Friday Devblog 22

You may have noticed that previously you could only build a wall on a foundation or a floor. This meant that if you built a staircase going up the side of a wall you couldn't really build a second wall on top. Well, now you can build walls on top of other walls.. which means you can potentially build warehouse sized buildings.

Last week we added the lock and key system. The lock was automatically added to each door. This week we decided that his should be more modular. Doors should exist, then locks should be added to them. This allows us to have different types of locks in the future. So now the lock is a craftable item, which you equip in your belt bar, aim at a door and use. This system is pretty raw right now, and will get a lot more refined over time.

The crafting menu has been rounded off. It now has lots more categories down the left hand side. And when you hover over an item it will show the ingredients. We're not done here, but it's good enough for now. We'll review this UI periodically as we add more items, and when you don't get all blueprints automatically (research etc).

We added a new UI system this week. You'll now get a tooltip when you look at stuff you can use. There's 3 main tooltips right now. This one shows when there's only one action. Pressing use now does that action straight away instead of popping up a menu. Secondly, this one shows when there's an item you can pick up. Seeing what the item is before you pick it up is pretty useful :) Thirdly, this one shows when you're looking at an item that has multiple options, which will open a menu when you use it. This makes doing things in the game feel a lot more polished. Also, don't worry.. this whole design is kind of placeholder right now - we'll hopefully be updating that in the near future.

I fixed players being censored even if you had trousers on.. and I added an option to toggle censorship (censornudity 1 in console). Censorship is now disabled by default. It's a dick, get over it.

You can't place frames on frames anymore, in certain conditions. This means you can't completely build a base out of frames and then run around building it anymore. You need to place foundations, build them, then place the wall frames on top. This seems like one of those things that makes perfect sense and I imagine everyone will agree with, but inevitably ends up being cited as the single reason someone is going to stop playing Rust.

Clothes slots now work.. so you can't wear 5 pairs of trousers anymore. The slot system has been designed with the future in mind. It uses bitmasks, and can have multiple layers. Right now we have two layers, under and over. You can see how the clothes are configured here.

I implemented Tom's Metal Chest Plate this week. It stops bullets killing you. Because it's made out of metal.

We increased the network view distance dramatically. For those that don't understand the premise.. entities are only sent over the network if you're near to them. Because it would be a waste of time sending the information about a player running around if he's 4 miles away from you and there's no possible way you can interact. This distance is now much much further. This means that when you look into the distance you can now see trees, buildings, fires, players, resources, animals.

The view distance has has a huge affect on client performance. This is something we're aware of, and something we're slowly fixing. A lot of this stuff is stuff we'd need to fix eventually anyway - so it's a great stress test.

Andre has implemented caves! They're not fully procedural yet, they use the monuments system (which was discussed last week). We're just making sure that the whole terrain clipping stuff works right now.

A lot of items have been updates with blueprints, so they're now craftable. Skulls have been added. Animals now drop cloth, so sleeping bags etc are now craftable.

Paul concepted a new torch. Third time lucky -right? And Dan has started work on modelling it. I think this is on the right track this time.

Howie has been concepting building parts. These image contain the Rust logo. This is so you don't assume we're making concept art for another game and posting it on our Rust Trello and in our Rust devblog. Please don't assume that every image you see on this website without a Rust logo is for another game.

Meg has been drawing meat. She's been exploring the idea of making meat models that describe which animal they're from. We're also looking at making helmets and masks. We want masks to obscure your vision when you're wearing them, so we're trying to find an interesting design for that. She also did an in-depth sleeping bag concept. The following image is a concept for Rust (if in any doubt please observe the Rust logo).

We're working on moving over to Unity 5. We're hoping to have done this by this time next week. Before everyone gets excited, an engine upgrade doesn't automatically make everything look and perform ten times better. So please don't expect things to change, at all. That said Unity 5 comes with things we desperately need. A 64bit edition means we don't have to close and re-open the editor to avoid crashing with out of memory errors. The PhysX update in Unity5 means that we're no longer limited to 65,000 collider objects - which means that servers won't need to be wiped anywhere near as often. The PhysX update brings faster physics too - I'm hearing more than twice as fast from a lot of people. There are other nice things. The physically-based shader means we don't have to write our own custom shaders for a lot of things. SpeedTree support should mean that we have the best looking and performing trees in the game industry. These things aren't something you just switch on and Unity5 only entered beta 2 days ago, so don't expect this stuff to happen over-night. But things should get a lot more interesting.

A lot of loose ends this week. A lot of work on the item admin website. New items, blueprint fixes. All good. Next week is going to be about transitioning to Unity 5. Anything else will be a bonus. Unity5 is in beta but the big man has given us the go ahead, and we're in development.. so it makes sense. It's what we would do if we weren't in early access. So expect crashes, expect unresponsive servers. We're developing.