Devblog 63

About the Patch

This patch is two week's work, so there's all the stuff in this blog, and all the stuff in last week's blog. If you didn't see it, you might want to head over and give that a read because there's some juicy stuff in there. We're really hoping that your framerate is better. Personally I'm experiencing 80-100fps all the time now, which is a huge difference from the 30-60 I was seeing a month ago. If you're suffering hit F2 and turn down Antiscopic Filtering and Parallax Mapping - those should give you the biggest difference. Servers need to be wiped for this update. Players can keep their blueprints.

Arrows

Arrows now stick in stuff. Walls, the floor, people, animals. They still have a chance of breaking on impact, so sometimes they will just disappear because they don't have a gib model yet. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2015/June/04/arrow.mp4[/embed]

Spears

Spears are throwable. And they stick in stuff, like arrows. We're probably going to make more things throwable in the future. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2015/June/04/spearthrowing.mp4[/embed] [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2015/June/04/Desktop%2006.04.2015%20-%2016.04.19.04.mp4[/embed]

Grass Displacement

Like in Legacy, the grass now displaces when you walk on it. And when animals walk on it. This was added to help you find stuff lost in the grass, but I haven't made dropped items displace the grass yet. For now you might be able to find dropped items by walking around in circles displacing the grass until you find it. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2015/June/04/grassdeform.mp4[/embed]

Pickups

There's a bunch of stuff you can pick up off the ground now. Right now Mushrooms, Rocks, Ore and Wood can be found lying around the world. I'm just laying the groundwork here. We have plans to add a bunch of different items, and of course this all plays into the farming stuff.

Building Shell

Building parts now have the notion of inside and outside. When attacking the outside you'll do less damage than the attacking the inside, and right now you do a lot less damage. This is going to take some balancing to get right, and I'm sure there'll be a ton of threads on reddit about how bases are now too secure, but I'm also sure there will be the same amount of threads saying that they're too weak, and the same amount of threads saying it's just right. So, like ladders, let's not all moan about it for weeks. Let's just play the game and see what we find, because it's not always a case of "make this stronger" and "make this weaker"; sometimes it's more interesting to find new items to solve these problems. So to be clear: the external side of walls are stronger, the external side of doors are stronger, the sides of foundations are stronger, and the top of floors and roofs are stronger. Come at me bro.

PVE Mode

Legacy had a PVE mode. It's for people who wanted to build and survive, and it forced us to cater for the survival side of things without the noise and confusion of the PVP stuff. When a server is in PVE mode players can't damage each other, and if you hurt a player the damage will be reflected back at you. Buildings can't be damaged when inside an active cupboard (and you're not authed). There's a bunch of edge cases here that will probably let you hurt players, or their buildings. It's going to be a trolling paradise for a while. We'll fix shit as it happens.

Community Entity

I've been working with some of the server modders. They can do quite a lot to the game from the serverside, but they can't really do much to the clientside. For example: they can't show any kind of UI, so everything is done via chat commands. So I've created an entity that the server modders can use. It's open source on github, and will be accepting pull requests. Basically any kind of functionality can be added to the entity so you can fire RPCs at it from the server. Right now all you can do is create UI (and that's kind of limited right now). It's not GMod style modding yet, but it's a start. For the end-user this means that servers can now show UI elements on your HUD.

Ragdoll Positions

You might notice that ragdoll positions are kind of crazy... even more than usual. Previously, the ragdoll was all client-side, so if it went rolling down a hill you couldn't really interact with it. Now their position is serverside, but the ragdoll itself isn't being simulated on the server. Things get a bit weird looking, like the ragdolls in Battlefield. The good news is we can drag them around on the server now, so it'll lead to some pretty cool stuff in the future.

Health Bars

You know how you'd attack barricades and it would show a healthbar that was totally wrong in every way? Well now that health bar is totally right. Cupboards, campfires, furnaces and storage boxes all have working health bars now too!

The Rest

• Fixed having to hold USE to pick up instead of tapping.
• Fixed not being able to pick up some items at weird distances.
• Fixed bone knife animation.
• Made crosshair tips/health less invisible in bright light.
• Added inventory.givebpall.
• Added server.pve.

Next Week

Implementing all the stuff that has built up. I'm gonna do some fun experiments too!

Ammo Galore

As promised, I finished up all the new ammo types and they’re ready to rock!

• Explosive Rounds
  • Easier to hit targets
  • Splash damage bonus

• Incendiary Rounds
  • Bypasses some armor types
  • Can start fires

• Incendiary Rocket
  • Area denial weapon
  • Can burn down wood building parts

• 12 Gauge Slug
  • Easier to hit targets
  • More accurate
  • Less damage

• High Velocity Arrow
  • Less damage
  • More accurate
  • Faster movement speed

The fire system (seen in the header image) I came up with for the Incendiary weapons allows individual fires to potentially create child fires, and so on and so forth, with a diminishing chance for each generation. This is a pretty basic method of doing it, but it's pretty effective. Once we get a system in place for being able to extinguish flames, I’m going to add the ability for objects to catch fire and spread by proximity. I also spent a few days on the mining system and I came really close, but it’s still missing a few critical features before it’s test ready. Expect this next week.

I’ll keep things short since my wisdom teeth got ripped out of my jaw yesterday. The 8th major iteration of our procedurally generated maps is going live this week and here’s a list of the changes you can expect.

• New roads.
• New rivers.
• Airport radtown.
• New and improved powerlines.
• Better prefab mountain and monument terrain blending.
• Better terrain height map generation with pseudo-erosion and noise distortion.
• Barrels only spawn next to roads and monuments.
• Various other improvements related to atmospherics, biome visuals etc.

Also keeping things short because I'm the last one writing, and Craig is waiting! To sum it up: I redid the entire lighting setup. Exteriors are now "properly" bright, and your character dynamically adapts to it. Expect night time brightness and overall feel to change considerably, but for the time being at least, it is pretty dark. Terrain tones have been changed considerably, and yellow grass in certain biomes is back. Hapis Island has also been updated, and will NOT be wiped until we do the next monthly wipe. It now has more roads and some empty road tunnels that will eventually become way more interesting. I'm thinking side corridors and stairways and lots of tight spaced interior darkness. Player spawn points have also been ironed out. You should no longer have to walk a mile to find a ramp to get off the beach.

Last week I improved the running animations for when the bears turned. This week, I did the same for the rest of the animals. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-03_14-55-10.mp4[/embed] I also added the viewmodels and worldmodels for the flashlight and the flare. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-03_15-04-29.mp4[/embed] And I started work on a generator model. I also fixed a bug with the horse's ragdoll skin not matching up with their living counterpart. Next week, I’ll be finishing up the generator, and if I have time I’ll start work on player animations for when he’s on FIRE!

This past week I continued work on the wolf headdress. Soon you’ll be able to show your enemies the beast that lurks within your soul! Or something. Next week I’ll be putting some work into creating a few more substantial clothing items, including some cool hand-crafted clothing that Megan drew concepts for a while ago.

I’ve been working on the new pistol for you all. It’s going pretty well: I've finished the high-poly model and the sculpting pass is done. Now it’s onto the super boring part of making the low-poly version, but it should be finished soon. Here’s what the high-res version looks like so far. Next week will be finishing the low-poly, texturing and LODs! Hopefully it should be ready for implementation by then for you guys and gals.

I finished the work on the first set of electric lights which, as you hopefully remember, will include a searchlight and a ceiling light. Currently, I am working on the oil derrick model. It’s a work in progress at the moment, but hopefully it will be complete with animations by the middle of next week. So yeah, next week I'll be sorting out the oil derrick.

This week I have been working on some more ideas for the second tier furnace, this time looking more at not only making it larger than the starter furnace, but also making it more into a communal looking structure with room for at least four people. I also looked at the high velocity arrows and opted to do the concept and icon at the same time, this is mostly due to the fact it's a pretty simple thing but also can be tricky to make into an icon that stands out for something that's more or less a stick. Other things I've been working on include some icon tweaks (adding colour to rifle ammo and pistol ammo for the fire, explosive, and HV icons), and I've been working on something else in between everything that I'm hoping to show in the not too distant future (it's not a major game changing thing, just an idea I've been toying around with). Next week I'm going to continue working on sketching out and refining my idea, possibly looking into an upgrade to the campfire as I have a few ideas (not a confirmed change to the game, just something I think makes sense), and most likely some more icons.

Finished working up some melee weapon ideas to add a bit of variety to close quarters combat. Have a peek! Next week I'll be moving on to clothing/armour exploration. The aim is to allow you to distinguish yourselves more, to create better opportunity for group identity.

I’ve been thinking of ideas for new Steam trading cards for Rust. Meg already created some awesome cards when Legacy came out, but we want to come up with some additional cards that reflect the current era of Rust. I know I promised more engine stuff this week, but I don’t have enough to show yet. Look for it next week though!

Performance has been improving week after week, and I’ve watched some users getting crashes when taking this opportunity to run Rust at 4K resolution. Unfortunately, there was a crash caused by a bug in PVT code that has been fixed since. It’s already on Dev and should be on stable soon as well. I added a modified particle shader with some additional emission parameters for Helk, so we can get some nice flames mixed with smoke particles. I also fixed a bug causing missing shadows on some objects. Most of the remaining time solving some Water2 issues related to GL, DX9 and DX11 parity, a mesh rewrite with complementary disappearing specular highlights and multiple lake support. I did about half of what I planned for this week, so next I’ll be clearing the rest of it.

I’ve spent the week building and staring at this lovely monstrosity: That is a Max/MSP patcher for generating wind and ambience that I’ve used to create more varied ambiences for different biomes and terrain. I wanted to build something that would let me adjust these sounds at a higher level and it ended up working really well! If I want to make the wind stronger and more blustery, I can just turn up the intensity slider. If I want to make things more howly and chilling (which you’ll hear in the Arctic biome), I just need to turn the howl slider up. There’s a few parts that come together to create the final sound here. First we have a base layer of noise that’s fairly static unless you really crank the intensity up. This just fills in the background a bit. Then we have two gust generators which are similar to the base layer, but they change volume and pitch quite a bit more and pan around randomly as well. Finally, there are four different granular sample playback layers that we can load recordings into that are used for detail layers like birds chirping or leaves rustling in the wind. These granular layers will play random slices of the audio files instead of playing them straight through, so we get something new every time we load them up. We’re also using the volume of the base layer and the gusts to automatically control the volume of the detail layer so leaf rustles and what not will get louder when the wind is stronger. I’m going to be working on more ambient stings (the occasional owl hoots, coyote cries, gull squawks, and all that) to help differentiate the different environments in the game a bit more. Next week I want to finish up the bullet fly-bys that I started last week and spend some time improving a bunch of the one-off sounds that haven’t gotten any love yet (door knocking, taking fire damage, etc).  

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