Devblog 125

Two months ago, I posted a to-do list for what needed to be done to make the game environments look a bit less like a cheap Nintendo 64 game, and today we are patching in the result of those changes. We had a lot of clutter being spawned everywhere, and there was often very little harmony between the different elements that together made up each biome. We've made that a little better now. The lighting is all brand new too, and should feel more fresh. I could write more stuff about all the delicate intricacies of the operation, but the patch is now waiting on my ass to finish writing this, so just go check it out yourself, or refer to the older devblogs where I also touched on it.

Gamma cranking, a.k.a. the classic de-facto way to play Rust at night, shouldn't be possible anymore. It does not matter what setting you crank, there just won't be any details in deep shadows for your monitor to pick up. I think this is the part where we say sorry for not implementing that handheld lantern back in the day -- because we could probably use an updated torch right now too. We'll see.

Savas Island deteriorated quite a bit while I was away, but I have fixed all those broken loot chests, upside down buildings, and what not. Oh, and I built three mines into it using Vince's awesome modular pieces. For shits and giggles, I also made a vanilla game-mode variant of the map. So if you like small maps, this may be your fetish. For server owners: SavasIsland = Vanilla Rust SavasIsland_koth = The old action packed loot-bonanza.

There’s been a long-standing issue with the weapon firing rate calculation that prevented it from being completely frame rate independent. The problem occurred when a weapon came off cooldown right between two update frames, in which case the time of the second frame was used to calculate the next attack time, which meant it was off by half a frame or so. This wasn’t a huge issue for semi-auto weapons, but in full auto mode this small error could add up and through the power of accumulation mess things up big time. This could basically make your weapon attack slightly slower or faster than someone else’s. Needless to say, it was absolutely horrific, never should have happened, and is now fixed.

After a pretty long wait on its own branch, we’re moving into the game the long list of improvements shown over the last two months worth of devblogs. There was a large amount of stuff done in that time, so the best thing you can do to see it in detail is to backtrack a few devblogs back if you forgot. The short summary would be this:

• New Lighthouse (although not finished yet)
• More work went into Airfield
• Total revamp of the Military Tunnels
• Power Substation mini monuments

The bone armour is in! I wasn't happy with some of the materials, so I gave them another pass. I showed off some artistic screens last week, so here's a brief reminder of how goofy the old armour looks in comparison, which now looks like a bad cosplayer's attempt at the new one.

Texturing has almost finished. I say 'almost', because I realised there were some parts to the model that realistically wouldn’t be seen, like the underside of the vending machine and the inside part of the drawer. I’ve removed those polygons, which frees up extra UV space allowing us to have a higher-res texture. This is what it looks like so far. The green block surrounding the vendor represents the doorframe deployable. It’ll fit into where a door would be placed, allowing you to separate the back and the front of the vendor. Y’know, some extra protection for all you traders out there.

Helk pointed out that the way the player is holding the rifles was a bit odd. I never noticed this myself, since I’ve been posing my viewmodels like this ever since I made Counter-Strike 20 years ago. He suggested that the left elbow was sticking out too far and suggested I tuck it in. So this week I started going over all the rifles and adjusting the animations so the elbow is tucked in more.

I finished up the LR 300 sounds this week and got them in the game. I’ve done some more polish work this week too. World item physics sounds are the polished thing you’ll probably notice the most change in.

I finished modeling the MP5 Sub-Machine Gun. This game is starting to look more and more like Rust Legacy! Please excuse the lack of smoothing groups on the model. I usually add the smoothing groups to the final model because adding smoothing groups at this stage is a waste of time because the model isn't 100% final yet.

A work in progress version of the Lighthouse has been added to the latest patch, but the interior is not accessible at this point in time. The initial plan for it was to be fully finished by now, but as time went on we decided to expand the scope of this area. I am currently working on making the interior layout more complex, which will include broken staircases, simple platforming puzzles and alternate paths. All in all, these changes should make this area more interesting to explore.

I spent more time working on the calm and sunny day type music this week too. Here’s a preview: There’s a couple spots where it gets a bit too full, and some spots where it feels like it’s droning on a bit too much (in the first 2/3rds of the song in particular there’s a really long note that I think needs to stop sooner) and notes need to change up a bit more, but I think it’s heading in the right direction so far.

This week I gave a new block a try on a private branch: spiral stairs. For now I only made a basic mesh and collider to test it out very quickly. Why am I doing this? I wanted to see once and for all if a spiral stair block was a serious solution to our stairs woes. A spiral stair comes with a few pros such as:

• Smaller footprint for a staircase (1x1)
• Ability to meet doorways in their center every floor
• Ability to meet doorways at half block height on alternate quadrants
• Quick to go downstairs

Now the cons:

• Can be slow to climb if you stick to the center column
• Requires a bit of mouse movement to keep the aim along the path

Can it work on triangle blocks? I tried it and it won’t be possible. To put it simply, it’s not so much the slope of the stairs that is making them impossible but the tiny surface available for the player to go through on a circular flight of stair into a triangle floor surface. Basically, players are too fat to allow for this. Does it work on normal blocks? It does!