Devblog 162

Shadowfrax's look at the latest update.

I recall replying to reddit a few months ago about how I was aware of how screwy and unfun the recoil in Rust was. It's like playing with a controller: you know what you want to happen, but you have to battle to get your cursor where you want it. I promised to address this in the future, but due to the extreme blow up on reddit about how terrible gunplay in Rust is right now, I accelerated my plans and began the recoil revamp. I've made the gunplay in Rust feel a little bit more in line with traditional first-person shooters, and I think this is a good thing. There are three major changes. First, you're going to notice less horizontal recoil so it'll be easier to maintain your target. Secondly, you're going to notice that, for rifles, the first shot is pretty much dead accurate and the longer you hold down the trigger the more inaccurate it gets by way of an increasing aimcone. This means you'll be able to tap at targets for high accuracy or you can risk spraying more rounds down range which are less likely to hit their targets. Lastly, I've implemented recoil compensation. This means if you're holding down the trigger and the weapon is riding up, as soon as you let go of the trigger it will correct back to the original aim position. The response on twitter has been positive, but I gotta tell you guys that this is absolutely not complete. This is a first pass at a different recoil system, and I'm sure some weapons are way underpowered and others are way overpowered. I'm going to be listening to feedback and balance suggestions, and I'll flesh it all out over next week. Please let us know how you feel about it by tweeting me @Helkus or by posting on Our Subreddit P.S. While rebalancing all the weapons I made some minor cost changes. The Thompson costs 10 less HQM and the pump shotgun and laser sight cost 5 less. P.P.S. Also, if you totally hate the recoil compensation, press f1 to open the console and type 'player.recoilcomp false'

When implementing the shotgun trap, I noticed the spread pattern was a little weird because it was square instead of conical, but figured I'd get to it later. After this week's insane bitchfest on reddit, I decided to look at it and found out that this was, in fact, a systemic problem in the game. All weapons had their inaccuracy calculated in a square instead of a circle. I ended up cleaning it up and implementing the proper math so aimcones are actaully circular now. The big deal about this is it means when we calculate how inaccurate something should be it will cover about 20% less surface area (read: 20% less inaccuracy). Whoops...

Another revival straight out of Concept Limbooooo! The Drop Box has been added to the game. This item can be placed on walls and will be accessible from the exterior of the building. Similar to the mailbox, you can insert items and submit them. They can then be retrieved at the rear (inside) portion of the drop box. This one way, outdoor item portal will help a lot with slaving, as people working for you will have a safe, easy way to deposit the spoils of their labor, and also should help with resource runs: you won't have to go through a hundred doors to deposit your items if you just want to drop some stuff off quickly and keep going. P.S. The mailbox also has a submit button now.

Hapis Island has been severely neglected lately, so today we are rolling out the first part a much needed overhaul. Broadly speaking, the goal is to:

• Make the terrain more engaging to play on. Less boring and flat.
• Fix the various gameplay issues, such as loot scarcity.
• Add caves, mines and other subterranean elements.
• Make each area feel a bit more distinct.
• Add/rework/modernize the radtowns, using all our new assets.
• Rework the mountain slopes to faciliate some base hiding, ala legacy.

In this first part, the most notable changes are an entirely re-worked west-coast, thicker forests, brand new caves and mines, a few radtown changes/additions, and some more overall terrain/river polish. Refer to the changelog for some more details. Expect to see an equally big update on the next wipe day, but more on that later. ATTN: There is a known issue with river reflections on Hapis right now, expect a client patch from Diogo ASAP -- until then, you can set Water Reflections to 0 to remove the issue.

This week's wipe includes a number of updates to the world generation with a large amount of fixes and various small improvements. You can now harvest the wooden logs that can be found inside forests, and all cacti now yield cloth and cactus flesh when hit with a gathering tool. A few relatively annoying small trees have been removed from the spawn table. The remaining smaller trees now yield the same resources per hit as the big trees in order to make chopping them down worth your time. Ore nodes in the arid biome now blend with the ground similar to the way they do in the arctic biome, and clutter rocks are a little bigger so they're not as easily confused with the collectible ores that can be picked up from the ground. Lastly I re-enabled our dynamic moon phase cycle so nights can be both fairly bright and dark depending on the moon phase and position.

I've added a bunch of additional server side checks to counter various exploits and hacks. The deploy time when switching weapons is now verified on the server, and medical tools can no longer bypass their cooldown by stripping the animation from the client. Various RPC calls now have additional checks in place to prevent invalid interactions, and player hack reports are finally also logged on the server so server owners can keep track of them. On top of that any violation of server side checks is now logged to EAC so it can be used by us when investigating hack reports. A false positive in our speedhack detection, that could incorrectly snap players back when sliding down the sides of mountains, was fixed.

We've been struggling with some server crashes and freezes ever since the new AI went live. The good news is we finally tracked down some situations where a corrupt navmesh would snap animals into infinity. We suspect that this was causing some servers to freeze. We'll keep an eye on server stability next week to make sure things are better now and to identify any remaining issues.

Following some playtesting and discussions between Vince and myself, we've decided to refactor the factory a bit. The old walkway layout proved to be boring to play through, so we've decided to streamline it. I made the paths through the level more obvious and added more platforming challenges, collapsed walkways that serve as staircases, and working lifts that will take you between floors. In addition, I added a few secret areas that are difficult to reach, but contain hidden loot as a reward. All in all, these changes should make exploring the rocket factory much more interesting and rewarding. I've also been working on polishing the area and making sure that all of these new additions are properly modelled and textured.

This past week I worked on the office buildings exteriors. The previous look was temporary and a bit blocky. For this iteration, I gave these buildings a meaner look than before by giving them a slanted silhouette. It makes it look more 'sciency', which is what I was after for this part of the complex. I reworked the layout around them to look and feel more functional as well, and to carry the 'state of emergency' look I gave to other places in the game. After I tackle the LODs for interiors and exteriors on these buildings I will move to beautification, which should give this area its final look. We are currently targeting July's wipe for the release of this new monument and the updated airfield.

Work continues on the hand viewmodels. I've finished up the texturing on the arms, complete with all the special maps Diogo's new shader uses. One of the neat features is the ability to mask off the skin tinting, which means I can more accurately portray the lack of pigment in certain areas of the skin, like the fingernails and palms of darker skin tones. Here's a video. Matching something with new proportions to an old rig is always going to be a bit of a compromise, but I think it's almost there. I'm doing a final pass on the skinning today.

First blog post from me in a while! I've been busy concepting some super secret stuff behind the scenes, but I took time this week to replace the temporary road signs that spawned along the roads with some nicer art. They were annoying me whenever I saw them. You're welcome!

I've been putting finishing touches on all the new music stuff this week. I made good progress on some new music and a few more tweaks to existing songs. Here's a preview of another new song. I'd like to get another section or two with a bit higher energy written too because the heart-pounding vibe isn't quite coming through yet. I like where it's headed though, particularly the ambience and pads.

I've finished up a first pass at sounds for the shotgun trap this week, and continued work on the melee weapon impact improvements. I ended up recording a few more bits to layer in with the melee impacts, and got most of the editing for the final in game sounds finished, so I'm hoping to have these ready to go next week :) I also added the ability for us to limit voice counts for sounds on a global level to help with some perf issues we were seeing from all the shotgun trap bullets. Previously we just had a system set up to limit voice counts within a given range, and I like that a lot because it helps make sure you won't miss any gunshots you need to hear if you're being shot at from two directions. That'll still be our go-to voice limiting strategy. It wasn't limiting voice counts aggressively enough to prevent issues with all the bullets that multiple shotgun traps can spew out, though so I've added this per-sound global voice limiting as a safety net.