Devblog 126

How stupid was it that our muzzle flashes were like artillery and prevented you from seeing your target? I lowered the bloom effect on them, reduced their size by about 60% and removed the smoke effect when aiming down the sight. It’s much easier to track enemies now. Check it out: Thanks for the image, Rustafied.

I hated how our viewmodels looked all elongated and strange. I lowered the field of view on them so they look a bit stubbier and solid. Before After

I’ve inverted the way viewmodel sway works to now aim a little bit faster than you change your view angles. Previously it would lag behind and it made the game feel sluggish. I think this makes everything feel snappier now.

Something happened with the Unity Trail Renderer component a while back that made tracers invisible or very difficult to see while in first-person. To combat this, I’ve added a small 3D object which, when in first-person, shows up from any angle. Guns feel great once again.

A video does a much better job of showing off how all the aforementioned changes work together.

Bone Armor may still suck, but I’ve increased its protection by 10% for all melee types. I’ll gather more feedback and adjust accordingly next week

Candle and Miner hats now use half as much fuel as they used to, making them a bit more attractive to use as a lighting option.

I’ve reduced how much your XP diminishes when gathering crates of harvesting to make the XP system suck less. This means at the upper levels you’ll receive more XP from doing these actions and it will no longer slow to a painful crawl.

Man, it was impossible to hit anything with this thing. Horizontal recoil has now been reduced to match that of the LR300. Enjoy!

I started to work on natural caves. It’s going to change a lot from the single cave we currently spawn on the map. What will be different?

• The new caves will require preparation work to get into. If you enter without health packs and less than full health you will struggle, and most likely die.
• Some caves will have no way of turning back, forcing you to continue. You will have to evaluate every jump you take as you travel deeper in the unknown.
• The same will be true of the entrances to caves. Some will let you resurface; others will force you to go on. Now you’re probably thinking, 'how do I rejoin the surface then?' That’s where it gets interesting: there might be a few exit only paths out a cave network.
• Building will be allowed in certain cave rooms, deep underground. Each building room will have its own exit path that can be owned by the base owner. An exit path will lead to a mechanical lift that will take you up a one way shaft. Players who attempt to jump down that shaft to raid you will most likely die. Unless they cleverly wait upstairs for you to use the lift.
• Preceding most of the ‘building allowed pockets’ will be jumping puzzles with varying difficulty.
• Some caves might have several ‘building allowed pockets’, which means you will have to deal with neighbors. Sizes of the pockets allow you to build from 2x2x2 to 4x4x3 bases. The larger the pocket the harder to defend it will be. Typically exposing more of your walls to raiders.

How is it better? It’s going to offer a more balanced approach to underground base building for one. While making underground bases more exposed to raiding it will still keep them relatively safe from attacks via the puzzles and death pits, and ultimately still provide the base owner an exit route only he can use. You might also be confronted to other players living underground with you. It’s gonna be more fun and more deadly!

If there's one thing Rust is missing, it's beauty pageants. I've made a cloth sash so you can finally have some recognition as Miss Rust 2016... Helk wanted something to potentially represent when a player has something other than a rock and a torch in their inventory, so I guess he could use it for that too. I've finished up the bake, so all that's left to do is a texture pass before Helk can have a play with it.

I tweaked a bunch of animations for the SMG/AK47/Thompson/Semi-Auto Rifle. Helk mentioned that the animations were a bit too exaggerated and “floaty”, which made the guns look a little fake. I toned down the excessive movement in parts of the animations and I think they look more solid now. I also went over a bunch of viewmodel animations for weapons that had the left arm sticking out unnaturally and tucked in their elbows.

I continued working on the lighthouse. I have finalized the interior layout, which should be now more complex and interesting to explore. Other than that, I have been polishing the remaining parts of the building, adding wear and tear, fixing issues and just generally getting it finished. I was hoping to make the interiors accessible in this update, but ultimately decided against that as it's not quite ready for that yet. I want to make sure that it’s polished and bug free before that. I should have something more solid next week.

After re-UVing and texturing, I’ve finished up on the LODs too! Have a spin of it below. The black box around the vendor represents the door frame deployable that it slots into.

Paul is on holiday starting today until next week, but before he left we finalised the design of the Flameflower Turret which looks like this. I’ve made a start on the high-poly model, and I should be well on my way to the low-poly, UVing, and baking by next week.

I’ve been going over explosion sounds this week. Right now a lot of our explosions sound really similar (especially the distant explosions), so I’m trying to spice them up and make them a bit more easily distinguishable from each other. Smaller explosives, like Bean Cans and Landmines, won’t sound quite so massive and boomy in the distance anymore. I’m also working on adding variations to explosives that you hear multiple times in quick succession like C4 and rockets. I recorded a lot of source material on the 4th of July that hasn’t been processed yet, so I’ve been chopping/cleaning those recordings up this week so I can put them to use for this. They’ve been amazing for the distant explosions so far and are making everything sound a lot more real. I’ve also been working on sounds for some of the explosives that don’t have unique sounds yet, like the Satchel Charge. This isn’t quite ready for this update, but it should be done early next week.

I’ve been working on higher intensity layers for the last couple ambient tunes that I’ve shared, and continued working on general sound polish (which I’ll commit with the explosion changes) a little bit this week too.