Devblog 29

Everyone wants to play without bugs, so we've been spending a lot of time this week trying to get rid of the most annoying bugs. There's not much to say about each of them, so I'll list them off, like an old school changelist.

• Fixed locks disappearing when upgrading doors
• Fixed being able to climb up buildings by tapping jump
• Fixed Looting/Deploying through doors
• Fixed strafing right not making any footsteps
• Fixed no sounds playing
• Fixed sounds playing too loud
• Fixed melee attacks vs sleeping players
• Fixed players wearing a burlap shirt being unhittable
• Fixed water levels not working properly (not drowning, not getting wet)
• Fixed crafting continuing after death

There's currently a wakeup bug that is proving a bit elusive. I thought I'd fixed it but people are reporting that it's still happening.

I implemented a few of the weapons and tools that the guys have been working on over the last few weeks. You can't throw the spear yet - but this is planned (the plan is to make pretty much everything throwable).

All the craftable weapons now work. There's a few small issues here still. Keep reporting and voting up and we'll get to them.

Streamers wanted a hide chat convar. So I've added that. To hide chat press F1 and type "vis.chat 0". I can appreciate that people making videos for youtube and streaming to twitch want to have no possibility of seeing cocks at all - so I will add that next week. I appreciate that the censornudity convar only partially works.

We've been exploring how the building upgrades are going to work. We want to make it so that you can look at a building and see if it's half upgraded. To do this we were considering making an animation for each component, moving to each level. Here's the system working with a test animation. The idea being that in the final animation bricks would appear, or wooden panels would appear step by step to flesh out the new level.

Scott has been working on the stone hatchet

Meg has been working on ideas for underwater remnants Howie has been working on more monuments Howie has also been experimenting with what we should replace the frame stage with. Howie has also been looking into what each stage of building should look like

I fell into the biggest Unity trap this week. I spent a day making editor tools. A little advice to anyone who is starting with Unity.. do everything you can to avoid writing Unity tools. Not because it's hard, or terrible.. but because you start making a tool to make your life easier, to make it so you can work faster.. but you then spend more time making the tool than you would have ever spent doing the repetitive task you're trying to fix. Then a week later you change a system completely, then your tool is either redundant or broke. Which means you either don't need it anymore - or you need to spend more time converting it to the new system. So my advice is if you really really need to make a tool then put the least effort possible into it.

We've been putting some thought into the workshop. I'm a big believer in user created content. I know there's people out there who see it as the game developer palming off responsibility for content creation to the community - but I don't see that as a bad thing.. at all. No-one is doing anything they don't want to do. Our ideal model is the TF2 model. People make items + clothes, if they get accepted to game they stand to make royalties from it. Exactly how this is going to work for Rust is something we'll wriggle our way through, iterating, pivoting, whatever other buzz words you want to call it. Basically changing shit if it's shit. So this is where we're headed. The sticking point is how we're going to achieve this. We need to make it so users can upload their entries to workshop. Do we set up a website? Do we add it to our Unity SDK? Would it require Unity Pro to upload because of the native plugin support? Rust is made in Unity 5 - which is in closed beta. Do we make the SDK target Unity 4? There's a lot of stuff to think about - but we want to get this cracking as soon as possible.

So, not much proof that we've actually been turning up to work this week, but we have been battling with stuff behind the scenes. Since going live with the new version last week we've been paying attention to the servers, the bug report site and other community run sites to see what people think, what problems they're having. We have been trying to fix most of the issues that people are having. The gameplay/balance issues people are experiencing are valid for the most part. We're giving them thought - we don't want to give a kneejerk reaction to these things. I would expect next week to be quite similar. Expect only bug fixes, performance fixes and light balancing. It's important for us to get to a stable position until we start pushing shit further forward and adding more bugs. One of the biggest things we're missing right now is blueprints.. how they're acquired, how they're used, how they're lost. At the moment you can craft everything from the moment you get the game. That's not exactly what we want to happen.. but there's quite a bit of work under the hood to get it to work how we want it to. Hopefully next week's work will go a long way towards that.

Diogo started playing with parallax textures on the terrain shader.