What's New in Rust's "Devblog 192" Update

Devblog 192 was the first Rust patch of 2018, and by Facepunch's own description a very small one. The Christmas event was switched off, servers were wiped (blueprints survived), and most of the post was a look at work in progress rather than shipped features - chiefly a ground-up revamp of Rust's trees and the ongoing rebuild of Scientist AI.

Tree and foliage revamp

Damian had been prototyping a new Douglas fir over the holidays. The plan was to replace Rust's existing trees, which came from the SpeedTree store, with higher quality custom-made meshes, and it was being driven by two separate motivations.

The first is gameplay: custom meshes open the door to making tree-farming more interesting, potentially letting players cut a tree in half and leave only the stump behind. The second is performance. The old trees were badly unoptimised, and testing over Christmas cut triangle count by roughly 40-50% and brought draw calls down to one per model. That saving could be spent either on increasing tree density or on keeping density as-is and banking the performance.

The first in-game screenshots showed four variants of the Douglas fir, with more species planned - specifically more deciduous trees like oak and beech - plus more ground-level foliage. This was flagged as a big job, so it would be a while before any of it reached live servers.

Scientist AI

The Scientist behaviour AI was rebuilt over the break in the same way the animal AI had been rebuilt weeks earlier, and was described as close to ready for public scrutiny. Scientists now communicate with each other, take cover, switch weapons based on distance to their target, hide while reloading or simply swap to melee instead, and run away from explosives. Their loot drops are controlled too, so they no longer dump their entire weapon arsenal on death. The navmesh problems that had plagued monuments were also solved, meaning scientists should be able to navigate tight corridors.

Third-person sounds

Work continued on parity between the viewmodel sounds you hear in first person and what nearby players hear when they watch you move. Melee weapon swings were finished this week, so other players can hear your rock whoosh through the air before it connects with their skull. Weapon deploy sounds were next, with a deliberately very short range so you can still swap weapons while sneaking, followed by one-off cases like syringe and bandage use and grenade throws.

Fixes

• Shelves are now correctly destroyed if the construction beneath them no longer exists.
• The same fix was applied to tool cupboards, which also can no longer be fully submerged inside the world layer (rocks).
• On Hapis, the Site A cave is no longer building blocked, and a refinery ladder was fixed.

A quiet restart to the year, then - but the tree work outlined here would eventually reshape how the whole world looks and performs.