Friday Devblog 17

The campfire has been upgraded. It now heats you when you're within a specific radius. It also burns you if you're too close. Sadly you can no longer build spiralling towers of them. You can't place a fire on a fire. :sadface:

The furnace is now in game and fully functional, turning your ore into stuff. I think we all hate this furnace model, so we're probably going to be changing it.

You now get notices on the UI when you're too hot, or too cold, or hungry, or thirsty, or bleeding, or poisoned, or wet, or have radiation poisoning.

Bill banged out a waterfall Here's his work in progress

You can drop anything in your inventory, and it will appear in a little sack just like in legacy. We want to make it so most if not all of these items have a unique model.. so if you drop a piece of chicken it looks like a piece of chicken.

Bill added an awesome blood overlay, so the more injured you are the bloodier the screen gets.

Sleeping bags are back and are fully functional. We're getting to baseline so I didn't want to mess with the formula here too much, but I did do a bit of extra leg work here so we can expand on this in the future.. like naming sleeping bags, or letting your friends spawn in them. It's definitely an area we haven't exploited fully yet.

We're not using hitboxes anymore. For those that don't know what hitboxes are.. they're this. See those boxes? Well when you shoot a character in TF2, it traces a line forward from your eyes until it hits something. Characters in TF2 are made up of thousands of triangles, so it would be stupidly slow to test against all of those. So they stick some boxes where the head is, where the arms and legs are, where the torso is, and test against those instead. And this works great. But it's 2014 and putting hitboxes on stuff is hard work. So we're using a skinned mesh collider. So check this naked guy out. We already have a really low poly version of the player character thanks to LOD'ing. So we can use that for collision! It's a skinned mesh, so each vertex is weighted to up to 4 bones. When the mesh is 'shot', we use the triangle ID to get the vertices, then we use the vertices to find the bone. The bones have multiple attributes. For example, the head and neck bones have multipliers, so that headshots to more damage (this is indicated by the red spheres in this picture). This gives us a lot of benefits moving forward beyond just being more accurate to the render mesh. For example, if we were to add a helmet on the player we could make it so that getting shot in the face still killed them. This is something that's not impossible with hitboxes, but it would be kind of clumsy.

Medkit, Bandages and Rad Pills all now work. You can right click them in the inventory and use them.

You don't realise how much impact this has until you don't have it. Here's a video with it enabled. Here's one with it disabled

Ironsights are back on weapons where it's appropriate. The positioning isn't perfect yet but the technicals are there. I'm thinking of getting the guys to add a bit more details on some of the view models especially for iron-sights, because I think we can do a better job here. The viewmodel sway plays great with ironsights.

I implemented a system this week to handle head shakes caused by taking damage, jumping, falling, shooting etc.. It works pretty good. I've probably over-done it a bit on the first pass. These videos would be better with gooseman's awesome sounds, sorry :( The choppy choppy headshake is even more over-done. You're probably wondering.. where is headbob? We want headbob back? Well it's something I thought on for a long time. Most people hate it. Whenever I bring it up people just say "make it so I can turn it off". So I decided not to bother with it yet and to see if we miss it.

The firey torch is back. No more running around in the dark for you. There's some things to note with the torch. You can now hit things with it.. but there's not really any animations for that yet. You can also extinguish and ignite it using the right mouse button.

Bill's been tinkering with the UI this week. The health bear disappears when you're on full health. The new metabolism notifications are at the top left. The crafting menu is now on the far right instead of the far left. The main inventory UI is top left aligned, instead of center aligned. This is a change I'm not sure about - but he's the deign guy so I defer to him. If you think we're making any huge mistakes here please let us know.

Falling from a high causes damage.

The clothes you wear now have attributes. And they're updated in the UI. They don't actually do anything yet though :(

Nights are cold again, so you better get a fire going! I did some extra leg work here, so when the biomes are proper they'll all be able to have different ambient temperatures.

Goosey has been messing with the Stag again.

Goosey also messed with a boar this week too!

Andre has got the bare bones of the AI system done. The wolves are roaming the landscape. AI now has a field of view, a view distance and a listening distance. It loses track if it hasn't seen its target for a while. It can switch to more threatening targets. We're using behaviour trees for the AI this time around. This gives us a much more visual, modular and debuggable way of handling it.

Dan wrapped up work on the sawblade tool.

Dan also started work on an improvised hammer.

We're getting serious about clothes. We don't really want to put the same clothes in baseline that are in legacy. Because those bin-bag jackets aren't cool. Meg drew these up for us. We're trying to avoid the obvious, cliché stuff. The Mad Max and the future military style. These are the places people jump to immediately. We're here, lets not recreate, lets come up with something new. I think that's what meg has done here. I'm a particular fan of 2, 4 and 7. What I like particularly about 4 is that even though the hazard suit is kind of video game cliché, the green welly makes it iconic, it makes it unique. And it works too - because maybe the suit was all fucked up with a leg tore off, and they put this boot on because it works just as well. Scott made some headgear concepts too. I really like the skulls, the boar head and the metal bucket here. Because they're all things that I could imagine wearing if I was actually in a Rust type situation.

Paul drew some more weapon concepts. Exploring the idea of broken, mended and home-made weapons.

We moved a shitload closer to baseline this week. We really got shit done. All that stuff you read there was done in a week. The only two things we really need to work at now are the building system and the AI system. These are both fundamental to Rust, so it's important that we take our time and get it right. Next week is about empowerment. I have coded all this awesome shit but no-one knows how to use it. I'm going to be cleaning up, writing documentation and making stuff artist friendly. We should then start to see new content trickling in. We also updated this website your eyes are looking at right now - so check out some of the links up top.