What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 14" Update

Friday Devblog 14 came at the end of June 2014 and it's a genuinely big one for the experimental branch. Players could now die, drop corpses and be looted - including while asleep - and the long HTML UI migration finally crossed the finish line with crafting, context menus and tooltips all working. There was also a rebuilt player rig, a new stars system, and a pile of smaller fixes that made experimental feel considerably less like a tech demo.

Death and looting

Players now die. They drop a corpse, and you can loot it - the looting UI still needed work, but it functioned. You can also loot sleeping players without killing them, which of course also means you can give them things or dress them.

There was one deliberately unresolved oddity left in to see how it would play out: you could loot alive, awake players if you stood close enough. Garry's read was that it seems like something that should be possible but was badly overpowered as implemented - fast enough and you could literally take the rock out of someone's hand before they killed you. His instinct was that it would need nerfing, probably by adding a progress bar to looting so the victim has a chance to notice what's happening.

UI finished

The switch to HTML UI was essentially done, with the old system completely removed. The week's additions were context menus, inventory notifications, tooltips and crafting.

The crafting UI works like this: the left column shows your available blueprints, with a background bar indicating whether each is craftable based on your current inventory. Left click queues a craft, right click cancels a queued one, and the queue itself sits at the bottom right with a red cross to cancel individual items. Blueprints are organised into categories, though the items themselves hadn't been sorted into them yet.

One experimental addition: items that contain other items can be opened while you're holding them. The devblog was upfront that this makes conceptual sense but they weren't sure yet how much sense it makes in practice.

Inventory notifications in the bottom right now show exactly what you're picking up and exactly what you're losing when building. A tooltip in the top right shows the cost when deploying a frame, and shows the required resources when you're holding a construction tool like the hammer and looking at a frame or damaged block. All of it was programmer art at this stage.

The new player model

Alex and Tom's weeks of work landed, activating the new player rig. Most players wouldn't notice unless they're detail obsessed, but the feature list is substantial: 'real' eyes that move and use a separate shader, an openable mouth, and LOD models for everything, which brings huge performance benefits.

The rig itself is cleaner, with a batch of subtle issues fixed along the way. Alex was about 70% through converting all the animations across to the new rig, with everything important already done. Skin and eye shaders were being looked at but had nothing to report yet.

Visual work

Andre implemented a new stars system - bigger and brighter. On water, Unity's reflection system had a long-standing problem where reflections don't receive fog, and after trying several approaches that never panned out, the fix was to tweak the water so the reflection is simply less apparent. Petur and Andre tag-teamed the grass, targeting the specific places where it looked bad. Petur also assembled assets for a new biome he called the Northern Beach, while Bill and Andre continued investigating the procedural cave system.

Miscellaneous fixes

• The server refresh button works, and server browser pagination works properly.
• The game camera is turned off before you spawn, removing the five seconds of watching procedural terrain generate from high in the sky.
• A disconnect button was added.
• Player animations are now predicted properly on the client.
• Fixed a melee bug where attacks would miss if you were too close.
• Time of Day is now synced over the network, so everyone on the server sees the same time.
• Fixed player lerping issues that left players consistently further from their real position - it felt like lag but was entirely artificial.
• RCon was added, coded from scratch in three hours.
• New fire effects on the ignited campfire.

Art and concepts

Goosey continued progress on the wolf animations, and Dan modelled and textured one of the improvised tools Paul had concepted the previous week. Concept corner featured Meg's fishing traps, caltrops and improvised armour alongside Paul's lamps.

Closing

The summary called it real progress, with the plan for the following week being to polish what existed and get it playable and error free. At that point the foundation would be strong enough to let GPS start hosting servers and to begin implementing, in Garry's words, real stuff.