Friday Devblog 8

The headliner this week is that we got the Procedural Maps working in game. So we're not jumping around on three green squared any more. It's still early days - and it's getting better every day. [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/61_m8A.mp4'][/video] [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2014May16-19-21-21.mp4'][/video]

The procedural map started out with grass. We were using Unity's own grass system.. and it looked great in a lot of places. Unfortunately it used an extra 600mb because of all the meshes it generated. Plus there were noticeable lag spikes when you were moving from area to area as it re-generated. So we need to roll our own solution to that again. And we need to roll a solution that we can justify forcing on. For now we're running without grass.

You know what sucks in PC Games? When you want to tweak the graphics to get better performance you usually have to go into the main menu, then options, then graphics, then tweak, then apply, then back into the game. You end up spending an hour tweaking graphics before you play. I hate that like poison. In Rust we have a F2 menu. It's called the F2 menu because it appears when you press F2. [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/88_pDB.mp4'][/video]

The animations need work, but they're in. [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2014May16-19-09-49.mp4'][/video]

You probably noticed those awesome lakes in the map. Well we added swimming. [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/64_EJL.mp4'][/video] The basics are there, we still need to fix the animations, and have coldness/wetness consequences to entering.

The rock is back :) [video src='http://files.facepunch.com/garry/2014May16-19-07-18.mp4'][/video]

Text chat is back. Dropped items are no longer invisible. I implemented string tables. Players/Objects that fall out of the level are handled properly. Convars can be set from the command line.

One thing I want to address, something that comes up all the time when we talk about generated maps, adn every server being different. Navigation. How do you find your way around, how do your find your friends. This is a fun problem for us to have. We haven't made any hard decisions but there's a lot of options that don't involve a console command that prints out your coordinates. Some that come to mind.. flares, stars, sun, moon, clouds, smoke signals, procedurally placed landmarks, user placed landmarks, user drawn maps. We're trying not to think of these problems in terms of server day 1 issues. If you turn up on a deserted island you're not going to know your way around. That's a given. That's part of the fun. We're hoping that by the end of the first week the server will have things like signs placed around which will aid navigation.

[video src='http://files.facepunch.com/alex/2014-05-16_14-47-48.mp4'][/video]

Another productive week. I think now the new terrain system is in people are starting to realise the scope of the changes we're making. I hope it's obvious that we're not just re-creating the current version of Rust with better graphics, we're also improving and re-thinking things along the way. We're getting closer and closer to the point of being actually playable and fun.. but we don't know exactly when that will be. There's already a bunch of people on the experimental server - and thanks to them because by just showing up and making a mess you're really helping us test the new systems and new net-code.