What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 13" Update
June 2014, and the experimental branch stopped being something you had to opt into. This week also brought a round of overdue legacy fixes, a purge of servers with silly names, and the first look at what Rust's caves might become.
Friday Devblog 13 went up in late June 2014, after what Garry described as a busy week - as players had probably gathered from the constant update downloads and periods of the game being broken. The structural change was moving the experimental build into the main branch, and alongside it came a batch of fixes to the ageing legacy version that hadn't been recompiled in months.
Experimental moves into the main branch
Launching Rust now prompted you to choose which version to run, because the in-development experimental version had been moved into the main branch. That meant you no longer had to decide which one to install - you could dip in occasionally to see what had changed without fully committing to it.
The reasoning was straightforward. Plenty of people play Rust without reading devblogs, and were complaining constantly that the game wasn't being updated when in reality it was being updated every day. Putting experimental in front of everyone was the fix.
The breaks
Bringing experimental into main meant also updating the normal version, which hadn't been compiled since March 18th on an old version of Unity. Compatibility problems with the newer Unity took a couple of days to sort out.
The holosight broke. The legacy viewmodels were, by the team's own admission, insanely hacked together, and something in Unity had broken the way transparency was being faked. Helk's quick fix was to make the holosight actual geometry instead of a texture.
The most noticeable bug was huge lag at dusk and dawn. It was caused by a batch of sounds being switched off and another batch switched on at the transition - something between Unity versions had turned that into an expensive operation. Helk found the fix: turn off compression for those sounds.
Finally, servers going missing from the server list. That one was deliberate. Server owners were adding colour tags and giant unicode hands to their names, so any server starting with weird characters, using colour tags, or sporting giant unicode hands stopped being listed.
HTML menu progress
Work continued with Bill on moving all the UI to HTML. Garry had originally budgeted a couple of days for the job and was, as he put it, way off - but the payoff was that building UI in HTML let them work a hundred times faster than any alternative. A few things were still to be made functional, with the expectation that everything would be replaced and working by the following week.
World and rendering work
Bill spent time exploring what caves could look like - the first art test for a system that would take years to properly arrive. Andre looked at billboards and hit a real constraint: Unity's billboard system requires trees to be placed with the terrain tools, which Rust generally avoids because its trees grow dynamically, and Unity's billboards don't support smoothly fading in either. Andre also implemented one of the forest types Petur had made an art test for previously, so it could now be procedurally generated.
On the art side, Dan textured the spear he'd modelled the previous week, Minh animated the projectile launcher and a wolf, Paul produced concepts for improvised weapons and tools, and Alex entered his fourth week of renaming bones on the character rig.
Where things stood
The summary was honest about the pace: new content was going in slowly while the fundamentals got sorted, with the hope that finishing that groundwork would free up time for the items and AI the artists had been building. On the branch strategy, the goal was explicitly not to get experimental to some threshold and then force it on everyone - it was to tempt people away from the legacy version naturally, by simply being better.