Server Performance
We had a breakthrough with server performance over the weekend. Server performance had turned really terrible over the last couple of months. Many servers were running at under 5fps. This meant that players on the server were teleporting about so gameplay wasn't smooth at all.
We found a couple of performance problems with our usage of rigidbodys, IsInvoking (which is slower than it could be), and moving the player in each received tick. All this lead to a snowball effect where once the framerate dipped the server couldn't recover.
We went through all this stuff and applied a few performance fixes and am happy to say we're not seeing any issues anymore. Some of our servers with 200 players connected that were previously running at 4fps are now running at over 500fps. You would not believe how much of a weight off our minds getting this shit sorted is.
Stone Compound Walls
This heavy duty wall is pretty hard to break through - but is easily scaled using a ladder. This is most useful for funnelling attackers, to make it more likely that they'll attack via the front of your base instead of coming from all directions. The pieces snap together allowing you to build a wall all around your house.
Wooden Compound Walls
This is like the stone wall but it's made out of wood - and has a nasty surprise for anyone trying to jump over.
Analytics
You might think what's the point in analytics. Isn't it for websites or something? Well, kinda. Now and then there's questions we ask ourselves that we don't have the answer to. Or more likely there's assumptions we make that turn out to be wrong.
For example, which items are the most crafted? What is the most common cause of death? How many people play in DX9 mode vs DX11 mode? Up until this week we didn't have the answers to these pretty basic questions.
This allows us to make smarter more informed decisions, rather than working from our gut or from angry reddit rants. I'll post some stats next week.
Workshop
This week I worked on the workshop SDK. This lets people design their own skins with the hope that they'll be included in the game. We're looking at the same model as CS:GO.
Right now it's just t-shirts and pants, but people have been doing some really imaginative stuff.
Obviously we're not going to put any old shit in the game. What goes in is up to you, or more accurately, kind of up to you but ultimately up to us. So vote
shit up and if it's not a terrible meme, someone else's IP and fits Rust's style, it'll go in.
The SDK is available on Steam under the tools section. You need to download Unity. There's a
rough guide here on how to get started, but I'm holding off writing some real comprehensive docs until it's settled a bit more.