Friday Devblog 15

The metabolism system has been hooked up. These are game central systems that have been missing in the experimental branch up until now.

• You now have a virtual heart rate. Your heart-rate increases depending on what you're doing. If your heart-rate is going fast you will consume calories and water.
• Once your calories get low you will get hungry. If you still don't eat you will start to starve. This will take your health.
• You can now bleed. If you start bleeding for some reason you will slowly lose health until it either heals itself, you bandage yourself or you die.
• I also introduced the notion of oxygen, so now if you're underwater too long you will start to drowned.
• You can now get wet. Being wet will make you colder than normal. This has no real negative or positive effects right now, but eventually the intention is that your wetness level will affect the items you're holding somehow.

This all still happens if you leave the server. I totally understand that people will be upset about this - so we'll experiment with other things if it doesn't work out (like slowed metabolism when asleep etc).

I implemented the bow and bow firing mechanics. We're missing ironsights, but you will probably be happy to hear that you can pick the shot arrow back up! It's not perfect yet but the core mechanics are done.

You can now right click and eat stuff. This is a per item thing, so it hasn't been enabled on every edible item yet. Eating stuff affects your metabolism, so depending on what you're eating you will get health, calories, hydration, poison etc.

You can now chop up another human's body to get meat and bones - in the same way that you do with animals. This might kick up controversy, but to us it makes no sense to be unable to eat other humans. Their body is in the world, you can eat every other living thing you kill.. meat is meat. So this allows you to cook and eat human meat. Eating another human's flesh won't make your name turn red, it won't put a balaclava on you, it won't make you evil. You are just doing what you need to survive, you won't be punished in any artificial game mechanic way. But before you eat someone, make sure they don't have Kuru.

Bullet weapons are going to be a bit different in the reboot. They work exactly the same as the bow weapon. Instead of doing a simply ray trace they are actual projectiles. This means that the bullet is affected by gravity and wind. This gives us a lot more options in terms of providing different types of ammunition. Again, not everything is perfect in the video below because we're just getting core mechanics done.

You could previously loot sleeping and alive players.. now you can loot dead ones too! This is the same behaviour as in the legacy version when they'd drop a loot sack. But now you loot their uneaten corpse.

If you're lucky enough to bump into a wolf in the experimental version you will now be able to kill him, harvest him and eat him. It might not be as tasty as the bald guy you ate for dinner, but it puts up less of a fight.

Corpses now get removed after 6 hours. This is a temporary thing, ideally the corpses will stay around forever.

Andre tells me we're not using 'real' tonemapping. I have no idea what we were using before. But stuff looks nice. We're also blending between different colour gradings at different time of the day. This has also given us nice twilight clouds

Remember the bug in the early alpha when the sky would go crazy and everyone would take screenshots and be like "look at the sky going crazy". Well Petur is bringing it back. Back to the North.

Goosey has been going crazy with the wolf again. Now with creepy sounds.

The server had a memory leak. A pretty bad one. It lead to me writing a script that wrote stats to a CVS file every minute. Then I imported the file into Excel and made pretty graphs. As you can see, the MemUnity goes apeshit. This is memory used by Unity on the c++ side (I'm lead to believe). Memory consumed by Mono is MemMono, this is managed memory that is garbage collected. The big blue line going through the middle is the amount of sleepers, that is, the amount of players that have joined the server and then left. The Yellow is the amount of players on the server. So because MemUnity is going crazy we know it's not something to do with garbage collection. To cut a long story short each player has an Audio Source to play their mic input. They're not actually used on the server, or uninitialized in any way. But the fact that they exist on the gameobject cause the memory to go crazy. So I write a script to cull them on the dedicated server. That'll do for now.

Goosey has also started work on the deer animations.

Alex done animation stuff this week

• Final 30% of anims now ported over to the new rig
• Anim template & master player rig file set up for future anims
• Starting to look into existing seams gap between parts of the player mesh *
• Too boring for the website but this is underway & taking longer than it should to fix. So far:
  • I checked the normals of the head & neck to discover they are different & there was alos some slight weight differences ( fixed now)
  • Tom confirmed that normals are different on his meshes in Max as well ( so it's not an Interoperability issue between max & maya.
  • Tom fixed the normals but on re-delivering the head files they now had different vert counts so the blendshape didnt work
  • future deliveries had different point orders so it's clear something has happened to the base assets since I've taken them & skinned them up.
  • In the end I gave Tom my existing assets to fix the normals on instead
  • We now have heads that match so I can move forward with recreating the blend & skinning back up again.

Meg got the memo about transparent backgrounds Paul didn't.

We got a lot closer to our baseline this week. A lot of gameplay stuff was added. There's a lot more ways to die. I got a touch of flu half way through the week and decided to spend time cleaning, refactoring and fixing. The server is much friendlier now, I added all the standard admin commands like kicking and banning. I have given the experimental server to Multiplay for them to play with, but I have asked them not to start renting out servers until we're happier with how it's all working together. If you want to get instant up to the second updates we are live tweeting our commits to @RustUpdates.

Dan has almost finished the saw blade axe. He is deeply embarrassed that it is taking him so long. It totally has nothing to do with the 15 games of Fifa he had to play.