Devblog 105

The new player models have been merged in less painfully than we'd imagined. This update brings aboard the new female models. We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don't identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender. This is really just the first pass of an ongoing rework of the player model. I'll continue to add variations over the comings weeks which means you're probably not stuck with your new face forever. We've got a decent synced workflow between the assets I make in Zbrush and the assets you'll see in-game now, so it opens up a lot of scope to easily add or change features without a great deal of technical faffing in-between.

Some people were saying the ceiling lights weren’t bright enough and kind of useless because of how little light they cast. I tend to agree, but the solution isn’t an easy one. You see, in real life the light would bounce off the floor and light up the walls making the whole room appear brighter. The problem is we can’t really do bounced lighting in real-time, so we have to settle for some hacks. To that end I’ve increased the spotlight angle significantly and increased its max range so it doesn’t fade out as quickly. There is also an unshadowed omnilight placed about a metre below the emission point which does a good job at faking bounced light and illuminating the walls. We do have to be careful with this because the wider the angle and the longer the beam, the more objects have to be rendered twice for shadow purposes. I think I’ve found a sweet spot so we’ll try it out like this and if it proves too slow we’ll have to dial back the max shadowed spotlights or come up with another solution. Protop: Placing the lights higher up will illuminate an even wider area

Well, that was a disaster. My armor changes last week kind of completely screwed with the game and it took me a while to figure out why. This also allowed for some open discussion about PvP and some further balance changes to be made to the Facemask. For the record we never actually intended the Metal Facemask to block all but 3-6 damage! The mask was supposed to protect about 80% of incoming damage, Here’s what was supposed to be happening: AK Damage( 40 ) * Headshot Multiplier( 2 ) * Protection( 1 - 0.8 ) = 16 Here’s what actually happened: AK Damage( 40 ) * Headshot Multiplier( 2 ) * Protection( 1 - 0.8 ) * Protection( 1 - 0.8 ) = 3.2 Oops! We were applying protection twice by accident. After I fixed it I realized it was still messed up, so we’ve reduced the Metal Facemask protection down to 0.5, effectively eliminating the headshot multiplier. The other helmet protections have been brought down to bring them in-line with this change and I think it’s a very good starting point. I’ll be listening for feedback, but so far so good. Another thing to note is I’ve increased the durability of the metal armor pieces so that they can absorb 10-15 shots before breaking.

I kind of hate the medical syringe. I think healing should require you to be out of combat or vulnerable for a bit, instead of pumping your arm full of Low Grade Fuel(???) on the run and blasting kids no-scope MLG style 5 seconds later. With that said, nerfing it down to only giving 5hp was not the solution. We need to come up with something else so I’ve kind of reverted this change a little bit. What I’ve done is increased the instant heal ability of the syringe to 15hp, but let it be stacked to 2. When I get some time I’ll revisit how the medical items work and come up with something better.

Remember how grenades used to suck ass in Rust? Well not any longer! I’ve done a pass on them and made them much more snappy and quick to throw (similar to what you may find in other first-person shooters) and their landing positions should be a lot more predictable. In addition to this I’ve tweaked the dud chances on the Bean Can Grenade so it fails a lot less often. I’m excited to see if people actually use these now

The grass was a bit fieldy. It looked a bit too uniform and smooth, like this: So I went in there and made it all messy and scraggly. We've always been inspired by STALKER, and I think this pushes us a bit more in that direction.

I spent most of the week fixing all sorts of bugs, most graphics-related. This one really broke immersion in heavily fogged environments. The image below shows decals, which are semi-opaque in this case, being completely ignored by fog: I fixed a few bugs like this in the past but for very specific shaders, like glass or particles. This time, however, a more complete fix will affect all semi-transparent shaders across our entire standard shader set.

With this week’s map updates I drastically changed the way you should go about gathering resources. Up until now ore nodes were scattered all over the map, with no particular place to look for them. This made resource gathering mostly luck, and the fact that they were pretty hard to spot didn’t help. Now ores are only spawning around other rock formations, so when you want to find them you can look out for a huge rock formation from far away, go there and check it for resources. I believe this is how all resources should work eventually. You identify a place to scavenge/farm/gather a certain type of resource from afar, go there, and have a decent chance of success.

The next version of our procedurally generated worlds is now live. For a full list of improvements check the changelog at the bottom of the blog. Here are some screenshots. I also added the procedural vegetation and rock clutter to all the handmade maps.

Our lighting model has been missing environment reflections for a long time, which made all metals, skin and cloth look pretty horrific. The reason we couldn’t boost environment reflections until now was that they didn’t really play nice with indoor scenes. This week we took the first step towards changing that and brought back back environment reflections in the process. To help mitigate some of these issues we added shader knobs for artists to simulate reflection occlusion by coarsely approximating the object’s self-shadowing. The next step will be to add screen space reflections to our lighting pass, which should help us make the lighting in indoor scenes far more convincing. We’re also researching the possibility of implementing a world-space large scale occlusion system, to complement screen-space ambient occlusion and reflections, that would effectively allow us to smoothly darken interior areas like caves and buildings, as well as fade reflections. If proven effective, it would help us solve a few problems.

Let’s talk about the melee attack weak side of doors. This was removed with last week’s patch and we’ve decided to leave it like this. Our reasoning is that the only scenario in which the weak side mechanic would actually be relevant was when someone didn’t know about it and accidentally placed a door the wrong way around. This was an easy mistake to make since for most doors both sides look basically identical. Unlike for walls where the weak side mechanic makes griefing significantly harder, it didn’t really have any purpose on doors other than fucking people over who didn’t know about it. So that’s why it’s gone.

As per the title, this will not be in game this week but hopefully next week. I’ve done some work on water in preparation for making fire a more important part of the game. You see, I can’t really buff incendiary rockets, or let you set people on fire, or let fires really spread in wood buildings, or have fire arrows, etc. until there is a way for people to put fires out. This also prevents us from taking farming to the next level (or actually usable in any way, shape or form) because we have no way of actually watering plants. To that end I’ve worked on a bucket item that lets you transfer water around and throw it on objects. It’s a little rough around the edges--the particles are sort of ugly and it’s missing some sounds and a few other features--but once this is in it will open the doors for us to work on a bunch of mechanics that have been missing from the game for too long.

We had some Unity related crashes last week which made it hard to get much of anything done on the XP branch. Given the fact that we were away at GDC and working on the XP system the past few weeks, we felt that the main game of Rust had some weakish patches. So we’re going to split our resources and I'm going to give some love to the main branch for a week before going back to work on XP. It’s taking longer than we thought, but we don’t want to push something out that is half-baked. It needs to be completed and tested for a long time before we put it on Main, so we think it’s only fair that we give you some stuff to play with while you wait. Right now we’re looking at improving water as a resource, and as many quality of life fixes we can muster. More next week.

I started work on our dungeons buildings as promised last week. I first had to create the texture sets I was missing for the first couple of days, additional concrete, corrugated metal walls, etc. What you can see here is one of the cooling towers that will replace the greybox models in ‘powerplant’. I am also working on a collapsed cooling tower (since we have two). The collapsed tower will possibly be harder and trickier to explore, but also easier to hide into during gunfights. More on that next week.