What's New in Rust's "Devblog 90" Update

Devblog 90 landed in December 2015, and it is very much a pre-holiday update: the team said outright that the rest of the year was going into optimization and fixes, and switched to weekly releases for the run-up to Christmas. That said, it wasn't a filler patch. The sleeping bag radial reset changed how respawns work in a way people still feel today, swimming got tightened up, and a nasty class of lag exploits finally got closed.

Sleeping bags stop being a respawn conveyor belt

The headline gameplay change is the sleeping bag radial reset. When you use a sleeping bag, every sleeping bag and bed you own within a 50m radius is now also marked as used, and their timers reset together. Before this, players could carpet an area in bags and respawn on loop like it was Quake. Now, if you kill someone, you can be reasonably confident they're going to stay dead for a while.

The change cuts both ways. Beds have always had a much shorter refresh time than bags, so they became the far more viable option for defenders sitting inside their own base, while attackers pushing a raid have a much harder time feeding themselves back into the fight. Facepunch flagged that further restrictions on bed placement rules might be needed, but wanted to see how this version played out first.

Swimming and water rules

Swimming got a pass from two directions. On the physics side, hitting the water now properly slows your current movement and dampens your fall, you can no longer hop out of the water for a short speed boost by holding spacebar, and you can no longer stay too far out of the water by tapping it. On the game-code side those values were unified across the board, and some new restrictions came with them: you can no longer eat food or use medkits, syringes or bandages while swimming, and melee weapons and tools can no longer be thrown underwater.

Loot you can actually retrieve

Two small but genuinely welcome quality-of-life fixes. Stuck projectile loss is gone - if arrows or spears lodged in an animal would have dropped through the world when the corpse rolled over or got harvested, they now spawn above the terrain instead, so you get your ammo back. And healthbars now round up instead of down, which means no more targets displaying 0 HP while still standing.

Seeing the world properly again

Barrels and trashpiles had an absurdly low LOD range, so the landscape looked empty until you tripped over something you should have been able to spot from a distance. Their view distance was increased by roughly 300%, which was a cheap change with a big effect on how worthwhile it feels to wander. Locks also had their LOD distances fixed - they were fading out early enough that doors looked unlocked from a short way off.

Exploit and building fixes

The big one was a lag exploit that had been doing the rounds, where players would intentionally lag out for a short window and use it to clip into rocks or place objects where they shouldn't be allowed. That's fixed, along with a long list of building-related problems:

• Fixed foundation steps being unplaceable in certain situations
• Fixed the lantern stacking and hiding exploit
• Fixed the floor/foundation overlap exploit
• Fixed floating doors when placed next to stairs
• Fixed embrasures and shutters randomly collapsing
• Fixed being able to block monument entrances using signs
• Fixed rockets going through building parts
• Fixed ladders and painting frames clipping inside walls

Locks can no longer be placed on a set of deployables that never should have accepted them: auto turrets, lanterns, the research table, the repair bench, both jack o'lanterns, the small furnace and the small stash. Blood, notes and batteries were also pulled from the spawn tables.

Rendering, shaders and the Unity 5.3 question

Unity 5.3 shipped this week and the team spent time working out what upgrading would cost. The summary: some maths methods changed in ways that appear to affect world generation, so upgrading before Christmas could have meant another forced wipe; the memory leak Facepunch had reported was fixed with a backport to 5.2 hopefully coming; and 5.3 contained improvements they'd wanted for a long time alongside some known issues. Porting the custom shaders was done in advance so the option stayed open.

On the rendering side, the ocean and river problems affecting some AMD hardware in DX9 were still being chased - DX11 was the recommendation until the following week. Most of the other fixes were shader or material related: skin tones going too dark from subsurface scattering, monuments losing detail (the satellite dish losing its rust) at low shader levels, horizon flickering, SSAO ordering relative to water, and water refraction backprojection on OSX. Global fog was removed as barely noticeable, water rendering was slimmed down, and the Terrain-Mesh Blend shader was modified ready for the new rocks.

Animation polish

Aiming in Rust works by layering a look up/down overlay animation on top of a base animation for standing, walking, running or crouching. It reads fine at a standstill or a walk, and ridiculous at a run - so a dedicated set of aim up/down poses was added specifically for running. The pickaxe and two-handed weapon attack animations were tweaked, a stab animation was added, a water-treading animation went in, and work started on a new wounded animation for taking a shot to the groin.

Throwables, art and audio

The salvaged axe and icepick became throwable. They hit harder than their one-handed counterparts, but don't expect to throw them anywhere near as far. Elsewhere, the new rock set was nearly finished - one big rock left to sculpt - with dungeons already converted over; the real work is getting procedural map generation to place them in a way that looks natural. The semi-auto rifle got its texture pass and started LODing, a concept for a rusty shipwreck to break up Rust's very barren beaches was drawn up (doubling as a coastal navigation aid and a newbie loot destination), and work continued on new head variations for the character model, built so ethnicity is modelled properly down to skull shape rather than just skin colour.

Audio was mostly groundwork for Rust's music system - collecting a palette of sounds rather than writing finished songs, with the ambition of music that reacts dynamically to weather, building privilege, time of day and threat level. Smaller audio work included making melee impact sounds more consistent (most of the low thump now comes from the surface being hit), tweaks to the M249 fire sound, metal hatchet impacts and fall damage sounds, fall damage sounds only playing at 20+ damage, dungeon light sounds no longer audible halfway across the map, and voice limiting on helicopter sounds so a rocket barrage doesn't fire a million explosions at once.

The full changelist for Devblog 90 is a long tail of small improvements, fixes and removals on top of all this - a genuinely tidy-up-focused week. With weekly patches planned through to the end of the year and performance as the stated priority, this was the calm before the holiday content arrived.