What's New in Rust's "Devblog 129" Update

Devblog 129 landed on September 29th, 2016, as the component system era officially began - on the prerelease branch, at least, where the XP system started coming out and everything became craftable by default. On the live game it was a week of housekeeping: a zero-day networking exploit patched under duress, terrain carving rewritten for real performance gains, and iron sights across the arsenal finally aligned with where bullets actually go.

Prerelease: Everything Unlocked

Helk began surgery on the prerelease branch, ripping out parts of the XP system so that everything was unlocked by default. His advice: enjoy it while it lasts, because the following week would be all about adding the actual component entities and rebalancing crafting recipes around them.

Prerelease also gained a clever new loot signal: a system for respawning the barricades and doors you'd normally only see after a fresh wipe. When a loot box spawns in a room, the door can close and barricade itself - a visual cue that something's inside, which players break down to get through. The team flagged two things to experiment with: placement, so roof campers can't read respawn timers from a distance, and tiered barricades that would require better tools to breach. As a first pass, though, it worked well.

The RakNet Zero-Day

Toward the end of the weekend, Rust was hit by a zero-day vulnerability in RakNet, its networking library. Attackers could deadlock the network processing thread, kicking every player off a server and rejecting all new connections. After some nighttime debugging, the exploit was found and fixed by Monday morning with a mandatory server update. As Andre put it - sorry for the downtime, but this one wasn't in their hands.

Performance: Terrain Carving Rewritten

The terrain carving rewrite promised the week before shipped, significantly helping projectile and player-culling performance - both huge bottlenecks on highly populated servers. Smaller optimizations stacked on top:

• Prefab pooling, object instantiation, LOD updates, and dynamic memory allocations all trimmed
• Client-side network update events optimized to reduce entity streaming stutter
• Needless string reallocation eliminated from object creation - better performance, less garbage collection

One more significant optimization - for player spawning - was tested and ready, held for the following week's update.

Iron Sights and the MP5

Every weapon's iron sights were tweaked to align better with the actual point of impact - the kind of change you feel immediately even if you can't name it. Meanwhile the MP5 finished its final model after a couple of weeks of work, ready to be handed off for animation.

Flamethrower Turret and Hazmat Suit

Back from holiday, Pilgrim finished the textures on the Flamethrower Turret - complete with a temporary smiley face ("unless you lot like it") and a flame test to match, with LODs half done and due imminently. The Hazmat Suit continued taking shape, with the week spent finalizing the rubbery feel of the suit and working into its many small details, high-poly targeted for the end of the following week.

Caves, Props, and Rendering Fixes

The natural caves work moved to layout design: a decent number of cave layouts were planned, from easy and small through large and difficult, with the challenge being variety from a relatively small pool of rooms. Diogo added water visibility triggers that disable water rendering within set bounds - letting caves and tunnels exclude the ocean plane while leaving the door open for underground pockets of water - and fixed tree lighting that had been rendering too saturated and bright thanks to a material specular misconfiguration.

On the workflow side, industrial props got a Substance Designer treatment: a library of material presets with sliders for rust, dust, damage, and weathering, designed so a mesh can be plugged in and come out fully textured - slower to set up, much faster forever after.

Sound Occlusion

Alex scratched a programming itch and built sound occlusion - sounds now play differently when something stands between you and the source. Rather than just dropping volume, occluded sounds get muffled through a low-pass filter. Unity's stock filter wouldn't let its unnatural-sounding resonance be fully disabled, so he wrote his own simple one-pole low-pass filter instead. The basics were working and feeling good, with volume changes and full sound-blocking planned next, then cleanup, optimization, and testing.

The changelist added a couple of server-owner niceties - a log line when the server has fully started and a refresh_stability debug command - plus fixes for AMD R9 half-screen darkening and stone gates no longer spilling wooden gibs. A transitional week on the surface, but with prerelease now running the component experiment for real, the next few devblogs promised to be anything but quiet.