Devblog 140

I redid some aspects of farming, but we’re not all the way there yet. This patch you will notice that we have added Planter Boxes to the game. They'll come in both a small and large variety, though only large made it into this patch, and can be placed on the ground or inside buildings. They have easy to use placement guides for plants, so you can sow seeds at their optimal distance. They will also make plants grow 3x faster than if they were placed on the ground outside! Also, all plants must now be placed at least a foot away from each other. Next patch I’ll make it so plants get a bonus from being watered and an even greater bonus from the usage of ceiling lights above them. Seeds also have a small sapling guide to help you visualize where your plants will grow. Enjoy!

Happy Holidays everyone! We’ve re-enabled the holiday content! For those of you who missed it last year, here’s how it works: every day in game day you’ll hear some jingling bells and a Gift Box or two will appear not too far from your current position. Run outside and smash them to retrieve presents! These presents can be unwrapped immediately for something small, or collected and upgraded to larger ones for a chance at a better gift. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a stocking. Hang it by a campfire and the next time you hear the jingle bells ring your stockings will be stuffed with goodies! This year I’ve made some modifications so that stockings will only refill if they are empty, and each refill costs it 10% of its health until it's destroyed. Have fun everyone!

The caves added a lot of static projected decals to the world and unfortunately none of them were being culled with the rest of the caves. This had a huge impact on performance, especially on servers that were using bigger maps. I added culling scripts to all of those decals to address those issues. The fix already went live in a small update after last week’s devblog.

I’m continuing my efforts to fix exploits and hacks. I’m aiming to get to a point where we have server side checks in place for all weapon functionality before the holidays. This week I fixed some minor outstanding issues with the server side line-of-sight verification, added verified periodic position updates for projectiles, and addressed some projectile ricochet verification issues. I also tracked down a building exploit inside the natural caves that was allowing people to build inside some of the cave walls.

The old Santa hat was really terrible, so I spent an evening making a new one so you can spread your festive cheer in style. Or murder people wearing it, whatever.

I've started reworking some of the animals in preparation for the updated AI. There's been talk about looking at some of the animations, so I want to make sure I can get some blockouts going early on, so that any potential adjustments to the rig can be done before a whole new load of animations are done. Here's where the bear is right now. It's still just a blockout, but it'll mostly be covered in fur (which is a whole challenge in itself) so I'll be mainly focusing on detailing the face and paws going forward.

It’s long been known that Rust has poor visibility culling. The problem is mostly because we can’t use Unity’s own occlusion system simply due to the fact that our maps are procedurally generated. However, there are some solutions out there that work with dynamically generated worlds, and I’ve been working on implementing such a system. The new occlusion culling recognizes occluders, like terrain, and allows for fully dynamic occludees. The first version of the system just landed on Prerelease and can be toggable using the console command “culling.enabled 1”. Please note that it’s not improving performance just yet as we’re still testing and validating results. Do expect improvements over the coming days, however. The image below shows how the system working on our procedurally placed rocks and cliffs: On the bottom left you can see our current distance-based culling, while on the bottom right you can see the new system working that can cull objects which are not within the camera view or are occluded by terrain.

We’ve been getting a lot of reports of poor performance. We're very aware of the issue and working hard to improve it. I’ve made a couple of changes this week to help improve the situation:

• Re-enabled Unity’s built-in dynamic batching
• Optimized deferred mesh decal visibility culling

You may notice that the virtual texturing performance option is gone this week. Terrain shader optimizations, in the past couple of months, have made the regular shader efficient enough to make virtual texturing not worth the runtime cost. We also save development and maintenance time that will be useful for other, more critical, features.

This week I've been chasing a few bugs. I’ve also set up both the F1 and Beancan grenades to play specific animations when dropping or attaching. It still needs some code love so you can actually see this in game, but the animations and state setup is all in place. Here's a video until then:

I’ve been continuing with the truck model shown in the last update. I spent some time earlier this week creating a simple interior. Since then I’ve been working on the lowpoly and preparing the mesh for baking. Once that’s done I will begin texturing.

After completing most of our prop art last week, I moved on to completing the harbor levels. While Harbor_1 is almost ready, Harbor_2 still needs quite a bit of work to reach the same stage. I have been working toward that over the last few days.

I’ve just been plugging away at the second pass over animal sounds this week, and working on music a bit when I need a break from that. I’m really happy with how the updated animal sounds are coming along so far!