Friday Devblog 9

The 'default' version on Steam right now isn't being updated. We're rebooting. The version I'm posting about in these updates is on Steam under 'experimental'. We post updates every day.

When will the reboot be default?

When there's more people playing reboot than default we'll make it the default. We'll put the reboot on another `archive` branch so you can keep playing it if you want to.

When will that be?

A while away. While we are making real serious progress in the reboot.. and we think it looks and performs better - not all the gameplay elements are in yet. We're missing major features like AI and building. We don't expect anyone to play it properly until those are in.

Why are you doing this? Why not just update the default?

After a few months of trying to update default and failing to update at the rate people wanted, we decided this was the way forward. The old code is very limiting in pretty much every way possible. When we originally released on Steam we expected to get a few loyal players, to update regularly and to tidy the code up as we went along. Now that 1.6 million people have bought the game we feel we need to make things happen a bit faster than that. And this is happening. Everything you see on the experimental branch has been made from scratch in the last few months.

Re-implemented world weapon models. Now you can see what other players are killing you with. We're not 100% happy with how these work with animations.. so Alex is re-rigging the player model so we can treat them like clothes. We've also got the animations all working too.

Crafting was in last week's update.. but cancelling hadn't been implemented. Now it is.

Andre has updated the prodedural terrain generator. It's now less cartoony, and a bit more mountainy.

If you're thinking things look a bit different.. you're not wrong. We switched to linear colour space this week. You can read more about this here. TLDR:

It works pretty much exactly the same as the current version, except the context menu is broken and the gamma is all wrong because of Linear Colour Space.

I implemented a system for the playback of sounds. Here's a video incase you can't imagine what that would be like.

The footsteps in the current version annoy me. They have no relationship at all with the player model animation... which they really should. So I'm testing out a system where the animation triggers the footstep sound and effects. The noise is obviously a placeholder. This works great - but it does mean we need to animate players you can't see but you would be able to hear. So we'll keep playing and we'll see if it's worth it.

Voice chat has been re-implemented. This time it uses Steam's built in Voice stuff instead of Unity's. I don't know if this brings any actual benefits.. it just means that all the encoding and decoding is done in c++, and is probably threaded, and we don't have to handle any of it.

Tom and Xavier have been thinking about improvised clothing. One of the things we want to do in Rust is give people choice. Yes there's no actual benefit to rubbing mud all over your cock and balls. But maybe you want to do that. And yes, putting tires on yourself like this still leaves you unprotected in many other areas. But the whole thing is about improvising. You don't have real clothes. You don't have much stuff. You don't have to smear mud on yourself if you don't want to. You don't have to put tires on your head of you don't want to. Your choice.

Dan finished off the Bota bag.

Petur has been working on new terrain textures.

Tom has been re-rigging the face so we can close our eyes

Those that have been on the experimental server might have noticed there's a webpage on the floor. This is a test. After talking will Bill about the UI for a while, we decided that it might be well worth trying to implement it in HTML. This might sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as you think. The main menu in Garry's Mod is all HTML. We'd also be moving all of the logic and rendering out of Unity and into it's own process. Which means that it would run it its own thread.. so if anything it might end up being faster. It's also about a million times easier to make things like in HTML/JS/CSS than in the Unity editor. And as a special bonus we can expose the style sheet so people can mod it if they want.

Here's some art tests Petur made (both rendered in engine)