Load Times
Load times have been an issue since we switched to asset bundles. I've optimized everything I can on our end.
We originally switched to asset bundles to split the game's content up into smaller files, so that uploading to Steam and downloading from Steam wouldn't mean transferring 1gb+ every update.
It's probably a bit ironic that load times get infinitely worse with asset bundles the more you split shit up. I mean it's super worse. Loading items at start-up used to take less than 100ms; with stuff split up over a bunch of bundles it takes over 10 seconds.
So now we're treading a fine-line between bundle size and load times. Things will get better over time.
Unity 5.1
That's right, bitches! We are now on an engine version that is 0.09 more than the last one. This has turned out to bring more problems for us than solutions, so I ended up spending a day fixing bugs and reporting crashes.
Benefits? Well, not many right now. A bunch of graphics stuff was recoded in 5.1, which should bring some probably unnoticeable performance improvements. They implemented the VFACE stuff we asked for too, so Diogo has no excuse to not make trees and water awesome now.
DirectX 11
DirectX versions don't really make any difference but people I know people are impressed by bigger numbers, so now if you have a DX11 capable PC the game will run in DX11 mode.
We could have technically done this months ago, but we assumed that if we switched to DX11 it'd stop everyone with DX9 playing. It turns out that was bullshit and it would have just fallen back to DX9 anyway.
Added Ladder
When there's nine threads on reddit arguing about a feature you're adding you know you're on the right track. The ladder was originally meant to be for your own base, like stairs. But obviously it's more useful to visit your friend's rock base.
The ladder doesn't adhere to the building privileges. You can place it inside the radius of someone's cupboard. You can place it on the side of their house and climb up to their roof. It's going to change how you design your bases.
Consider this an experimental feature. You're testing it. This game is in development; play-testing is what you're doing. Yes, your one man base is now going to "get owned" by "big clans" because they are "op". We don't think their inability to climb three metre walls was preventing that anyway.
Player vs Player Collisions
You used to be able to run through other players, and now you can't, but you can jump on their stupid bald heads.
This is also an experimental feature. You're testing it. This game is in development; play-testing is what you're doing.
Performance
Along with Andre, I've also been looking into any performance hogging stuff that might improve our situation. This is going to be a bit of a theme for the next few weeks, we're trying hard to get the game performing as well as it possibly can, because we understand this is really the biggest difference between the new and old versions of Rust for a lot of people.
When you join a server that has been up for a while there's usually players asleep everywhere. It's not uncommon to spawn in and have 50 sleeping players visible. This can be a bit of a performance hog since each player needs to be animated and skinned. So now it only animates sleeping players that are quite close to you.
One of our foliage models (some clovers) was about 5000 triangles without a LOD. And it got spawned a lot. In a typical foresty scene we saw our scene's triangle count go from 600k to 1.5m when enabling the foliage renderer. So we got rid.
Everything Else
- Status command can be used by clients.
- Fixed audio settings not changing.
- Server console is UTF8 encoded.
- ConCmds added to global namespace if no conflict exists.
- Viewmodels get lowered more when running, etc.
- Optimized trigger memory usage.
- Added server browser filtering.
- Improved server browser performance.
- Anticheat bans are announced to the server.
- Animals animate further away.
- Fixed supply drop blueprint existence.
Next Week
More of the same. I still have things on my list I didn't get done this week, like throwing and streamer mode. We've started collecting a lot of stats so we're also going to find a way to use them somehow. I also want to start working on vehicles pretty soon, but that's background noise right now.