Devblog 66

Reddit

Over the weekend I posted on reddit asking for people to report bugs and annoyances. And they did. I filled our tracker with 191 new bugs and this week have been working through them. Thanks, Reddit!

Building Part Balances

Triangle foundations and triangle floors take up half the space, so it makes sense that they should cost half the resources. So they do. Half the resources to place, and half the resources to upgrade. They also have the same "shell" protection as their non triangle siblings. Floors, doors, pillars, half wall, doorway wall, window wall and foundation steps cost less too. This just seems to be logical. Pillars and half wall are smaller, so they should obviously cost less. The doorway wall and window wall kind of need something else to complete them - so they should cost less too. The maximum health of doors, window bars, pillars and the low wall has been lowered. They still have the same protection values. You can only rotate your items for a 10 minutes after they've built. No more stairway valts - sorry. To make up for this you can demolish a block for up to 10 minutes too!

Balancing

Lots of balancing has been on the cards for a long time, and I've finally got around to it this week. The C4 now only damages the building component it was placed on. This is in-line with Legacy and we're hoping it will be used more tactically. It will still damage players in the blast radius. The Codelock no longer needs a blueprint. Half of the community want this, and half don't. Our feeling is that the way you find blueprints right now kind of sucks, and is going to be changed in the future. With all this in mind this seems like a fair solution. The Pump Shotgun and its blueprint should spawn more often. I was debating whether to make this a default blueprint like the codelock change, but I figured that on balance this, as an offensive weapon, should be found. Yes crafting gunpowder sucks. It sucks less since the crafting UI changes, but it still sucks. Now it crafts twice as fast. Well, it doesn't technically, it just gives you twice as much per craft (and obviously needs twice as much ingredients) The servers hate your 20 furnace bases. They hate how you let them spit out charcoal everywhere. So now furnaces make less charcoal, but to make up for that when the charcoal spills out the fire and hits another piece of charcoal, it will stack onto it. The despawn timer gets reset on stack

Bone Size

Players are now randomised, and you've probably already heard about it. It's kind of funny: all the work we do every week, all the gameplay advances, all the bug fixes, all the new features... it never gets picked up by the gaming press. But then we make it so your penis changes size and suddenly it gets picked up everywhere. So the real story here isn't so much about penis size, but the whole body. Your whole body size is now randomized. This changes the player silhouette just enough to make your friends recognisable at a decent distance. Like your skin colour, this is based on your SteamID.

UI Tweaks

A bunch of UI tweaks this week too. You can now right-click in loot to automatically drag it into your inventory. It will show a timer, then be dragged in. You know how sometimes you'd drag stuff into a storage box, and you'd miss one of the slots and it'd drop it in the world? Well I got rid of the gap between them, so you can't do that anymore. I did already do this to the main inventory, but I overlooked the boxes. The campfire and furnace have a couple of upgrades. They now have and on/off button, which means you don't have to keep exiting the menu to switch the fire on and off. The fuel that is currently being burned has a fire icon now too. You can now drink from the water catcher via the UI by clicking the drink button. I disabled being able to drag the water from the water catcher and into the world. It was weird. I disabled selecting the contents of stuff, because it got confusing. For example, a candle hat. Selecting it shows the selection panel, then on the selection panel you have the fuel, selecting the fuel replaces that panel with the panel for the fuel. It was weird too.

Movement Changes

Fixed footsteps playing when not moving. Jesus fucking Christ, I should have done that about 6 months ago, but that was what this week was about. Players now move silently when they're crouching. This is quite a big change that we're hoping will lead to more stealth, observing and generally slower gameplay.

Everything Else

• Fixed being able to wear hide boots over other shoes.
• Codelock gives small electric shock on failure.
• Fixed some tree normal textures not being set as normals.
• On Community HUD images are blank before loading from URL.
• Added OverlayTOP to Community HUD (to show UI on top of everything).
• Added player flag VoiceMuted for mods.
• Added player flag ThirdPersonViewmode for mods.
• Fixed locks not always showing properly on wooden storage.
• Make sure all sounds are controllable by volume controls.
• Fixed wolves dropping multiple skulls.
• Fixed campfire/furnace pretending to be on after server restart.
• Aligned bolt rifle ironsights.
• Fixed items disappearing when dropped onto wooden boxes in the inventory.
• Server Console reports invalid commands properly.
• Fixed wrong description on pumpkin.
• Restricted sleep command to admins.
• Increased grenade throw power.
• Fixed horse/chicken ragdolls not bleeding.
• Added network data caching.
• Moved player persistence folder to UserPersistance.db.
• Fixed some item names showing as Translate+Phrase.
• Optimized inventory menu performance.
• Fixed some prefab errors.
• Updated to Unity 5.1.1.
• Grass treads down on lower shader level.
• Grass no longer gets dragged down into caves.

Next Week

Sarah is making me go on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm taking my laptop anyway but I don't know how much I'll actually do. I should be around to help the team with the patch at least.

Weather

I worked on the first version of our custom dynamic weather system. Many games implement weather by having a set of predefined weather types which are faded in and out when a certain weather event triggers. I decided to take a somewhat different approach in Rust and instead generate a set of weather indicators very similar to what you would find in a weather report (like percentages for humidity / precipitation or the expected wind speed) which are then mapped to a visual representation (rainfall, snowfall, object fog density, atmospheric fog, cloud coverage, ...) and can depend on the server seed, time, date and biome. Getting the right results is a bit tricky and requires some tweaking, but the advantage of this approach is that technically no two days look exactly the same and any weather phenomena you see in real life can occur completely naturally without writing out dozens or even hundreds of separate rules. An example for this would be light rain with a relatively clear sky, which in real life could lead to a rainbow (disclaimer: there are no rainbows in this first iteration). In addition to looking nice, weather also affects various gameplay elements. Water catchers now gather water from condensation (fog) and precipitation (rain and snow), players can get wet when standing in the rain and a nice water screen overlay appears when looking straight up into the rain (this effect is also triggered right after stepping out of a waterbody). There’s a number of things that are still missing and many things (most notably the sounds) are placeholders. We’re not lacking ideas for what to do with this new system in the future, so expect many interesting things over the next couple of months.

Other Stuff

• Increased moon god ray intensity at night.
• Fixed bootstrapping taking a very long time on OSX.
• Fade out furnace lights when fading out their shadows (fixes light going through walls).
• Prevent building placement inside the terrain collider.
• Added CraggyIsland to build (a small test / debug island).
• Added weather test scene (editor only).
• Ambient sound system now supports weather parameters.
• Updated bloom and ambient occlusion (minor changes).

Next Week

Weather tweaks and the next iteration of our procedural maps, for which I’m hoping to figure out how to make our arid biome look more like these concepts.

Bit of a slow week for me, but I did manage to implement a few things.

Semi-Auto Pistol

This bad boy is now ingame and should feel very similar to the p250 from Legacy. It has an eight round clip, fires faster, reloads faster, and does more damage than the revolver. Enjoy!

Road Sign Jacket

Think of this as an intermediary armor jacket. It’s half as expensive as the metal chestplate, and half as effective.

Bullet Velocities + Balance

I’ve heard some chatter about the bullet velocities in Rust and how they’re too slow. I agree and this is why I added the HV ammo, but it seems like it’s just not quite enough so I’ve made a few changes:

• Explosive/Incendiary rounds travel at the same rate.
• All other bullet types travel about 30% faster than before.
• Custom SMG used to nerf bullet velocity by 40%, now only by 20%.
• Shotgun Slug travels faster than pellets.
• Shotgun Pellets do 50% more damage (15 instead of 10).

In Addition

• Mining Quarries work slightly faster (5 sec instead of 6).
• Mining Quarries yield 3x as many resources.
• Stuck objects like spears and arrows fall out of objects when they are destroyed.
• Spear throw-velocity has been nerfed.
• Spear throw-damage has been slightly nerfed.
• Spear has a tiny amount of inaccuracy when thrown (no longer a laser).

Next week I’m going to change the game up a bit. The Pumpjack will be in, and I’ll be introducing a new resource type which can only be found via mining. I’m also working on a new serverwide event, but I’ll fill you in on that some more next week.

Working more on the female character. I’ve been testing out what clothes work and what clothes don’t work, and thankfully all the hats fit. There are some things I need to take a look at, skinning and also LODs for the female character which I hope all be done fairly quickly. [embed]https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.facepunch.com/TomWorkPC/2015/June/25/animations2.mp4[/embed] Next week I hope to have the character finished up and making some new faces!

Finished up the baseball riot helmet. Here’s an animation of it in-game. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-18_14-11-52.mp4[/embed] Added a howling gesture to go with the wolf headdress. Temp sounds. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/June/22/2015-06-22_18-39-52.mp4[/embed] Helk asked me to try to make the semi-auto pistol more like the legacy P250 animations, and make them less bouncy. So I worked on that this week. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/June/22/2015-06-22_18-44-06.mp4[/embed]

This past week I finished off the road sign armor jacket and got started on the pants. The “pants” are more of an armored skirt, and they as well as the jacket are designed to layer on top of other pieces of clothing. This means that you should, in theory, be able to wear them with shirts and pants equipped as an added layer of protection. Next week I’m planning on having these pants done and moving on to Paul’s wooden armor. I have some ideas about how those pieces can be constructed, so they could be turned into multiple parts, so stay tuned.

This week I've been working on some more ideas for the tier two fire, looking into how it could enable more options for cooking and preservation without being overly complicated. I’ve also had to play around with the designs and add some better chimneys as these are buildings that ideally should be placed indoors unlike the furnace, which should be placed outside. I’ve also been working on some more finalized ideas for the survey charge, playing around with the idea of it being more C4 and electronics based, but I also tried out some fused based stuff as that tends to work fairly well. I’ll probably be doing some more work on these over the upcoming week as I still think there’s some room for improvement. And icons. I bet you weren't expecting that. Next week I’ll be working on some more tier two fires, tweaking the survey charge idea, and also more icon work.

I’ve been working on the game models of the 6 new melee weapons that I started last week. So far I’ve got a texture WIP pass on the first three. Here are also some material testing shots ingame. I’m hoping to have the other three done over the weekend with some luck. These will need worldview models too.

I worked on finalizing a design for the larger auto turret, we want players to be able to upgrade these turrets modularly, so there could be various camera, shield, damage, etc. upgrades Next week I want to focus on the smaller turret that utilizes the existing guns in Rust.

I finished up the first pass at a system to let us crossfade between different audio files based on how far they are from the player. Right now we’re only using this on gunshots and explosions, but we’ll eventually use this for things like adding more bubbly detail to rivers when you’re closer to them. I’ve also done a first pass at the distant sounds for all of the guns and explosions, and it’s already sounding a lot better than the DSP effect-based approach we tried first. I’ve also done some quick rain sounds for Andre, a first pass over the boar sounds, and have started on stag sounds. Next week I’m going to be finishing up stag sounds, doing a pass over the new semi-auto pistol sounds, and then diving in to the ambience system to tie it more tightly to the new weather system.

Been working on ideas for some tribal bone armor this week, as of writing this now i'm sorta halfway thru the process but i thought it would be cool to throw up some thumbnail and rough exploration work to show how many ideas kinda get slapped down and dismissed before landing on a final design. Next week ill probably be finishing up a color final front and back for this then passing it on to be modeled :D

The state of cheating is shitty again right now. We hear you. This is how it's going to be for a few months: some weeks we're going to win, some weeks they're going to win. As long as people are willing to pay for cheats there's going to be people willing to go the extra mile to create them. It probably doesn't feel like it out there, but EAC are bulk banning every day. Please keep tweeting your reports to @rusthackreport - these are invaluable for us, not just for catching individuals, but for getting a sense of the global cheat situation. A lot of this seems to be using the Steam refund system. Hackers are buying the game, cheating for 1 hour and 50 minutes, then quitting and getting a refund. I think this is what Valve added the game ban feature for, but I'm not sure how useful that is when we ban a user that has already got a refund. We're going to have to contact Valve to see what we can do about this. We'll take steps in the game itself soon to restrict just how destructive hackers can be. We were trying to avoid serverside checks as much as possible--because we wanted EAC to take care of it all-- but it's obvious now that it's not going to work in the long run.

Some people mentioned that they'd like to see a real changelog every week - because you can't always tell what is in the patch and what isn't. Which is a very fair point. Here's the changes in tonight's patch:

• Added dynamic weather
• Added roadsign jacket
• Added semi auto pistol
• Prevented building underground
• At distance furnace lights are turned off (instead of just their shadows)
• Fixed being able to wear hide boots over other shoes
• Codelock gives small electric shock on failure
• Fixed some tree normal textures not being set as normals
• On Community HUD images are blank before loading from URL
• Added OverlayTOP to Community HUD (to show UI on top of everything)
• Added player flag VoiceMuted for mods
• Added player flag ThirdPersonViewmode for mods
• Slightly reduced ragdolls going crazy
• Fixed dropping items between the grid in loot panels
• Fixed locks not always showing properly on wooden storage
• Can right click to loot instead of dragging (has time delay)
• Dropped items combine and stack on collision
• Can only rotate placed blocks for 10 minutes after placing
• Can demolish placed blocks for up to 10 minutes after placing
• Make sure all sounds are controllable by volume controls
• Fixed wolves dropping multiple skulls
• Explosive/Incendiary rounds travel at the same rate.
• All other bullet types travel about 30% faster than before.
• Custom SMG used to nerf bullet velocity by 40%, now only by 20%.
• Shotgun Slug travels faster than pellets.
• Shotgun Pellets do 50% more damage (15 instead of 10).
• Fixed campfire/furnace pretending to be on after server restart
• Aligned bolt rifle ironsights
• Timed Explosive only damages the block it's placed on
• Fixed items disappearing when dropped onto wooden boxes in the inventory
• Crouched players move silently
• Viewmodel bobs slower when crouched
• Fixed footsteps playing when not moving
• Mining Quarries work slightly faster (5 sec instead of 6).
• Mining Quarries yield 3x as many resources.
• Stuck objects like spears and arrows fall out of objects when they are destroyed.
• Spear throw-velocity has been nerfed.
• Spear throw-damage has been slightly nerfed.
• Spear has a tiny amount of inaccuracy when thrown (no longer a laser).
• Burning wood creates less charcoal
• Campfire/Furnace loot panels have on/off buttons
• Items in inventory being burnt have a fire icon
• Preventing selecting contained item in hat/water bottles
• Can drink from water catcher loot panel
• Fixed being able to drag water and drop into world from water catcher
• Server Console reports invalid commands properly
• Codelock no longer needs a blueprint
• Pump Shotgun is less rare
• Gunpowder crafts 2x faster
• Toggling lens dirt off in F2 only turns off F2 (not bloom)
• Added a low quality bloom mode (some kind of bloom is now always on)
• Fixed wrong description on pumpkin
• Restricted sleep command to admins
• Increased grenade throw power
• Fixed horse/chicken ragdolls not bleeding
• Added network data caching
• Moved player persistence folder to UserPersistance.db
• Fixed some item names showing as Translate+Phrase
• Player bones are scaled randomly according to steamid
• Optimized inventory menu performance
• Fixed some prefab errors
• Updated to Unity 5.1.1
• Grass treads down on lower shader level
• Grass no longer gets dragged down into caves
• Fixed serverlist sort order
• Triangle foundations/floors cost less
• Triangle foundations/floors have shell protection
• Floors, doors, pillars, half wall, doorway wall, window wall, foundation steps cost less
• Doors, window bars, pillars, low wall have lower maximum health