What's New in Rust's "Devblog 37" Update

Devblog 37 went up in early December 2014 and was described by Facepunch as "coding and stuff" - a branch-work week without a headline feature. That said, several things did land: much faster water, a change to where every player spawns, stone and metal floors, and a rebuilt satellite monument. The big under-the-hood job, the weapon refactor, was almost across the line.

Weapon refactor

Every weapon had been converted to the new system, with Helk working on an improved damage system that was complicated enough that Garry held off explaining it until it was finished. The intent was for players to notice almost nothing beyond a few bug fixes - the point of the refactor was to open up future options like reworked reloading.

It also swept up work that has nothing to do with weapons, which is why there was pressure to merge it into main and get it onto the Steam development branch quickly. One example given was queued network updates, to stop flood-outs and network choking when sending snapshots, something happening a lot at the time. The hope was that merging it would fix the common lag-drop bug that was forcing server owners to wipe every couple of days.

Faster water

The old water was a framerate killer, so Andre rewrote it. Instead of re-rendering the whole scene to produce a reflection, the new water uses screenspace reflections, which Garry described as "about a million times faster" because it's essentially free to render. It didn't look as good as the old water, but the trade was roughly 7 extra frames per second.

Washed up: beach spawns

Players now all spawn on the beach. This was framed explicitly as an experiment, and an idea the team had been sitting on since the start of legacy Rust. The expected consequence was that new players run into each other far more often at spawn, which in turn pushes people to run inland toward quieter areas to start out. Feedback was invited.

Building and monuments

Stone and metal floors arrived, directly in response to players worrying about raiders breaking in through ceilings and floors. Helk built the upgraded versions, which are far stronger than the wooden ones.

On the world side, Vince's improved satellite monument went in, and Dan finished his lighthouse.

Legacy map port

Facepunch confirmed for the first time that the old legacy map was being ported. Andre was working through the procedural systems to make sure things also function on hand-made maps, with a pile of art work still to follow, so it was going to take a while.

Community-made maps were floated as a want, but flagged as a sticky area - Garry wasn't sure it would work and expected they'd need to talk to Unity about it, noting that Unity are keen to support user-created content but that this may be beyond the engine's capabilities at the time.

Fixes and smaller changes

• Smashing a corpse now makes it spew items instead of just disappearing
• Corpses no longer disappear while you're looting them
• Launching with the -dev command line argument enabled developer tools that were being used to cheat - now disabled
• Fixed melee attacks sometimes not hitting or being inaccurate
• Andre fixed lights: on lower quality settings, torches, fires and lanterns had been producing no light at all

What came next

With the weapon refactor's loose ends nearly tied up, the plan was to merge it into main and get back to work with visible results - proof, as Garry put it, that this wasn't just coder self-indulgence. The following week was earmarked for gameplay and bug fixes, specifically stopping houses collapsing for no reason, plus some blueprint work.