Devblog 100

Welcome to the XP system. Phaedo82 made a video that explains it much better than we could in a big block of text, so big big thanks to him. The balance of the system has been tested a lot, but it still needs a lot more work. This is why you're here: let us know of any problems or exploits, and expect a bunch of patches over the next week.

Here’s a list of things you can do to earn XP:

• Fish
• Chop Trees/Mine Rocks
• Craft Items
• Find Crates
• Smash Barrels
• Hunt
• Feed People
• Forage
• Destroy Helicopters
• Gut Fish

As time goes on we will add plenty more, but it’s important to note that Ownership plays an important role in this system. What is ownership? Well, it’s a system that tracks your influence in the world. Completing various actions will leave your mark on items, and when those items are used to generate XP somehow, you’ll get a share. An example is a Fish Trap. If you make the trap but someone else uses it, you’ll get XP. If you cook food and hand it to another player and they eat it, you’ll it earn as well. If you harvest resources and someone else uses them to craft something like a hatchet, you’ll earn XP. Also, because your resources were used in the creation of an item, the system knows that and when that hatchet is used, you’ll also get XP. Basically, the more you interact with people the more ‘streams’ of XP you’ll generate for yourself. One last note… Some people have raised concerns on reddit about sharing XP with your friends. Understand that this system is functional and fun, but incomplete. Please rest assured we will be watching for balance issues and exploits and the system is a work in progress. We don’t want groups of 20 people unlocking an AK47 on Day 1 while everyone else is still using hatchets. It needs a lot more testing and we need a lot more feedback.

We've had notes in game for a long time, but they were just useless items. Now you can write in them and leave them for other players to find. We want to expand this over time, so check back in a couple of years and you'll probably be able to pin them to walls and stuff.

There's a new branch on Steam and on the dedicated server. If you already miss the good old days of blueprints and fragments you can switch to that branch. It's Rust exactly how it was one day ago.

Have you ever started Rust and it's just sat there doing nothing for 5 minutes before eventually starting up? Well it's possible that Easy Anti-Cheat was downloading an update invisibly in the background. Now we show a progress bar when it's doing this, so it feels more proper.

We have all this content in game which is unbalanced, broken, and unpolished. The game performs terribly relative to every other game in the world. We have a bunch of new stuff we want to add to the game: horse riding, electricity, caretakers. As fun as it is to work on new features like that, there comes a time where you need to sit down and fix and polish what you've already done. This means new stuff might not get added, new content might be queued waiting to go in, and some existing stuff might even be taken away. The good news is that the stuff we currently have is all going to work better. But we're a team of people. If the programmers are optimizing code then Taylor, Tom, Vince, Alex, Paul all have to work on something. They're not going to be doing nothing. So when you see that Tom is working on a shotgun, that's not to the detriment of everything else. Tom isn't going to make AI stop walking through walls because he's an artist. If Vince is working on monuments, he isn't working on it instead of fixing a full screen DirectX9 crash. He can't. He's an artist. I know 90% of you guys understand this, you understand that people do different jobs, but I think it's still worth saying for the angry and vocal 10%. We've got this shit, don't worry.

You’ll notice in the unlock tree that you get access to a few melee weapons pretty early on, and that their costs have been significantly reduced compared to what you’re used to. I’ve also gone ahead and made it so you are no longer targeted by the patrol helicopter when holding a bow. This should prevent the slaughter of endless newbies. I’ve also buffed the Eoka pistol substantially (25% damage and fires more reliably). I’m sure these changes will be welcomed by all and serve as a helping hand to fresh spawns everywhere.

Last month’s worth of work is merged into this patch. This gives you a first look at the new Airfield, the doors and barricaded doors placed in dungeons. There's also cover in various places to stimulate gunfight in high tension areas. Both barricades and cover can be broken, and for the moment they don't respawn. That’s a minor issue that I’m sure we’ll work out soon. In the future, we’ll tie door barricades respawn rate to the loot they protect, and we’ll use a respawn timer for gunfight covers. I have also changed the output type of crate that spawn in dungeons for this update, to be a vast majority of military crates. In theory it’s a good idea, but this will only show benefits once Helk revisits what spawns in them. You might still find the odd torch in them for now.

I've made a start on Paul's updated bone armour. It's still in the blockout stage, but progress is nice and quick now that I've got a library of bones and wraps sculpted. I'm only focusing on one of Paul's concepts currently, but I'd like to explore the option of having variations on a single armour type (the deer skull helmet definitely looks too badass not to have in the game) and Andre's gunplay update means we can do stuff like shape variations without having any significant gameplay impacts. As a byproduct of the bone armour I'll updating the skull too. You probably won't notice the difference, but it needs to be done for the armour so I may as well update what we've currently got.

This week’s wipe reduces the stability contribution from pillars and roofs to make raid towers less effective and building height more of an issue. I understand that it’s a thin line between allowing building creativity and preventing building exploits, so there’s probably more tweaking to be done in the future. That being said, we should have struck a somewhat decent balance between the two now.

The gunplay reboot is now up on the prerelease branch for testing and will be moved to the staging branch next week. There’s still some armor balancing to be done but the plan is to release it with the next update.

While the rest of the team have been focused on updating Windows XP for some reason, I've been looking at what all our players are losing sleep over: throwable weapons that don't suck. Since going live last week, some people have had problems with response time/reliability. This was mainly due to the fact that if you hit fire before you're in the aim state, it doesn't register. I've now tweaked things to increase that response and give the option to throw before the intro animation is finished. Hopefully you'll notice a difference. Garry made a good point that when hunting you really want to be able to sprint and aim. There's no real gameplay reason not to, so now you can courtesy of Helk's code change. He also added a tumble feature to projectiles, so we've been able to get the spinning hatchets we always wanted. If you have any feedback by all means throw it my way. At least now you'll be able to hit me.

I did some sounds for the XP notifications this week. I recorded myself swinging a bunch of stuff by my mics to get some good whoosh sounds for the background (a metal strainer, a straw, a milk carton). I also recorded some metal impacts and used some sounds I recorded with a disassembled doorknob. I used one of the drum sounds that is in some of the music to make the level up sound big and exciting, and I layered some chimes in the background to add a little bit of shine in the high-frequencies. There’s a sound for when you gain XP (a full bar worth, not every single time you gain some), a sound when you gain a level (which is the biggest, most exciting one), a sound for each item unlock notice, and a little whoosh for when the notifications go away. I also recorded a bunch of fireworks on the 4th and got some great sounds that I’d like to work into distant explosions to give them a little bit more variety.

We had a Unity bug that showed up when we went to merge the music system into prerelease last week that was causing the build server to crash while building asset bundles. It wasn’t happening every single time things built so it took us a bit to track it down. It turned out to be coming from Unity converting music files from wav to ogg during the build process. My goal was for this stuff to go live with the XP system, but I’ll be pushing it out next week since we didn’t get a chance to test this stuff much yet.

LODs are done and I spent some time going over some of the materials. I felt like the main body of the gun was really lacking some visual interest, generally the rusty metal was too much and it just looked too brown. I put a lick of paint over the metal and thickened the normal map where the paint is, then I placed some of the paint dripping over onto the grip and trigger guard. I also dropped a couple of sweaty fingerprints on the screwdriver handle and on the top part of the gun. Take a look below! I’ve started on the alternative grip--the stock--and then I’ll be starting on the extended barrel and frontsight.

I polished up some third-person animations that looked a little funky. Some of the AK47 animations had the supporting hand misplaced and the firing animation looked a bit feeble. There was also some issues with the Bolt-Action Rifle where the player would be holding it a bit off from where he was actually pointing. I added some animations that show when a player is holding up a throwable weapon, and I also added proper throw animations for single and two-handed weapons.

The sleeper bug that I fixed a month ago cropped up again. This is the bug where a player is shown standing until you approach him and then he pops into the sleeping pose. I added some code to fix this and it should be working properly now.