Devblog 90

Sleeping Bag Radial Reset

I’ve implemented a much needed improvement to the way sleeping bags work. Basically when you use a sleeping bag, all sleeping bags and beds in a 50m radius that belong to you will also count as being ‘used’ and their timers will be reset. This means no more spamming of sleeping bags enabling the player to instantly respawn as if it's Quake, and if you kill someone you can be reasonably sure they are actually dead for a while. This affects both raiding and defending, but in different ways. Beds have always had a much shorter refresh time than sleeping bags so they should be far more viable for defenders to use, and attackers will have a harder time getting back into the fight, which is how it should be. Some balance may be needed to further restrict the bed placement rules, but we’ll try this out like this first.

Stuck Projectile Loss

Don’t you hate it when you kill an animal with arrows or spears and it rolls over so you are unable to retrieve them? Then if you harvest it they just disappear? Well no longer! I have some checks in place so that if an item is going to drop in the world it spawns it above the terrain so you should always be able to get all of your spears and arrows back!

Barrel & Trashpile LOD range

We had a very low LOD range for both these items, which meant the landscape looked kind of bare until you stumbled across something that you should have been able to see from far away. This has been fixed and the view distance increased by about 300%. This wasn’t a lot of work, but it was an important change and should give people a reason to explore the landscape a little more.

Swim Changes

After Andre tweaked the swimming parameters, I went in and unified the game code to use his values and added some additional checks. This means you can’t eat food or use medkits, syringes, or bandages while you’re swimming.

Bugfixes!

• Fixed healthbars sometimes showing 0 hp (we round up now)
• Fixed locks fading out way too early, making doors look unlocked
• Removed Blood, Note, and Battery from spawn tables
• Can no longer throw melee weapons/tools underwater
• Updated stone worldmodel/physics to be less low-res
• Fixed rockets going through building parts
• Removed ability to place locks on some items:
  • Auto turret
  • Lantern
  • Research Table
  • Repair Bench
  • Both Jack o Lanterns
  • Small Furnace
  • Small Stash

I took a day off this week to get some desperately needed end-of-the-year accounting done. Then I crunched through our bug report system, fixed some minor and major exploits and checked out the new Unity 5.3 release.

Weekly Updates

Since our focus for the rest of the year will be optimization and fixes we decided to release weekly updates this and next week.

Performance

We’re aware that performance is shit for some of you right now. We’re working on it.

Unity 5.3

The next major Unity release is out and we started looking into what changed and what it’s going to take for us to upgrade. Here’s the gist of it:

• Some math methods changed which look like they affected our world generation, meaning should we decide to upgrade before Christmas we might have to do another forced wipe.
• The memory leak we reported is fixed and they’re working on a backport to the 5.2 version - we’re hoping this will happen soon.
• Unity 5.3 contains a number of improvements we’ve been wanting for a long time, but there are also some known issues with it.
• Upgrading Rust itself appears to be fairly smooth, so we can decide when it makes sense for us to pull the trigger.

Water Movement

I fixed a variety of annoyances with our swimming movement. Hitting the water now properly slows down your current movement and dampens your fall. You can no longer hop out of the water for a short speed boost by holding down spacebar and you can no longer stay too far out of the water by tapping spacebar.

Lag Exploits

There’s been a fairly significant exploit going around that involved people intentionally lagging out for a short period of time and using that lag to do all sorts of evil things like temporarily getting into rocks or placing things where they shouldn’t be allowed to. This is now finally fixed

Fixes

• Fixed foundation steps being unplaceable in certain situations
• Fixed LODGroup errors on the keylock
• Fixed lantern stacking/hiding exploit
• Fixed nighttime water reflection highlights
• Fixed floor/foundation overlap exploit
• Fixed floating doors when placed next to stairs
• Fixed embrasures and shutters randomly collapsing
• Fixed being able to block monument entrances using signs

Next Week

Optimization, specifically the higher building LODs and trees.

I fixed a few bugs on my backlog this week, and carried on with the new rocks. I have one big rock left to sculpt. We’ll save a lot of disk space once this is over. Even in-game, I believe we should see improvements in Vram used at the very least. I already converted the dungeons to use the new rocks, that was the easy part. The hardest part is getting procedural map to spawn them in a way that looks nice. It’s gonna take some work.

Next Week

More rocks work, some terrain splats rework if I have time (textures used on terrain).

Mostly focused on bugs and performance this week and will continue doing so crossing over to next week. I'm dealing with the remaining issues some folks are having with oceans and rivers running on some AMD hardware in DX9. For now I recommend using DX11 until next week, which is when I expect all problems gone. These are being taken care of right now. Most of the bugs I fixed were shader or material related. Some related to some skin tones ending up too dark due to subsurface scattering. Some monuments were losing too much detail (e.g. satellite losing rust) when a low shader level was used. Also optimized these shaders to be more lightweight on lower quality levels. Unity 5.3 came out this week so I took care of porting our custom shaders and working out any kinks in advance.

Other Changes

• Made some modifications to the Terrain-Mesh Blend shader in time for Vince's new rocks
• Fixed some horizon flickering issues
• Removed global fog (barely noticeable)
• Slimmed some parts of water rendering
• Fixed SSAO ordering in relation to water
• Fixed Water refraction backprojection in OSX
• Made some modifications to the Terrain-Mesh Blend shader in time for Vince's new rocks
• Fixed some horizon flickering issuesRemoved global fog (barely noticeable)
• Slimmed some parts of water rendering
• Fixed SSAO ordering in relation to water
• Fixed Water refraction backprojection in OSX

Essentially, I'm done adding features for a while until we get performance under control again.

Next Week

Close remaining bugs, optimize as much as I can before the holidays

I got around to do a polishing pass on some of the player animations this week, as I noticed some of them looked particularly awful. I went over the way the look up/down animations work. Currently, the way aiming is done involves applying an overlay animation (of the player looking up/down) on top of a “base animation” (standing/walking/running/crouching). This saves a lot of effort on my part as I only have to do one set of aim up/down poses and just apply those to any of the base animations. Unfortunately, the end result is that the player looks fine when he’s standing/walking/ crouching. It’s when he does a run that it looks ridiculous. This video illustrates the problem well: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/December/09/2015-12-09_23-14-55.mp4[/embed] To fix this I added another set of aim up/down poses specifically for when the player runs: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/December/09/2015-12-09_23-29-22.mp4[/embed] I also tweaked some of the attack animations for the pickaxe and two-handed weapons, as well as adding a stab animation: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/December/09/2015-12-09_23-26-03.mp4[/embed] I also added a water treading animation: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/December/09/2015-12-09_23-23-15.mp4[/embed] Last but not least, I started work on a new wounded animation for when the player gets shot in the groin area: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/December/09/2015-12-09_23-32-57.mp4[/embed]

Next Week

I’ll continue working on the aim up/down poses for the rest of the weapons.

I’ve been working away on the texture of the new semi-auto rifle and here it is so far. Take a spin in the viewer too!

Next Week

I’ve started on the LODing process already and should be well into it if not finished by next week, hopefully!

I’ve been sick (hi reddit ;D) and working on some stuff for Deuce, another one of our games, so I haven’t spent tons of time on Rust. I have worked on music a bit, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. Right now my focus is gathering ideas and getting a palette of sounds together, not writing complete songs. Here’s one of the sketches I’ve worked on that’s in more of a song form (This is really really WIP still, though). I’m thinking I want to take things in a little bit more of a crunchy, gritty direction than this, but I do like that the cleaner sounds will contrast with our in-game sounds well (meaning it’ll be easier to pick in-game sounds out). We’ll probably end up with the music being more ambient and spacey too. I want Rust’s music to be really dynamic and heavily impacted by what’s going on in the game around you (happier music when you’ve got building tools out, sadder music when it’s raining, tense music when you’re sneaking around, scary music at night, etc). I’d love to be able to do things like play a different drum track if you’re being chased by a wolf vs when a player is shooting at you. Ideally we’ll figure out a good way to arrange music from a bunch of smaller loops dynamically, but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get the level of polish that I want if we go that route, so the implementation for this is going to take some experimenting. I’ve also done a few smaller things this week. There was some inconsistency in our melee weapon impact sounds. Sometimes we were getting most of the low end in a sound from the weapon’s impact, and sometimes we were getting most of it from the dirt/wood/whatever being hit. I made this more consistent and made most of the low thump come from the thing being hit, which has made a the soft target impact sounds sound a bit better. I also…

• Tweaked the m249 fire sound
• Tweaked the metal hatchet impact sounds
• Tweaked fall damage sounds
• Made fall damage sounds only play when you take 20+ damage
• Fixed a couple little bugs with sound playback
• Made sure the sounds on the lights in the new dungeons don’t play when you’re half way across the map (this should help perf a bit)
• Fixed footstep sounds not playing on surfaces with a generic material
• Set up voice limiting for some of the helicopter sounds so we don’t play a million explosions at the same time when rockets hit.

 

Next Week

Next week I’ll be working on music some more, and I’d also like to start working on ambience for the new dungeons.

Back on throwable weapons this week. The salvaged axe & icepick are now in-game. They pack a bit more punch than their one handed counterparts, but don’t expect to be able to throw them as far. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/alex/salvaged_throwing.mp4[/embed]

Next Week

More of the same

I finished the skinning this week and made some adjustments to the overall mesh. I also started on one of the new head variations. I felt like it was quite important to get the foundations right, ethnicity is generally more than just skin colour and everything right down to the shape of your skull should be modelled to reflect that. Because of the new workflow this stuff is really easy to get into game too, it only take a few clicks to have a fully rigged version working in game (still very work in progress though, don't worry!). The goal is to have each player recognisable from their face alone, so making sure Zbrush and Unity are in sync goes a long way towards that.

Next Week

Finish up this head. I'll need to go through each item of clothing and make sure there aren't any issues with clipping due to the adjusted proportions. I wanted to have at least one variation before I started to get some kind of visual guide of how much leeway would be needed for the head items.

This week I came up with some more ideas for frame fillers. And I also worked up some concepts for our natural environments

Next Week

More of the same, more frame fillers ideas and I want to do a few more environment concepts one being a swampy area.

This week I worked up a concept for a rusty shipwreck to add some interest and exploration to our beaches, which at the moment are very barren. It also doubles up to help player navigate the coasts and give newbie spawning in something to go and explore for some early loot. I also finished up some more armor tweakings for taylor's new character model

Next Week

more environment stuff for beaches. I had idea for some larger, ominous looking abandoned ships that are further off the coast that players could sail out to explore.