Devblog 109

The accumulated updates from April are going in this week, this includes quite a few of the buildings on the map. There’s a bit of them left to do, which will come end of may beginning of June. Performance in dungeons is likely to be a tad slower until I do a pass on LOD distances, hopefully for next wipe. Some of you heard of the door barricades this week from the Twitter bot. This isn’t (yet, and maybe never will be) something players can place themselves. It will be breakable entities that we will place around dungeons loot rooms to seal them, and have them respawn with the loot after some time. Like a good indication that a room hasn’t been looted yet.

Remember how you used to have to throw away cans of food and charcoal because you simply didn’t have the storage space? Well no longer! I’ve went through and increased the stack size to 10 for most food items like Chocolate, Granola, Cans, and even Empty Cans. Charcoal stack size has been doubled to 1000 units, and 5.56 now stacks to 100. Enjoy!

The Reactive Target was kind of a bust. I checked out Rustafied’s main server and with 200,000 entities deployed, only nine were reactive targets. They just aren’t being used as much as expected to test out weapons, and part of that probably has to do with the cost and the usability. So what I’ve done is reduced the cost by 100 Metal Fragments, and I’ve also changed it so it auto resets six seconds after being knocked down. Maybe they’ll be a little more fun now.

While the survival changes have been very well received, there is still the potential for people to be unable to find food of any kind. I saw some pretty cool videos on Youtube and decided to go ahead and add our very first form of fishing to the game! It’s a default blueprint, and to use it you deploy it on the shoreline and add bait to it. Bait can be any type of food, but the important thing to know is the more bait in the trap the more likely it is to attract bigger fish. This is a good way to recycle things like mushrooms into higher quality food.

Human Meat has long needed a negative attribute to discourage eating it. To this end, I’ve made it reduce your hydration by 40. It is still possible to survive on it, but you had better have a good water supply. I’m excited to see how this changes the game. Please stop eating new spawns.

This is kind of an experiment to see if we can give players a place to meet up or trade. Basically if you own a sentry gun, it has an option to be put into ‘Peacekeeper Mode’: it will only target players who have a weapon out, or have dealt damage to another player recently and nearby. This means you could use sentry guns to make an outpost or area of the map where random, non-aggressive people can interact without worrying about being randomly killed or attacked. I’ll probably build a couple of these after the wipe on a few official servers to see how it goes.

Snow is back. There’s more snow at high altitude and even some fairly large patches of snow in the north. It’s not the vast, samey arctic biome we used to have, but I think it’s a good compromise and a lot closer to what we want the north of the island to look like.

I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the mix and polish changes I’ve been working on. I recorded 5-10 minute long audio reference clips from some games that I really love the audio work in and spent a lot of time listening back and forth between those reference recordings and Rust, making tweaks as I went. We’ve got more variations for some common sounds now: each footstep type has eight variations instead of the four we had previously, bows and crossbows have multiple attack variations, raising and lowering ironsights has more variations, etc. Gunshots and explosions will take over the soundstage in the game a lot more. We’ve been dynamically dropping the volume of background sounds and quieter world sounds for a while now, but I beefed this up a bunch and I think it sounds fucking awesome with the whole reverb tail spread thing we’ve got going on. And on top of all this I’ve done a lot of small EQ and level tweaks and general cleanup to a LOT of sounds. Most of this stuff would be hard to notice on it’s own, but it all adds up and helps everything sit together a lot better. There’s definitely still more we can do here, and I’ll continue refining all this stuff moving forward. I’m quite a lot happier with how everything is sounding now though and most of the sounds that have been bugging me for a while are fixed now, which feels great!

Speaking of altitude, Petur and I combined forces to get some more mountain variety into the maps. What goes live this week is only part of our efforts since the biome specific mountains we initially wanted to release need some more work, both in terms of optimization and visuals. That being said, you’ll definitely see a lot more variety than you did last week. Expect even more of this to come with one of the next wipes.

I’m texturing the female clothing I started next week. The skirt is pretty much done, but haven't got it in-game just yet. I want to really push the frayed look a bit more before calling it finished, in line with Paul's concepts.

I continued my efforts to rework resource gathering. Ores spawning around rock clusters turned out to work pretty well, so I’m now doing something similar for mushrooms since food is starting to play a bigger role in the game. Mushrooms now only spawn on non-grassy ground inside forests. This means you can identify the general area where mushrooms could be found from far away instead of walking around aimlessly and having to hope for luck. Wild corn and pumpkins also work a bit differently now and should be easier to find and more common overall. This step also prepares us for some much needed balancing of the resource amounts, but more on that in a future devblog.

So it seems that people like this idea. Thanks for all the positive feedback so far. I was chasing a few bugs this week but here’s couple more anim ideas: I still want to try others like dehydrated, fatigued, etc. Someone pointed out they'd like to have an option to shuffle through idle stances in the preview. Although that sounds cool in theory, it's kind of the opposite of what I want to do. Instead of showing random stances, I'd rather the anims give you a heads-up on how you're surviving, so you can take appropriate action.

To help with performance I tweaked the bush and clutter rock spawn densities a little bit, which, depending on your hardware, should shave around 1ms off the frame time. Since I mostly got rid of bushes and rocks in parts where they weren’t very noticeable it shouldn’t decrease the visual quality of the world all that much either. Last but not least, our testers spotted a loading time regression related to non-uniform collider scaling of cliff meshes. This is now fixed, which reduces both client and server load times by multiple seconds.