Devblog 76

Update Frequency

We've been talking about how often we update. It seems to me that we lose a day every week to packaging the patch, then we lose a couple of days to putting out fires caused by the patch. So we're losing like 20% of our week to patching. Patching is great and it's the whole point. Maybe putting out patches every week pushes us and keeps the game relatively stable? Or maybe it stresses us, overworks us and drives us to put out unpolished, incomplete, untested, buggy features instead of taking the time to play the game and fix underlying problems? So what do you think? Should we keep doing it like this, or would you be happier with monthly bigger patches?

Weapon Attachments

This week I added weapon attachments, which wasn't trivial by any means. There was a lot of back-end bullshit that I needed to do to make them work. So right now the only attachment is the silencer. The art is all placeholder. It works on most bullet weapons and it adjusts the stats of the weapon slightly. I'll leave you guys to assume and get angry about those stats. Consider this a proof of concept before the real work begins. At the moment all weapons that can take an attachment have two slots. This will change in the future. You can access your weapon slots by selecting the weapon in the inventory menu, then you can drag attachments to the slots at the top. Warning: There's an issue with the networking on the silencer right now - which means that it will only be visibly attached if you do some very specific stuff. There'll be an update that will fix that tomorrow - sorry guys

Spectator Stuff

Spectator mode is primarily used by admins, so it hasn't really got much love from us for a while. It's started being used a lot by modded servers, and vehicles will eventually use the same/similar system, so I've given it a pass. First-person mode now locks to the targets view angles. This is still a bit messed up because their player model is visible. I fixed third-person mode being offset weirdly from the player. It should now work as expected. There was previously a long delay between switching spectate target and actually getting there and viewing them. The length of this delay was dependant on a bunch of server stuff. That should go away now. You'll start tracking the player but their surroundings will slowly start to appear around them.

Next Week

More weapon attachments.

Beds

I’ve implemented beds. They’re just like sleeping bags, except they’re more expensive, must be placed indoors, and have a much quicker recharge rate. I’ll play around with letting multiple people authorize to them next week.

Bolt Rifle Manual Cycle

As you may have noticed, the bolt rifle will not perform its cycling animation while you’re aiming down the sight. The same goes for the shotgun. The problem is due to the extreme zoom and range your targets are usually at when using the bolt action - the quick unzoom and actioning can be disorienting, and it also makes it difficult to figure out how far off you were if you missed. No more! The rifle now utilizes manual cycling of the weapon. This means you click to shoot, and the weapon will fire and stay zoomed in. Just click again at any time, or let go of right mouse (aim down the sight) and the weapon will then cycle and get the next shot ready. Hopefully this makes it easier to use, which probably means we’ll have to nerf it next week (haha!). Also, we know the sights are messed up, but check out Garry’s section for more on how we plan to fix that in the coming weeks

Next Week

If it’s ready, I’ll work with Garry on beefing up weapon attachments and making the selection more robust, and put some more work into a long running PVE encounter that should have been in-game weeks ago

Procgen10.1

This month’s wiping update brings some tweaks and fixes to the world generation.

• Lowered field rocks.
• Reduced waterside rock scale.
• Tweaked per-biome forest shape, size and frequency.
• Cliffside topology (to be used for new object spawns).
• Support for empty topologies (relevant for custom maps).

Projectile Penetration, Part 2

Since everybody has tested out projectile penetration of body parts for a week now, I’m confident that the system is solid enough to take the next step. I added projectile penetration to certain deployables and building parts this week. I’m starting slowly to avoid making things completely unbalanced.

• Wood barricades can be penetrated by certain rifle bullets and shotgun slugs.
• Twig building parts can be penetrated by all bullet types.
• Increased health of twig building parts from 5 to 10.
• Reduced the penetration power of arrows and throwables.

Of course, same as for body part penetration, bullets deal less damage after penetrating objects than they do with a direct hit.

Reflection Improvements

To beef up our reflections, especially on water, I added the clouds, sun, moon and stars to our reflection pass. This greatly improves the specular highlights from the sun and makes water look a lot more interesting. Diogo is working on improving our screen space reflections and adding them back to the water shader, for more details on that see his section.

Smooth Time Sync

Something that’s been around for a long time is the issue that the sun and moon could slightly desync between client and server and jump a certain distance when resynchronized. This is now fixed.

Collider Batching

This won’t make it into this week’s update since it’s not completely done yet and needs some good testing on dev before we can release it to everybody. Since we’ll be wiping this week, the collider limit won’t be a problem for the next 2-3 weeks anyhow. I’d like to provide a little background on the issue for those who are interested. When switching to Unity 5 we expected the 65k collider limit to be solved. While this turned out to be true, a bug in the PhysX version Unity upgraded to causes another limit around 256k colliders. Since Unity isn’t planning to upgrade PhysX in the immediate future, we have to solve it on our end. There’s a lot of bullshit involved in making this work, like the fact that once a collider is batched you have to implement some way to quickly and efficiently look up the original collider from the triangle that has been hit. The backend of this is all done and I’m currently working on exposing it in a way that doesn’t make all programmers want to hang themselves when using it.

Other Stuff

• Censor shader no longer falls back to a black rectangle on low shader LODs.
• Server events like the airdrop are no longer always triggered after a server restart.

Next Week

Wrap up collider batching, then move on to some tool development to make Vince’s work on the new dungeons a bit easier.

A couple of weeks ago, my desire to make a small combat oriented no-build map finally got the better of me, and I decided to try it out. As of today, it is finally playable, and we're calling it Savas Island. As of yet, there's only a single game mode for this map, a sort of "soft" King of the Hill. Soft because there's no actual scoring (yet), but the map is designed in such a way that it rewards players who occupy the hill, as seen on this ghetto 5 minute map overview: As you probably notice, the map is fairly symmetrical, and for good reason. The idea is that if we ever decide to implement a focused team-vs-team game mode then we will immediately have a suitable map. Also keep in mind that we haven't had a time to properly large-scale playtest this yet, so honestly we have no idea how it will flow. Chances are that the overall pacing is off, loot spawn rate wrong etc. We need to see it played, to be able to tune it properly.

Next Week

I'll get the atmospheric visuals under control, loot balance the map, and I'll also fork out a standard Rust version of Savas, for those who want a full but very compact Rust experience.

Most of my changes this week went into a separate branch, so they won’t make it to the build. I’m working on water 2.5, particularly on revamping local screen-space reflections performance-wise--to make it more accessible to mainstream hardware--getting fog and scattering on the reflections, finally getting rivers to match the sea, and to fix the underwater mode a little bit. I asked Andre to enable rendering of clouds, sun, moon, stars into the reflection map and that turned out to make a huge difference. It created some problems with double-lighting and specular highlights but that’s sorted out. We might even extend it to all reflecting surfaces in the future but, for now at least, improved global water reflections will make it to the build this week. We hope you enjoy your new sea-level sunsets and moonlight :) Late last week I delivered a few bug fixes:

• Fixed PVT going crazy in lower quality modes and showing some black artifacts.
• Fixed PVT getting way too low resolution (still needs some work).
• Fixed incorrect SSAO on tree barks.
• Fixed the see-through walls problem caused by SSAO (my bad).
• Fixed water artifacts when switching weapon.
• Simplified Amplify Color shaders; may help with warnings in some platforms.

Next Week

Probably more bugs and getting water 2.5 done

I managed to complete several relax gestures for some of the weapon holds. The Rock. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/September/02/2015-09-02_11-11-38.mp4[/embed] Unarmed. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/September/02/2015-09-02_11-13-23.mp4[/embed] Hatchet. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/September/02/2015-09-02_11-15-13.mp4[/embed] Shotgun. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/September/02/2015-09-02_11-18-25.mp4[/embed] I also improved the wounded animations, and smoothed the transition when they get up.

Next Week

I’ll be working on creating 3D models for various weapon addons. Stuff like red-dot sights, zoom scopes, flashlights, silencers, bayonets, laser sights...

After a Monday off work I have put more work into our new dungeons. The powerplant is off a good start, and I’m about to get it tested and improved in-game now. There’s a good flow to it I believe, and no position in the level seems to be overpowered in terms of offense vs defense. At the moment the level of detail and cover is limited to medium to large size props, but it is enough to define good line of sight, directions and flow throughout. This dungeon will not make it in this month’s wipe, but I’m pretty confident we’ll get it and two or three others in for next month. Although it will be in a greyboxed state, it'll be a playable one. Other than that, I have spent the week on creating more cover props of an industrial nature, and I am literally starting the second dungeon level as I type, which will be a train-yard. The past two weeks spent on greybox have been a really useful already, helping me gauge how much work will have to be put in the production of final art. There’s quite a bit, but it’s still manageable over the course of several months.

Next Week

Trainyard level design first pass, and maybe another dungeon too.

I finally finished up my set of Steam trading cards. We wanted them to reflect the major changes Rust has gone through as well as highlight a few things the community has made famous. I did 10 of them, but instead of showing them all off, I'll leave you with just a few to whet your appetite. Hopefully you will be seeing them soon on Steam!

Next Week

Next week I want get back to the radtown stuff. I know that’s what I said I was going to do last week, but I chose to get the trading cards out of the way first.

I added a bit of reverb to the static structures that spawn around the map on Procgen and Savas. Unity only supports spherical reverb zones, so I also had to create a little system to activate and deactivate reverb zones when the local player enters the area that we want the reverb in. Most buildings are not spheres. I added the ability for gibbable objects to specify an effect to play when they break, and made new gib sounds for the pumpkins and barrels. I did a first pass at sounds for the rocket launcher, fixed some small issues with the pump action shotgun sounds, and made the codelock code changing beeps match the volume of the in-world beeps. I spent a bit of time working on geared player footsteps as well, but I’m going to be working on this in bursts because footsteps get really repetitive because we’ve got a lot of variations.

Next Week

Next week I’m going to spend some time making other player’s reload sounds audible, working on silenced weapon sounds, and maybe some alternate gunshot sounds for us to pick and choose from because I’ve had at itch to make more of those.

I finished up the pants from last week’s update, and they should be going live very soon. These were designed to be easy to customize, so I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with them!

Next Week

This time next week I’ll have just returned from a family wedding (yay!), so I won’t have too much to show (boo!).

Been on holiday Monday and Tuesday, so I didn’t get much done. I added smoke, embers and heat-haze to the large furnace, and smoke to the small furnace. Gooseman attached the frosty breath FX to the players and a bit of code so it’s active when the temperature drops. I also started adding a bunch of FX to the Deployables, like sparks, falling dust, and dripping oil. I also worked on beefing up the full screen damage overlays so we can get better visual feedback for when you're taking damage and from where. Next Week Get all the deployable FX finished and in the game and then this little list:

• Create proper planting seeds FX.
• Create FX for when you pick up small rocks, wood.
• Improve the Stone harvesting FX.
• Dampen down the footstep FX for most terrains as they are too cartoony.
• Also might look at the current monuments and see if adding some ambient FX is in order.

This is the progress with the female so far, it’d be great to hear your thoughts as we progress further.

Next Week

The same next week but more considering I’m back now! :D Hopefully get this sculpt finalised and then onto the low poly!