Devblog 167

After a good three months of work, Damian and I are happy to release the Launch Site monument to you. It consists of the largest man-made structures of the world of Rust. There's a lot to explore! Right now the office interiors are still mostly empty, but we will finish that area in the coming weeks. As always when releasing something as big as this to the game, there might still be kinks left to iron out. We will make sure to address these for the next forced wipe.

Shadowfrax pokes his snout into the latest update.

Hobo Barrels have been added to the Launch Site and the Lighthouse. They're empty barrels that act as campfires near monuments. You can fill them up with wood, ignite them, cook food, stay warm, AND they grant 100% comfort. This will be especially helpful after a nighttime swim to the Lighthouse. Be warned, if this plays out anything like it did in Legacy, they'll likely attract a lot of attention. People can be like moths in this game.

I neglected to update the ores spawning in caves when I changed their yields. Whoops! This meant that people who stuck to caves were getting an unfair advantage relative to everyone else. This is now fixed and it also begs the question if we should consider doing something a little different in caves rather than just spawning the same ores inside? I've also fixed a bug that prevented half-completed ores you encounter from giving you the completion bonus after a server restart. Lastly, the Metal Ores found in the Desert and the Arctic Biome will corretly yield 2 HQM instead of 1.

Well kind of new. I borrowed the model from the non-procedural DM maps. This crate will spawn at the Launch Site monument (for now) and will yield a boatload of supplies and scrap for those lucky enough to find them.

Barrels suck. We know. They were always meant to be a placeholder. A few years in and we're still not ready to give them up, though so I thought the least I could do is make them slightly more satisfying to smash open. I've added a particle effect and changed how the gibs work, so they actually fly apart a little bit. I've also changed the sounds to be more beefy, instead of that hollow shitty sound. Keep in mind these sounds are somewhat placeholder and need a polish pass by our sound guy, but I think you'll all find it a little bit more satisfying. Also I've modified item pickups so that they play their physics impact sound when you actually grab them. This adds to the 'game-feel' of looting barrels, but it also has some gameplay implications due to the fact that others in the world will be able to hear the small pickup sound.

There has been a long standing exploit with the helicopter where if you were the only target and you disconnected after being killed, the helicopter would be stuck in mid-air and become an easy target. It would also screw with the server FPS. This is now fixed, and in addition I've added an eye bone to the helicopter optics so that admins specating the helicopter get a clear view of where it is aggroing.

I know you hated it when you would run all the way to a vending machine only to find it was out of stock. So I fixed it. And I'm sure you hated it when you ran all the way to a vending machine only to find out they were selling a rock for 1000 tech trash. This is now fixed, too. The map tooltip of player created vending machines show you exactly what is for sale and how many they have left. I know its unrealistic as hell, but at this point who gives a shit? Hopefully this will produce more honest transactions between players. No more traps or playing around. I also ended up fixing a minor issue where the vending machine would list itself as 'in stock' if it had less than the designated quantity for sale available. i.e. if you were selling 10 wood for 1 stone, but had 9 wood in the machine, it would still list as in stock.

Just wanted to let everyone know I've handed off NPC/NavMesh/AI work over to an AI specialist: Pål Trefall who works on Before. He's currently on vacation, but I'm sure you'll hear from him in the next devblog. This guy knows about 100 times more than I do, so hopefully he has the time to improve our existing base, as well as finishing up the Humanoid NPC.

There's new grass going in this week from André and me, replacing the dated models we used up to this point. The density and height are controled by procedural noise and gradients, which should give it a more natural coverage over the old one that was one dimensional. Slight changes have been made to terrain grass colours as well in this patch, but the overall game colour palette should feel unchanged.

I've also added the updated airfield layout from March 16th this year. Here's an excerpt of what I wrote at the time to refresh your memory: I worked on adding a little bit of depth to our Airfield. Similarly to the Trainyard, it now has an underground network of tunnels. These tunnels include a few bunker rooms, sewers, and a short natural cave segment. This should offer an opportunity to players to cover the surface of the Airfield while hidden in dark passages, to resurface at the other end ‘easily’. The loot found in those segments will be following the same theme as elsewhere in the game, meaning the natural cave segment will spawn ore nodes, and the bridges between cave and bunker space will have mining crates.

Caves will now offer more legroom to build your bases. The 2x2x2 and 3x3x3 surfaces are unlocked, letting you use the full surface of the room. While the larger 4x4x3 room remains as before, I will be listening to the feedback I get from unlocking the smaller rooms and might consider unlocking the larger room surface if worthwhile.

I finally sat down and implemented some world generation improvements that have been planned for a very long time. The most notable one is the fact that monuments can now have a detailed terrain blending map instead of a basic radial falloff. This means they can blend with the terrain in a much more natural way and avoid unnecessary flattening of the terrain around them. I haven't been able to add these blending maps to all of the monuments, so expect things to still be a little circular overall. However, I did update the terrain anchoring tests so they choose the placement height that results in the lowest possible error for any given placement position, which means that even monuments that don't have detailed terrain blending maps yet should no longer look like they're placed on a circular plateau. Everything I've just said will probably need some tweaking over the coming months, so don't expect things to be perfect just yet.

Remember when any road was a hotspot of player interaction? This died down completely when we added the junkpile loot spawns all over the map. To bring back some much needed action around roads we've decided to make junkpiles only spawn along roads and around powerlines. This also has the advantage of having a clearly identifyable area where you can go when looking for junkpiles, instead of aimlessly wandering around the world.

Driftwood can now be harvested with any tool you can chop trees with. This is part of the bigger picture of us trying to make all interactions in the world as intuitive as possible. If something looks like it gives resources then it should give resources.

The video really says it all. The weird player spine rotation in the distance is now fixed.

I fixed some really annoying things about the in-game F1 console. You can now trigger a quick autocomplete by pressing tab. Furthermore, when trying to access commands you've entered in the past, the autocomplete popup will no longer come up and prevent you from going back more than one command.

You've probably noticed by now that when you die or when you kill someone, instead of there being a body left behind, we replaced it with a bag. Just like in the old days of Legacy! And, indeed, the bag was from Legacy, which means it needed an update. So this week I started on a new version. Here's the progress so far. The dude is just for scale reference. After the 'base' for the high poly is done, I'm going to roughen it up a bit; make it more Rusty, and add a few things here and there to give it some personality.

Hapis Island got another update. Changes include a completely revamped valley with a large canyon, plus a good chunk of the southern coast which has now morphed into more of a desert area. A desert that will most likely expand even more with time. There's over a kilometer's worth of new roads, new mines, caves, and slight radtown/loot tweaks and additions. I'm also experimenting with slightly softer lighting, which I decided to roll out as well. There's a lot of stuff still lined up, including new trees, radtown refinement, a swampy area, a launch site, map names for pretty much everything, and more -- but all in good time.

There has been a slight tweak in global lighting reflectivity, so expect things to be just a little bit less matte. It's not perfect yet, but it will get better.

I'm continuing on with the changes to the skin textures I made last week, and I've all but finished up the male body textures. Apart from just looking generally a bit nicer (hopefully!) I've added a separate texture set for dark skin variants. The skin shader works by multiplying your skin colour over a pre-defined coloured texture, which works well in theory, but breaks down a little in practice. The reason this sometimes looks a little odd is twofold. Firstly, the colour variation across your skin changes depending on your skin colour. Secondly, it's impossible to lighten something by multiplying it by another RGB colour. The result of this was basically very flat skin tones, and unfortunately the darker skin tones suffered from being difficult to balance, often coming becoming too red. This should fix that issue, and make the lighter skin tones look better at the same time. Check out a comparison between the two default light and dark skin tones below. I've also ported over the texturing and remodelling of the viewmodel hands, as well as rebaking a slightly more realistic normal map. I've added some loops to the chest area that I've noticed weren't holding up too well during deformation. I'm aiming to get the texture changes in when the viewmodel gets updated, so that the skin changes are consistent across the whole game.

I could give a long winded reason here, but the crux of the matter is we have a lot of viewmodel files that don't all match hierarchy wise. This has no effect in game, as they are loaded independently, but I've known at somepoint this would need correcting. One reason for this change (other than neatness) is wanting to see clothing visible in viewmodels. For this to ever happen a vital requirement will be a matching hierarchy across all animations and assets. As Taylor has now completed an update for the viewmodel arm mesh which will need adding, I felt this was as good a time as any to tackle this. In the initial phase, I'll just be getting all our source files updated and organised. I'll also be re-exporting all viewmodel files with a matching rig, no mesh data, and removing bloated nodes. Best case scenario for me is you see absolutely no change visually. If you do spot anythIng weird, let me know via twitter or reddit.

This week I finished up improvements to the dynamic loading and unloading of music clips that I mentioned last week. We're only keeping any currently playing clips and any clips that will play in the next ~8 bars in memory now. That switch away from using streaming clips seems to have sorted the last of the sync issues. I've also done some optimization and continued to fine tune some songs. This was the first week I've been able to listen through all of our music 7-8 times in a row and not hear any issues other than minor musical tweaks I'd like to make. There's nothing left to do on the implementation side of this anymore, which means this is ready to go out now! I'm out of town this weekend, and won't be around to fix issues if anything breaks though, so I going to hold off on pushing this out until next week to be safe.

Music took most of my non 4th-of-july time this week, but I did spend a little time experimenting with sounds for the scientist NPCs. I've also started working on some new chunkier impact sounds for the loot barrels based on some quick sounds that Helk did.