What's New in Rust's "Devblog 41" Update

Devblog 41 landed in the first days of January 2015, written with the caveat that it's hard to get solid work done over the holidays. A few people kept going anyway, and the result was a tidy fix-focused week: a nasty networking regression reverted, an engine upgrade, the return of two features that had been off, and the beginnings of better visibility for server owners.

Invisible walls and server exceptions

The previous update had bumped Lidgren, the networking library, to its latest version. After a server had been running a while, it started throwing exceptions about re-using a message. With no response to the bug report, Garry reverted to the older version, which fixed it.

The player-facing symptom was worth knowing: the server would fail to send some reliable messages, leaving clients completely unaware of certain entities. In practice that showed up as walls missing from buildings.

Unity 5 beta 18

Rust moved onto Unity 5 beta 18, up from beta 14 - they'd been stuck on the older build due to an incompatibility that beta 18 finally fixed. The upgrade was expected to improve performance and fix bugs for some players. It also brought a known regression: objects appearing all black, or extremely dark shadows, on OSX and Linux, with a fix promised as soon as possible.

Weapons, sounds and animation

A bug had left weapons invisible in your third-person hands, which also broke their audio - meaning no weapon shoot sounds at all. That's fixed, and the player model correctly looks up and down again. Alex 1 went through every weapon so they sit in the hands properly, and Goosey added more variety to the animations.

Separately, Alex 2 had been steadily improving the game's audio, with the changes most noticeable on weapons.

Two reversals

Fall damage is back. And chat is global by default again, undoing the local-chat default introduced a couple of months earlier.

Server performance and visibility

Garry spent much of the holidays on server performance - optimizing, chasing drops, and trying to make servers less of a black box for their owners so reports of lag can actually be diagnosed. He considered embedding an HTTP server exposing stats and admin tools, decided it would cost more development time than it was worth for now, and shelved it as a possible future project.

What did ship was a server FPS indicator in the console - simple, but described as incredibly useful, with more stats such as bandwidth usage planned over time.

The honest state of things: performance was 'ok'. After loading a save, a server's framerate drops to around 10 fps until it finishes calculating every building's stability details, after which it runs fine for a few days before needing a wipe. Reducing how often wipes are necessary was an area of active progress.

Stability rework incoming

This patch was deliberately pushed out before touching the stability system. As it stood, the system was slower than it should be and structures were more stable than they should be. Sky bridges were possible, with fall damage acting as a partial deterrent. The refactor in progress aimed to make the system run faster and rule sky bridges out entirely.

What came next

Steady progress in a week where nothing at all would have been reasonable. The following week was aimed squarely at gameplay and performance, with blueprints still high on the list and Andre working on radtowns.