Devblog 145

Skins haven't been working properly over the last week or so. This is a huge issue: you guys paid for those skins and you can't use them. That's terrible and we're sorry. The issue isn't properly resolved yet. At first I thought it must have been something I did because the timing seemed to coincide with the patch last week. So I hit my head against a brick wall trying to solve it, without any luck. Then I heard rumors that we weren't the only game with this problem, which lead me to believe that it's a Steam problem. After talking to the Steam guys on the forums it does seem that they did change something on their end that may not be backwards compatible, but they thought that updating to the latest Steam SDK would solve it. That didn't fix anything either. So I've hacked around it for now, and skins should work again. I wish we'd have done this hack on Thursday while we found out what went wrong, but the real fix always seemed to be a couple of hours away. So once again, sorry. We'll try to take this as a lesson.

I spent some time this week doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while now (and that a lot of people have been begging for): recreating the classic Rust music! This isn't in game yet. I’ve always liked the old song, but we only had the fully mixed down file on hand, which meant we didn’t have access to the individual layers to use in the dynamic music system. There were a couple parts of the song that have always felt a little off to me too, so this isn’t exactly the same, but I hope it’s close enough to make everyone happy. It’s not quite where I want it to be yet: the piano needs a bit of fine tuning, and there’s only one drum pattern through the whole thing right now, but I’m pretty happy with it so far. Hit play to enjoy it for the rest of the blog.

The latest version of farming is done and I'm nearing completion of this project. In this update you'll notice that you can see distressed plants by their color, so you'll need to keep them watered to improve their yield. Yield is also calculated differently, and is based on how much water the plant absorbed during its growth cycle. Each plant requires different amounts of water to produce a yield bonus. For example, an unwatered pumpkin will still produce 1 pumpkin, but a properly tended to one can produce up to 3. Corn produces 2 ears, but can produce up to 6. Hemp was nerfed to produce only 10 cloth, but will produce up to 40 when taken care of! I’ve also doubled the caloric yield of corn/pumpkins to make them much more sought after food items. You’ll always get 2 clones from a plant, and healthy plants can produce up to 6.

I took a quick look at a bunch of crafting times and reduced them to sensible values. Arrows craft in 5 seconds instead of 20, and most of the guns were reduced from 3 minutes down to 1 minute. I would have reduced everything further but then I’d just have to increase them again when I add the Workbench...

I was playing on a battlefield server the other day and I noticed the Holosight was very difficult to use during the day. In fact, it was virtually invisible. I made some changes to the texture and shader so that the reticle is much larger and stays red during the day. Enjoy!

I’ve changed the F1 Grenade to be a lot cheaper, lowering the required resources and removing the spring from its recipe. I’ve also almost completely removed its building damage capabilities and made its throw animation very snappy. I’m hoping it will be used more frequently in combat for anti-personnel purposes.

I’ve reduced the component cost of the Double Barrel Shotgun down to one Pipe and removed the Gear cost for a Landmine (this was silly as it was a one and done deployable and thus a waste of valuable component). I’ve also reduced cost of all barricades, including the reduction of the Blade requirements for applicable ones.

Part of the problem some people may have been experiencing with the lack of junk piles is simply because people are not finishing the job when they see an oil barrel. If a junkpile still has unbroken barrels or unlooted crates, it’s going to stick around until its despawn time of roughly 20 minutes. This means it is eating up a population slot and reducing the overall number of fresh junkpiles to be found in the world. To combat this, I’ve added some Low Grade Fuel to the Oil Barrel as well as the existing crude. Hopefully people will finish the job now. If not, I’ll look at reducing the Oil Barrel health, or figure out another despawn method.

I know we got new recycler sounds this week but that isn’t all: I’ve slightly reduced the volume but increased the audible distance. Make sure the area is clear before turning it on!

A lot of level detail dressing for me this week. In all there’s, like, 10 dungeons to cover. So far this week I completed overgrowth passes on the powerplant, sphere tank and lighthouse dungeons. I’m currently working on airfield.

I spent the last week texturing the unfinished bunker rooms found inside the military tunnels. I’m nearly finished with texturing the base structure and I will be moving next on creating a set of modular interior assets to add more variety to this environment. This will include assets such as pipes, air vents, cables and so on.

I spent most of the week tracking down bugs in memory management and networking. It’s pretty unglamorous work, but it does feel good to track down bugs that have been around for a long time and caused all sorts of weird higher level issues. For a full list see the changelog.

I finished up the first iteration of the world serialization system over the last two weeks. The game can now cache and load the procedurally generated world on both the client and the server. This means vastly improved loading times on consecutive server joins and server restarts. Since it’s a pretty big change I’ll start testing this on the development branch early next week and and I’m planning for it to go live with next week’s wiping update. If everything goes smoothly, the next step will be to allow server owners to stream the world from their server in order to open up the world generation for server side mods, which I’m hoping to introduce some time next month.

I’ve been redoing all of the third-person animations to better suit the changes that were made to the animation system. Since the new animation system overrides all spine bones, I had to modify my animations so they only use the shoulders/arms. An added benefit of the new animation system is that we no longer use IK to “plant” the hands to the guns. I can precisely position the hands in Maya and it will stay planted to the gun. This means there won’t be any more clipping of hands through guns. Here are some of the animations I’ve gotten done so far (please disregard the animations on the weapons themselves, like the bolt moving back, etc. I haven’t had time to edit those and synch them to the player animations).

We had to revert the Unity update we applied earlier this month because we ran into a problem with the physics engine that prevented certain servers from starting up. This downgrade sadly also reintroduces the alt tabbing issues when running the game in fullscreen exclusive mode. We’re sorry for any inconveniences this may cause and we’ll try to upgrade to a version that fixes this as soon as possible.

The bear rework was getting a little too close to being finished, so I've relegated it to concept limbo*. I've picked up the heavy plate armour I worked on a few months ago, just doing a final pass on the modelling and texturing. It's almost there, although I'd like to break up the big flat metal surfaces a little better, possibly with patches of scuffed paint from whatever the steel's previous purpose was. It's easy to go overboard with colours, so I might just try and push areas of rust a little more and add some drips/chalk markings to introduce some variety. I'm aiming to start rigging by the end of next week, ready for Helk to start the unenviable task of balancing it. *Not really, I'll be working with Alex to ensure the model works nicely with the rig, so expect to see it again soon.

Work continues on the many various components. I’m drawing nearer to completion on them, so here are some for your viewing pleasure!

I played for a bit over the weekend and on Monday and took a bunch of notes whenever I heard anything funky, so this week there was a lot of polish and bug fixing from that list. I fixed a couple of small bugs with the sound/effect system, including the one where firing your bow, rapidly switching to another weapon, and then switching back to the bow would make the bow shot sound play an extra time (and the crossbow too I believe). That one was caused by effects remaining attached to entities when they’re disabled, which meant that when the entity was enabled again the sound would play. I did a polish pass over distant gunshots. They’re a bit sharper and the tails are quieter, which helps make distant gun fights sound more clear and less like a wash of reverb tails. I polished up explosions a bit too. I was mainly focused on the distant explosions this time around and I think they’re sitting in the mix a lot better and feeling more natural now. I also made some new sounds for the recycler. One of the layers in there is a recording of me sitting on top of a filing cabinet shaking it around like I was riding a bull.