Devblog 67

Anti-Cheat

We had hoped that EAC could handle all of the anti-cheat stuff so we can concentrate on handling all the game stuff. It's obvious that’s not working, so I did some work on a second-layer of anti-cheat this week. One of the things I added was serverside noclip protection, that I'm sure that a lot of people have wanted for a long time. The good thing is you can’t write a cheat to break this; the bad thing is it may end up increasing the server's CPU usage. Things should get better over the next week. This won't resolve cheating by any means. It will make them less obvious to everyone on a server, but also less destructive. I’ll be watching and listening and improving this more as time goes on.

Incendiary Fireball Changes

I did a little bit of work on the fireballs that come out of incendiary rockets to make them a little more useful:

• Fire deals much more damage.
• Being in the flame will slow your movement down.
• Flames now emit light.
• Flames have different heights.

Ore Yields

Right now how people are getting ores is wrong, so this will probably change in the future. While playing I realized that it was ridiculous that you could find an ore node and gather enough metal to make 3-4 guns from it. There are also some cases where a few players get lucky and get a whole bunch all at once, leaving nothing for anyone else. To combat this I halved the number of resources found in Ores. Sorry! To make up for it, I increased the maximum number of ores that spawn by 50%, so in general there will be 25% less theoretical ore on the map. We’ll see how this plays out for now, but we really need to revisit this next week and have finding ore be more like finding a bit of treasure and not just a time sink.

Riot Helmet

Not a terribly uncommon drop, this helmet is very good at protecting against melee hits and a little worse at protecting against bullets than the bucket helmet. I’m interested to see how it plays out.

Bone Club + Torch Changes

I’ve done some work with the low-level melee balance of the game. First, I’ve implemented the bone club as a low-level melee weapon. It’s cheap to make and hits about twice as fast as the starting rock. Second, I’ve made it so when you ignite your torch it does +10 fire damage with melee strikes. The downside is it’ll only last 6-7 hits while lit, so use this ‘buffed ability’ sparingly!

Land Mine

The third trap of the game was added! It’s uh... pretty self-explanatory.

Everything Else

• Fixed supply drop dropping too many mining quarries.
• Supply drops drop more survey charges.
• Rock no longer loses condition when harvesting flesh.
• Bone knife range increased.
• Shotgun slug is more accurate.
• Coffee can helmet cost reduced.
• Increased quarry audio range.
• Beartraps + landmines displace grass.
• Beartrap cost reduced slightly and made more common.
• Traps no longer show health making them harder to spot.
• Lowered shotgun headshot sound.
• Lowered slug damage.
• Increased shotguns view sway.
• Fixed keypad culling out too soon.
• Fixed ragdolls freaking out when arrows/spears are stuck in them. There were some really funny YouTube videos, but we had to put an end to it :).

Next week

I’ll spend a little more on anticheat and might implement the pumpjack, most importantly though is I’m working on ██████████ ██████ ████ ████. ████’█ █ ██████ ███████ ████ ██ █████. █ █████ ████ █████ █████████ ███ ██████ I’m super excited! [Helk got a little too excited and tried to announce something we're not ready to announce. I hope no-one else does that - Craig]

Procgen9

The 9th major iteration of the procedural world generation is now live. I just started working on this a few days ago, so some changes might be a little rough around the edges. There’s some good stuff in there however, so I didn’t want to hold it back for another month.

• Reworked arid biome with more vegetation and height variation.
• Made biome transitions smoother overall.
• Improved visuals of the hill noise.
• Improved texturing of forests.
• Made forests appear thicker by adding more bushes.
• Added colliders to airfield warehouse and metal building.
• Removed invisible colliders around the big powerline poles.
• Generate all rivers as prototypes, then select the longest ones.
• Randomized river width along the river path.
• Tweaked lake and island shape.
• Fixed rocks spawning inside powerlines.
• Added palms to arid and temperate beaches.
• Added some smaller cliffs around the beach to land transition.

Bloom

We forced bloom on everybody last week but didn’t really write anything about why we made that decision, which led to some confusion and anger. The reason we decided that everybody should have bloom enabled is that turning it off yields a significant advantage, and we believe that with physically based rendering and high dynamic range color buffers it’s possible to achieve very convincing results with it. That being said, there were a couple of issues with some of our assets that caused massive bloom flares to appear in certain situations that weren’t intended, and the effect itself wasn’t perfect either, looked a lot like fog in certain situations and blurred the image unnecessarily. We’re planning to address those issues, and started doing so this week.

• Water and terrain wetness sun reflections are less intense.
• Only very bright objects cause bloom (fixes blurring of the entire image).
• Made bloom blending additive (makes it look less like fog).
• The torch viewmodel is no longer lowered right into the line of sight when running.
• Garry fixed a number of SpeedTree assets having very intense bloom highlights.

If you’re still having issues with massive bloom flares coming from certain objects, try dialing back the decor quality slider in the F2 menu to see if that fixes the issue and let us know which object is causing trouble.

Other Stuff

• Increased moon brightness.
• Increased star brightness.
• Optimized dynamic decor spawning and object counts.
• Optimized grass and decor refreshes when no work has to be done.
• Optimized overall world layout and object counts in remote areas.
• Weather override admin commands now take floats.

Next Week

Next week will be mostly polishing, tweaking and fixing for me. I’m also planning to investigate performance and memory usage. Unity also has some nice optimizations in the pipeline that could really help us out, especially with tree performance, but we don’t have an ETA for when we’ll be able to can get our hands on those yet.

Linux

Linux is broke. We know and we're sorry. This isn't a problem we can fix easily. It's a bug in the latest version of Unity. They've apparently fixed it in their internal builds - but haven't released the fix just yet, so we're waiting patiently along with you guys. We can't just roll-back to a working version of the game because it would mean rolling back a number of other important fixes if we do. This might seem cruel, twisted, disrespectful to the Linux users. Would we roll back if this was affecting Windows users? Yes. Because they are the huge majority. We sometimes have to prioritise the majority. It sucks, and we know it sucks. It's important to say that the game is still in early access, still in alpha, still in active development. We update every week. It's not going to stay like this.

I finished up the animations for the bone club viewmodel. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/July/01/2015-07-01_22-50-50.mp4[/embed] I started working on some animations for when the player is crouched and turning. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/July/01/2015-07-01_22-52-44.mp4[/embed] I also finished up a generic animation for the player doing something on the ground. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/July/01/2015-07-01_21-48-28.mp4[/embed] I added 3rd person animations for when the player is aiming with the bow, so there will be no more situations where strangers are calmly chatting you up and then there’s an arrow in your face. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/July/01/2015-07-01_23-02-12.mp4[/embed] I also did some minor tweaks with some of the positions of some of the weapon models in third-person. They should sit better in the hand now. Next week I’ll be working on some player animations for when player gets caught in a bear trap. I probably also start on animating the swords that Dan has been working on if they're ready.

I’ve started on making new faces, but decided to take a break to make a quick prop: the landmine. It's already in the game. Every screenshot of the metal face mask and plate armour reminded me of how much it sucked, so I changed it. Thanks to Rustafied for the image! Next week I should have something to show for the different female heads, and possibly some images on smaller assets I’ve been working on when I can, which includes a new weapon!

This week I did some more work on the tier two fire and cooking ideas. I like the idea of them being multi-purpose and the player being able to chop and change what kind of setup they want depending on their needs. I'm not 100% sure if this is an idea that will make it in-game, but it's been fun to work on and I think it would be a good addition. I've also tried making some new masks and headgear with some focus on a tribe or group identity. I really want a traffic cone that lights up. Oh look! Icons! The plan for next week is to try a few more iterations of the headgear and to do a bit more work on some bits and pieces I've been doing off and on. I may also be working on more icons. Possibly. Definitely.

After finishing up some designs for the larger auto turret last week I started working on finalizing the smaller auto turret that lets players incorporate the game's existing rifles. I’ve also started on developing the look and feel for our vehicles. We’re thinking a modular approach for their construction will work best so we can have a large variety of different looking vehicles with minimal assets. We also want vehicles to be more than just a means to get from A to B quickly, they should be used for more utilitarian purposes as well, such as moving large amounts of resources around. Next week I'll be working on a fractionating tower that allows players to distil multiple types of fuel. After that I'll probably hop back onto more vehicle stuff.

Finished off the bone armour design this week. This one went through quite a few changes until it landed on something that fit the way Rust works with armour (which protects where it covers as opposed to some arbitrary armour value), and it ended up with two designs that both went down quite well. It kinda might be cool to have some kind of randomized clothing system that combined different bits and pieces. Next week I'm going try some ideas for some more endgame type stuff, something influenced by more tactical looking military/riot gear using Kevlar, or maybe some kind of Rust improvised stand-in.

I’ve been working on the other three weapons from the set. I’m currently sorting out the textures so they play nice with Unity. I’m also sorting out the world-view models and LODs while I balance textures.

This week I did a first pass at sounds for the stag and spent some time working on making the ambience system more weather aware. Only the stag sounds will be going in this week though. Right now I’m doing some experimenting, trying to figure out how I want to handle changing ambience when the player is inside a building. Rain hitting a roof is one of my favorite sounds, and it gives a great sense of being safe and sheltered from the elements, so I really want to get this working well. One of the things I’m hoping we can get right is having rain/birds/whatever still clearly audible if there’s a window or a door or an open wall to one side of you. I’d love to be able to stand under a covered porch and hear the rain falling around you AND the rain hitting the roof above you, [Alex wrote a load of really cool stuff in here, but we want to save it for another time. I also enjoy teasing you, so I've kept just enough to make you want it - Craig]. I also spent some time working on ██████████ ██████ ████ ████. ████’█ █ ██████ ███████ ████ ██ █████. █ █████ ████ █████ █████████ ███ ██████ ██████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ████ ███ ██████████ █████ ██ ███████ ███ ███ ████ ██████ ██ ████ ███ ███████ █ ██████ ████ ███████████. ████ ██ █████████ ████ ██’██ ██ █████ █████ ████████ ██████ ██ █████: ███ “█████” █████ ████ ███ ██████ ████, ███ ██████ ██████, ███ ███████ ███/██████ ████ ███ █████ ████. █████████ ██████ ██ ████ ████ █████ ██ █ ███ ████ ████ ██ ██████████ ██████ ██ ███ ██████████ █████ ██████. ███ █████ ██████ ████ ██ █ ███ ██████ ████ ███’██ ██████ ██ ███ █████ ████ ███ ██████ ████ █████. ███ █████ ████ ███ ███████ ████ ██ ████ ███████ ████ ███ ██████████ ██ █████ ██ ███. ██’██ ██ ████ ██ █████ ███ ██████ ██████ ██ ███████ ████████ ███ █████ ██████ ██ ██ ████ ████ ███ ██████████ ██ ████████████ ██ ████████. ███ █████ ████ ████ ████ ████ ███ ██████ ██████████ ███ ██████████ ████ ██’█ ██████ ███. These were tons of fun to work on, and I’m really excited to get this one in-game! I’ve also made distant gunshot sounds audible from a bit farther away. The hope behind this is that people looking for trouble will be able to find people causing trouble a bit more easily, and that fresh players will have a bit easier time avoiding it. Next week I’m going to be focusing on the weather ambience, and I might take a day or two to tear through the list of little tweaks and needed clean-up that I’ve been writing in my notebook while playing over the last few weeks.

I just came back to work this week, and I resumed work on the sphere tank monument art work. Nothing to show, but I am well rested.

The past few days have been pretty frustrating for me because of things like missing or corrupted project files, computer issues, and internet downtime, so I don’t really have much to show. Hopefully by this time next week, I’ll have something that isn’t just me complaining.

• Reworked arid biome with more vegetation and height variation.
• Made biome transitions smoother overall.
• Improved visuals of the hill noise.
• Improved texturing of forests.
• Made forests appear thicker by adding more bushes.
• Added colliders to airfield warehouse and metal building.
• Removed invisible colliders around the big powerline poles.
• Generate all rivers as prototypes, then select the longest ones.
• Randomized river width along the river path.
• Tweaked lake and island shape.
• Fixed rocks spawning inside powerlines.
• Added palms to arid and temperate beaches.
• Added some smaller cliffs around the beach to land transition.
• Water and terrain wetness sun reflections are less intense.
• Only very bright objects cause bloom (fixes blurring of the entire image).
• Made bloom blending additive (makes it look less like fog).
• The torch viewmodel is no longer lowered right into the line of sight when running.
• Fixed a number of SpeedTree assets having very intense bloom highlights.
• Increased moon brightness.
• Increased star brightness.
• Optimized dynamic decor spawning and object counts.
• Optimized grass and decor refreshes when no work has to be done.
• Optimized overall world layout and object counts in remote areas.
• Weather override admin commands now take floats.
• New stag sounds.
• Removed pain sound.
• Fire does more damage.
• Fire slows you down.
• Fire has light.
• Fire has different sizes.
• Fixed supply drop dropping too many mining quarries.
• Supply drops drop more survey charges.
• Halved ore yields.
• Increased ore spawns.
• Rock no longer loses condition when harvesting flesh.
• Bone knife range increased.
• Added bone club.
• Added riot helmet - not as good against bullets but great against melee.
• Torch does bonus damage when on, but destroys quickly.
• Shotgun slug is more accurate.
• Coffee can helmet cost reduced.
• Increased quarry audio range.
• Beartraps displace grass.
• Added landmine.
• Beartrap cost reduced slightly and made more common.
• Traps no longer show health.
• Lowered shotgun headshot sound repeating.
• Lowered slug damage.
• Increased shotgun view sway.
• Fixed keypad viewdistances.
• Updated metal chestplate/facemask textures.
• Fixed ragdolls freaking out with arrows in them.