you will hate and others will love. It’s also very possible that the entire balance of the game will be thrown off so keep that in mind while playing. It will only get better in time.

• Most firearms take High Quality Metal instead of Metal Fragments now.
• Armored Tier requires High Quality Metal
• Metal Facemask & Metal Chestpiece require High Quality metal
• You can get High Quality metal from smelting High Quality Metal Ore
• You can pretty much only get High Quality Metal Ore from a mining quarry

Quite the game changer and I hope for the better.

Large Furnace

I hated seeing rooms with 957 furnaces all going off at once, so I got around to adding the Large Furnace to the game. this has many more slots and will allow you to smelt much quicker. It needs to be placed on Terrain, though.

Crossbow

Tom & Alex finished up the crossbow so I threw it ingame! It’s a common drop and will fire arrows a bit faster than the bow, Enjoy!

Spear Nerf

In rust we have like 17 melee weapons or something, yet almost every single melee fight I’ve ever seen or been a participant in was spear vs spear. I hate that. Then I realized the spear had an almost 3m range and was totally unbalanced and that’s why it’s the only weapon to use. I nerfed it, sorry! It’s range is shorter now and it’s melee grace area is smaller, this means you’ll have to aim a little harder to hit with it compared to the other larger weapons which hopefully some of you will start using now.

New Melee Weapons

Gooseman did a great job with the animations for the set of two-handed weapons. I’ve implemented them as slower firing but higher damage weapons with good range

• Mace : High blunt/stab damage
• Cleaver : High slash damage
• Longsword : Great range

These weapons behave a little differently than you’re used to, the time it takes between swing and hit is longer than most weapons but the payoff is huge and should be a fun addition to the game.

Wall-Looting Hackers

I heard some reports this week about people looting through walls. I made a serverside check so this is now impossible

Windows Magnifier Exploit

So there was a bit of an exploit with ranged weapons where they would be dead accurate as long as you weren’t aiming down the sights. Some clever players realized they could use a tool that magnified the pixels in the center of their screen and pull off perfect headshots from across the map. I fixed this by adding a bit of an aim cone when you’re not aiming down the sight. Almost no one will notice this change except for the exploiters and eventually we’ll put in a proper fix with loose aiming.

Next Week:

Phew, Quite a week for me. Next week I’ll probably be fixing bugs and balancing and deal with the wrath of reddit due to my changes and I’ll continue working on the new event.

Freelook Tweaks

I was planning to network the head view direction to other clients this week, but I ran into a last-minute issue that will require some changes to our third person player animator and therefore I had to disable head networking again. While I was poking around I also decoupled head and body orientation in a bunch of other code, so now we have the option to do certain things in the direction the player is looking at with his head while doing other things in the direction his arms are pointing at. In TrackIR news I added trackir.refresh and trackir.recenter console commands that do exactly what their names say they do. The TrackIR state is also refreshed when opening the F2 menu now, so if you forgot to launch the TrackIR software before connecting to a server just open the F2 menu to make Rust look for new TrackIR instances. I also added support for the third head rotation axis and allowed for more head movement freedom. That last change means you can now have a good look at the floating hands that hold your weapon in first person. I started researching better ways to render our viewmodels in order to one day be able to render the entire player body in first person without losing the high-quality first person animations viewmodels provide. I don’t have anything to show for it yet, but I got some good ideas to follow up on.

Synchronized Ambience

Something that always bothers me in games is when you play with your friends and someone sees or hears a localized effect the others don’t see or hear. In Rust more often than not this situation was caused by certain ambient sounds being fired on one client and not on all the other clients. I decided that sending events for every ambient sound event that’s fired (of which there are many, and more are being added every month) to every client (of which there also tend to be many) was a silly idea, so I implemented a clock that calculates a seed from the current ingame time and date (which are synchronized anyhow) and guarantees to have the same state on all the clients. I might be the only person on this planet who can get excited about this, but events can now subscribe to this synchronized clock with a certain repetition interval and variance and are automatically called at the same time on all the clients, without adding any networking overhead. Long story short, this is what ambient sounds do now.

Weather Balancing

Weather is great and all, but it seemed to rain way too much. I reduced the rain probability by a third and for the case that it does rain I slightly increased the bias towards stronger rain in the temperate and tundra biomes. I also added rain with a less intense peak intensity to the arid biome, which I should have done earlier this month when the new arid biome went live.

Loot Spawn Refactor

Let me start by saying this won’t change all that much for you guys other the fact that barrels in certain radtowns no longer spawn underground, which should lead to slightly higher barrel counts around the center of radtowns and brings back garbage cans to a lot of them. What I basically did was replace a fairly massive chunk of old code with a new, shorter piece of code that should behave pretty much the same way. Server owners will be glad to hear that this also fixed a bunch of errors that could be logged on server load.

Other Stuff

• Fixed error spam if graphics.shadowlights was less than 0.
• Added shadow light count slider to F2 menu (specifies the number of lights, in addition to the sun, that cast shadows - greatly impacts performance).
• Made player movement climbing state slightly less forgiving.
• Fixed a bug that could prevent players climbing a ladder from triggering the ladder animation state.
• Fixed airfield hangars and warehouse floating above ground.
• Fixed beachside trees being allowed to spawn on cliffs (trees that are loaded from the savegame can still be on cliffs until the next wipe).
• Tweaked god ray color around dawn and dusk.

 

Next Week

I’m hoping to get a proof of concept of the new first person player model rendering I’m envisioning done next week, which doesn’t mean it will go live with next week’s update since there are various animation-related issues that might have to be fixed by either Unity or us. I also have plans to further improve the character movement step detection and might get started on some things that have to go live with the next wiping update.

Still in progress but I’m working to bring back the shoreline wetness working as intended, finally getting the rivers and lakes working nicely with the new ocean water, as well as PVT compression and perf fixes/optimizations. These will be deployed to the developer branch before I go on holidays next week, for some heavy testing and leave room for a rollback until I get back, in case something goes wrong.

This week I finally did a round of tweaks and cleanup on a bunch of things that have been bothering me for a while. Sand footsteps sound a lot better, grass footsteps are cleaner, the ak doesn’t sound as flimsy, etc. I made some sounds for the crossbow, the pumpjack, and the oil refinery, and I started refactoring the ambience system.

Next Week

Next week I’d like to spend more time doing the cleanup and refinement thing because it felt awesome to tear through some of that list. I’m also going to finish the bit of refactoring I’ve been working on and start on sounds for some of the new melee weapons (that bone club is going to be fun!)

Exterior Wall

I worked on exterior wall placement this week. It's in game now but it's a hidden blueprint at the moment - so only admins can spawn them. I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement them. I've got the placement done really nicely. You can free place them anywhere on the terrain, but if it detects one next to it, it'll try to pull closer to it and align itself nice. This feels very organic. The issue I'm having is that I don't want these to be in the tier system, like the building parts are. I want you to place them straight out of your inventory. The issue with that is that it probably isn't that great to allow players just to plonk big walls with 1000 health down. So it needs to either be plonk, then hammer until build and then become solid, or plonk and self build then solid, or plonk a frame and hammer until solid. The issue with hammering is that we're in a bind - because of the right click stuff on the normal building, it'd be inconsistent to say "ok left click builds these things, right click upgrades these things". So that's why it isn't in right now.

Protection Properties

Protection properties show in the inventory. The clothing slots moved too - I hope that doesn't affect your muscle memory too much. Ignore this lady's big arms.

Steam Inventory

People seem to be having fun with the Steam Inventory. The problem right now is that there's only about 7 items so you're getting a lot of repeats. Well this update brings about 25 new clothing items, which are just really variants of existing items, but should add a lot of variety. These items also spawn in loot. The feeling out in the community seems to be that these skins should only be usable on servers where you've unlocked the original item by finding it. The argument that is made a lot is that everyone joining a new server should start on the same level, all have the same stuff. I'm not sure if that's a valid statement. Even though we wipe our servers every month the blueprints never get wiped, so players always have a reward for being a long time players. This also isn't an issue in games like Battlefield where players that have played for a year have unlocked more stuff than players that are starting fresh. Investing time and unlocking new stuff is part of the game. The concern that I do understand is that new players will be able to spend $20 on weapons, join a server and kick everyone's ass. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid. So any of this stuff that we do that involves armour or weapons would come in the form of reskins that you unlock. For example, to use a blue holosight you'd have to have unlocked a holosight on the server. Right now running around radtowns looking for blueprints is a big part of the game. We're not sure that it should be.

Refactoring

I've been doing a lot of refactoring internally. The kind of stuff you shouldn't really see any effect of in game, but should make our lives easier as developers. If you do see any issues with invisible walls or lookat tooltips not showing up please give us a shout - because that's something that I fucked up.

Female Model

Everyone was being mean about the female model's physical appearance so we've decided to have another run at it. Nothing to show yet.

So I finished up on the crossbow, I’ll probably have to revisit the lods later to optimise them more but here’s what it looks like in Unity. So the old eyes sucked majorly. For a long time i’ve wanted to work on them more because they have really been bugging me, so I took some time to do just that. Here’s a comparison shot! And here’s a video of them in action

I have finished the work on the tier 2 furnace this week, as well as other little tasks. Amongst which a small crater to help you track explosions from your survey charges. I also reworked the foundations of most big deployables like the quarry, the pumpjack and the still to be coming windmill so they stand more accessible across all types of terrain. I am starting the artwork on the compound walls.

Spent some time redoing the 3rd person attack animations for the 2handed melee weapons. I also added 2 new weapons. A 2 handed baseball bat/mace thingy and a 2 handed cleaver. I also spent some got around to fixing a bunch of bugs. Like the one bug where the 3rd person animation for when the player was aiming his bow would constantly play in a loop. I also fixed a bug where players would sometimes play a 3rd person animation of the player punching as soon as they equipped their weapon. I’m currently working on an animation for when the player is recovering from wounded state. Next Week: I’ll be working on the hacksaw weapon and going over any player animations that need doing.

Had fun animating the crossbow this week, here's some of the view model anims in-engine:

More vehicle stuff from me this week. After planning out how I imagined the modular system would work I wanted work on them not looking modular, if that makes sense :) The first car in this set is a paintover of one of my designs from last week which works ok but we thought it was looking too close to being made out of legos or some other building toy. So with the next two I tried making them less blocky and with the addition of wheel arches and bumpers I think they look much more convincing as a real world vehicles.

So the first set of bridges are nearly done. There are currently 10 pieces which all work together to give us loads of variety. We can place a long chain of broken bridge sections and columns along a path to help with navigation. But we also want you to be walking through a forest and stumble across a single column or foundation block.

Next Week

I’m going to try and add some biome specific layers to the Bridge pieces so they blend in wherever they spawn. So vegetation, moss and ivy for forests, sand accumulation for desert and snow and ice for the northern biome. If I can get this working then we can apply the process to monuments and possibly towns. Also I’m going to look into making sure they blend correctly when connecting to roads.