What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 26" Update

Devblog 26 arrived in September 2014 - "Speedtree, rocks and stats." SpeedTree finally went into the game, triangular floors joined last week's triangular foundations, and the team switched on analytics for the first time, publishing a genuinely interesting snapshot of who was playing experimental Rust and how.

SpeedTree

Petur converted all the old trees to the new SpeedTree system, which brought two big improvements. The first was LODing: the old system made it painfully obvious when billboards flipped into real geometry, whereas SpeedTree's transitions are far cleaner. The second was wind - the trees now move properly in it, with the plan being to tie wind strength to weather effects so biomes feel even more distinct from one another.

The whole thing was framed as a feasibility test. Unity's SpeedTree implementation was untested at that point, so problems were expected, though the team was confident both parties would sort out anything that surfaced.

Building and movement

Triangular floors followed the previous week's triangular foundations, completing the pair.

Andre put significant work into player movement, addressing the ability to walk up absurdly steep slopes, broken water levels, and unducking into rocks. The result was described as generally more stable.

Analytics: who was actually playing

Google Analytics went in so the team could see how the game was performing in the wild - session lengths, player counts, locations, framerates. After only a few days it produced a useful picture:

• Around 8,000 unique users per day.
• Concurrent players peaking around 400, bottoming out around 100.
• Average session duration just under 10 minutes, but with the majority playing only 2-3 minutes.
• Player locations: roughly 21% US, 20% Russia, 9% Germany, 5% France, 5% UK.
• Average framerate on 64-bit Windows: 33.

Garry read the short session times as one of two things - people checking in daily to see progress, or people trying to join and crashing. Either interpretation was taken positively: the first is exactly the behaviour they wanted, and the second is a fixable problem that people were evidently tolerating in order to keep coming back. Location data fed directly into localisation and server placement decisions. The 33 fps average was better than expected, and other platforms accounted for under 8% of results, so their weaker numbers were probably sample-size noise. The response either way was to keep optimising and add more customisation options to the F2 menu.

Interface and server tools

The F2 menu sliders were improved and now actually work. A shadow distance slider was added on the right, controlling how far away shadows render - capped at 50 meters, since that tends to prevent the black shadow bugs on terrain, though players were invited to experiment. More performance settings were promised.

Server owners got auto-updating: adding -autoupdate to an experimental server makes it quit automatically when an update is available, the idea being that your batch script then pulls from Steam and restarts it.

Fixes and exploits

• Meat was cooking regardless of where it was stored. Fixed. Wolf meat became cookable, and meat now spoils if you don't keep it cool or cook it in time.
• Wearing the hazmat suit made you immortal. Fixed.
• An exploit where going into spectate mode, sleeping, then respawning left you attached to another player.
• Killing yourself mid-craft still handed you the items on respawn. Fixed.

Art and models

Stag, boar and bear all got proper ragdolls, ending the era of balled-up corpses for everything but the wolf. Goosedog delivered real impact effects, and Goosey started improving the temporary muzzle flashes as well as animating the salvaged hammer.

Scott, Alex and Meg produced a new rock model. As the blog acknowledged, focusing this hard on a rock looks strange from the outside - but the rock is Rust's identity, so it needed to look special.

Alex began exploring gestures as a way to communicate with distant players. Reddit's suggestions leaned heavily on the raised middle finger, which was dismissed as too obvious and too easy; the team preferred inventing their own insults. On concepts, Howie worked on "remnants" - things that might be placed randomly across the islands - while Meg continued with medical items.

Wrapping up

It was a roughly three-day week for Garry, but progress continued. A batch of official servers went live across multiple regions, replacing the previous setup of two servers that were both on the same machine - intended to make experimental feel closer to legacy. Performance, stability and memory usage, on both client and server, were named as the focus for the following week.