What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 24" Update

Devblog 24 came out in early September 2014, the week after the Unity 5 port settled. Its own summary was "Server files, trello and hats" - server files for both legacy and experimental went public, PVT was resurrected under the new engine, and three pieces of improvised head armour went in. It was mostly a cleanup and polish week, with a good pile of crafting fixes and one particularly embarrassing performance bug.

Server files released

The server files for both legacy and experimental Rust opened up to everyone under APPID 258550. The download contains folders for Legacy plus Debug and Release builds of the experimental server. The legacy server was Windows-only; the experimental one included a Linux build, though it was untested at that point.

Armour and helmets

Three head-protection items landed, all craftable and all in game:

• Tom's Metal Facemask - the metal blocks bullets and reduces melee damage substantially, but you can be shot through the eye holes.
• Xavier's improvised Coffee Helmet, with metal that blocks bullets like the facemask.
• Xavier's improvised Bucket Helmet.

On the back of these, the team floated putting together an SDK so the community could make clothing items in the style of TF2 - reasoning that it seemed silly to do all of it in-house when thousands of talented people were already around. They explicitly asked for feedback on whether it was worth pursuing. It was, and Rust's community workshop items eventually became a whole economy of their own, which you can browse via our skin tracker.

Crafting fixes

A batch of crafting problems got sorted, several of which had been genuinely blocking progression:

• Metal fragments weren't stacking in the furnace, and still didn't stack when pulled into your inventory - making it near-impossible to accumulate a useful amount of metal. Fixed.
• Sulfur ore wasn't cooking in the furnace and produced nothing at all. Fixed, so sulfur is obtainable.
• Gunpowder didn't exist and therefore couldn't be crafted. It now does and it can.
• Crafting Low Grade Fuel now yields 10 instead of 1.
• All weapons and bullets became craftable - though some of the weapons didn't work yet.

Death, ragdolls and animals

The death routine was improved. Previously dying just threw up the death screen with no sense of what happened, so now you get a third-person view of your ragdoll for a while. It was described as nowhere near perfect, but the boilerplate was in.

A ragdoll bug where killing someone appeared to knock their soul out of them - the ragdoll drops out while the player model keeps standing - was fixed, so dead players now disappear properly.

Animal corpses got tougher: last week a single rock hit on a wolf corpse handed over all its meat, and now it takes several hits to strip everything. Corpses bleed properly when struck, they no longer spawn in a heap where the animal died (bone positions are copied from the parent correctly), and effects attached to the living animal, such as blood, carry over to the ragdoll. Andre also gave the AI attention, and the animals move again.

Environment and rendering

Diogo and Petur worked on making biomes feel distinct, giving each its own colour correction values and fog settings - clear blue skies in the desert, cold and limited visibility in the snow. That was framed as a stepping stone toward varying weather effects per biome.

Diogo also got PVT - procedural virtual texturing - working under Unity 5, having been disabled during the port. Andre and Petur added rock clutter, small rocks deployed dynamically onto the terrain in certain places, the same way grass is, with plans to lean on the technique heavily to make the immediate environment feel richer.

Petur's new placement guide was implemented; it emits a bit of light to help you position things.

The framerate bug

The previous week had shipped a bug that made framerate steadily degrade the longer you played, until the UI became laggy and eventually unresponsive - effectively unplayable. The cause was an InvokeRepeating sitting inside an Update. Garry took full responsibility and asked that it never be mentioned again.

Odds and ends

Goosey added weapon bobbing while walking and animated Dan's Thompson model. The Trello boards were reorganised, with a new Programmers board for bugs and feature to-dos that anyone could sign up and vote on, and the Art board restructured to match. On concepts, Howie investigated ways to make buildings look less square, along with spikes, gates, foundation ramps and the building process generally, while Meg drew rocks.

The week's summary was short and to the point: bugs fixed, performance improved, missing features added - and baseline nearly here.