Devblog 64

Information

Water Catchers

These are pretty much exactly what you are expecting. You place them outside somewhere and they slowly fill up with water. You can then transfer the water to a vessel (only the water bottle right now) or drink straight from the tap. They come in two flavours, the mini (above) and the max (below). You've probably already realised that we don't have any rain right now. You're right -- we don't -- and this update doesn't introduce any. And it doesn't operate differently in different biomes. This is all planned. Don't worry, we're not idiots.

UI Stuff

The 'selected item' box has been updated to accommodate the new 'items inside items' stuff that was bought by the catchers. The item actions are now scrollable, just in case we end up getting items with a shitload of actions. The splitting window has been cleaned up and has a little bit of help because it's unintuitive and I haven't ever seen anyone use it properly.

Miner Hat & Candle Hat

These hats used to break when they ran out of fuel, and they didn't actually take any fuel. Now they both consume low grade fuel and once it's expired they just run out. You can replenish the fuel by dragging and dropping it onto the hat's icon in the inventory menu.

Other

• Loadtime improvements.
• Laggy firefight improvements.
• Arrows and Spears should be easier to pick up.
• Arrows and Spears don't block gunfire and melee attacks.
• fps.limit is now saved properly.
• Context menu is now ordered properly (was ordered randomly).
• Client handles "server is full" properly.
• Fixed deploy guide not rendering some parts of the mesh.

Next Week

Farming.

This week I finished the mining quarry implementation! Unfortunately, it remains untested, and since I’m going on vacation next week we decided it might be best to hold off on releasing it in case there are a bunch of game-breaking bugs. We may release it in a patch tomorrow if it works out OK on the Dev branch tonight. I did some balancing to the ammo types so that alternate ammo types are always better than using standard ammo, in addition the shotgun slug does twice as much damage as it used to. Next week I’ll be on vacation, but the week after that I’ll be working on implementing the second mineral extractor: the pumpjack.

I had another look at the performance impact of buildings this week. The big issue with building performance was that every individual building part did between one and six draw calls, which combined with the relatively far view distance of buildings was really hitting us hard. I solved this by combining building parts that are close to each other into a single mesh as soon as the lowest level of detail kicks in, for which Vince prepared the building parts last week. When writing a system like this you’re always walking a thin line between writing efficient code and keeping everything sane enough for other programmers to have a chance at understanding it. We failed that in Rust Legacy, but I believe we succeeded this time around. The system is reusable and once we’re sure everything works as it should I’ll investigate if we can apply the same thing to other objects as well. Initial performance tests in our building test scene showed an improvement of 2.5-3.0ms on my machine, which means my FPS increased from 85 to 115. Your results may vary, but overall everybody should see some decent performance improvements. Next week my helping hand is required on a different project. If I find the time I’ll also get started on the weather system for Rust and add the new draw call batching system to spammy deployables like barricades. We’re also nearing the second half of the month, which usually means I assemble a list of changes for the next wiping update and therefore the next iteration of the procedural world generation.

This week I finally merged Water2 into the development branch. While there are no dynamic reflections yet, which is kinda why the water may look like a waving blanket, they are due in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be bringing back the old reflections. Finally pulled the trigger on that native water simulation. Ended up about 8x faster, keeping that's CPU cool. I also took some time to improve shoreline wetness, which is now also possible on any object that uses our standard shaders. You’ll start seeing wet rocks as soon as artists start enabling the shore wetness flag on objects touching the water. Still needs work, however. We now can have multiple water instances as well. They can also be rotated which is very useful for lakes, swamps and puddles. I didn’t have enough time to get Hapis Island’s lake using Water2 before this update, but I’ll have it up by tomorrow on the development branch. Next week: More water quality/LOD options and control. I’ll be fixing some precision issues and removing underwater shine closer to the waterline, adding some foam, removing SSAO on top of water, and getting started on rivers.

I finished an animation for when the player is on fire. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-10_11-30-37.mp4[/embed] I also started work on an animation for when he’s cold. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-10_11-42-58.mp4[/embed] Next week I’ll start work on the bone club and the semi-auto pistol weapon animations.

This week I finished off the new pistol! Here’s what it looks like. And here’s what it looks like in Unity! Next week I’ll be starting on some more character work for y’all.

I’m working on some armor! This week, and probably for the next few weeks, I’m going to be focusing on some armor sets that use various materials, and are all designed to fit together with minimal weirdness. These armor sets are going to primarily be jackets and pants, though some other things like helmets will probably sneak in there. This first set is based on a concept that Paul drew a while ago that uses road signs as armor plates. Next week, more armour.

Finally got some more engine stuff to show, and I started thinking about ideas for base defense. I think engines could come in a variety of flavors in terms of how they’re fuelled. The previous ones run on gas, but for these I’m thinking they take in wood/coal to create steam power. As for base defence, I’ve been exploring automated turrets so players have a way to better defend their bases when they’re offline. Maybe they could utilize the existing guns? Next week I want to finalize some of the steam trading cards I’ve been doing sketches for and I’ll probably think more about turrets.

I finished the oil jack pump this week with its animations. I started to work on our new windmill right away, and it should be ready for implementation next week.

This week I managed to finish off the first batch of ideas I've been playing around with: knuckle dusters and hand protection to go along with the punching animations and attacks we plan to add in the future. I like the idea of bare knuckle fighting causing some degree of injury to you (much like it does in real life). In order to protect yourself you'd need some form of padding and to be more effective you'll need something like metal to make your punches really sting. Lots of icons this week. I made a new icon for low grade fuel and a new jerry can for mid-grade fuel, 2 water catchers and the icon for the quarry, which is probably the fiddliest one so far. I've also been working with Helk to come up with some ideas for a new in-game event similar to an airdrop. I hoped to show it off this week, but unfortunately I had to give priority to the icons so it's not quite finished yet. I've also done a bit of work towards a tier two fire, but it's only in the very early stages right now. Next week I'm going to finish off the event ideas, and also I'm going to be concepting a little something you can use to see what resources lie underground for you to mine: a survey charge.

Been shaking off the cobwebs on my character stuff this week, and I started work on some new stuff to wear. First thing I wanted to tackle was some wooden armour: just doing rough explorations on this, but Helk gave a little direction, saying that the armour should slow the player down and be able to absorb maybe 50-100hp (two hits or so) before breaking apart and falling off. Also our painting system could be used on these to let you custom paint your armour to however you like it. Next week I'll be continuing on with this until it's ready to be taken to 3D, and then onto something else to wear that provides a function, maybe ghillie suits or something similar?

This week I added a bunch more ambient stings (the random one off ambient sounds that get played over the background ambience) and increased the frequency that they play at. The end goal is to strip most of the details out of the background ambience and gradually add more stings/increase the sting frequency until these stings are creating a constantly evolving soundscape. Once most of the ambience is coming from stings, we’ll easily be able to do things like stop bird chirps for a little bit after someone shoots a gun near you. I did a first pass at bullet fly-bys too. Getting shot at feels more tense now, and it’s nice to have more of an indication that that distant gunshot you heard was actually intended for you. I’ve also done a bunch of small tweaks and general clean-up on some sounds, and taken a first pass at bandage sounds, door sounds, and the cargo plane sound. Next week I’m going to continue picking off the straggling sounds that haven’t gotten any attention yet (chickens, boars, medical syringe, etc).