Friday Devblog 26

Petur has been converting all our old trees to the new Speedtree system There's a couple of pretty big improvements that come with the speedtree system. First of all.. their LODing system is really second to none. Here's what our old LOD system looked like.

There was a weird bug where meat was cooking no-matter where it was. This is now fixed. Wolf meat is cookable now too. And meat spoils if you don't keep it cool or cook it in time.

Last week we gave you triangular foundations, this week we give you triangular floors!

Andre has done a lot of work on the player movement this week. Things like the player being able to walk up super steep slopes, broken water levels and being able to unduck into rocks. Things should feel a bit more stable here.

The F2 menu sliders have been improved. They now work too! I added a shadow distance slider on the right - this controls how far away the shadows are. We are restricting them to 50 meters because this tends to pretent the black shadow bugs on the terrain - but feel free to experiment with it. We'll add more settings here to help you guys out with performance.

I added a feature to the experimental server. If you add -autoupdate to your server it'll automatically quit when there's an update. The intention here is that you will have an auto update/restart script.. so on quitting your batch file will update from Steam and start the server again.

All these guys have ragdolls now, so no more balled up wolf corpses for them.

Goosedog has done the impact effects for real!

I implemented Google Analytics so we can collect data about how people are playing. It's quite important to us to know how the game is performing for people, how long they're playing for, what country they're in, how many people are playing. So we're now collecting some of this information. It's only been running a few days but we already have some useful statistics. We're averaging about 8,000 unique users per day. We're seeing highs of about 400 people online at once, lows of about 100 people online at once. Average session duration is just under 10 minutes, but the majority of people are playing for 2-3 minutes. To me this suggests one of two things.. people are either coming on every day and checking out our progress, or they're trying to join a game and are crashing. That's something we've got to work out. If people are coming and checking us out every day then that makes me very happy - because that's exactly what we want them to do. If they're crashing then that makes me kind of happy too - because it's a fixable problem, and it shows that they're coming back despite that. Seeing where people are playing is really useful. It helps us localize and choose server locations. We're seeing about 21% US, 20% Russia, 9% Germany, 5% France, 5% UK. Average frame rate on 64bit windows is 33. That's actually not as bad as I was expecting. The other platforms account for less than 8% of the results - so their low scores could be put down to the low sample counts. Either way this data gives us a rough idea of how well we're doing here - so we'll try to increase performance by optimizing and providing more customization on the F2 menu.

Scott, Alex and Meg have made a new rock model! To the outside world it probably seems pretty stupid to put so much focus on a rock.. but this rock is Rust's identity.. so it needs to be a bit special looking. I don't want to over-play the significance of it. '>

The muzzle flashes we had were temporary. Luckily Goosey noticed that and he's started improving them!

There was a bug that meant that if you had the hazard suit on you were immortal. Fixed. There was an exploit where you went into spectate mode, went to sleep, respawned and you were attached to a player. If you killed yourself when you were crafting you'd still get the items once you respawned. This is fixed.

Goosey has been animating the salvaged hammer.

Alex has started exploring the idea of gestures. The idea being that you'll be able to communicate with other players from afar.

Howie has been concepting stuff that might be placed randomly on the islands. We're calling them remnants. Meg has been concepting medical stuff.

The march continues. This was about a 3 day week for me, because of Alex's birthday and other bullshit, but we definitely pushed things forward. The speedtrees we're adding are a bit of a feasibility test. The Unity implementation is untested so we might run into some trouble with it. That said, Unity and Speedtree are cool dudes and I'm sure they'll fix any issues we come up against. We added a bunch of official servers in a bunch of different regions too. We only had two servers before, and they were both on the same server. This should make experimental feel a bit more like legacy. Performance, stability and memory usage is pretty important to us right now. Server speed and stability too. That's what we're going to be spending a lot of time looking at next week.