[The Umbrella Expedition]

Decay improvements, an update on the XP system, dungeon art, and more.
Melee Verification
Since the line-of-sight and distance verification for projectiles has gotten quite solid I decided to add a similar system for melee weapons this week. It uses the same lag compensation as the one for projectiles, so it should be just as reliable and resistant to false positives. The line of sight verification is especially important since it prevents exploits that allow people to deal damage to sleepers, storage containers and cupboards through walls.
Missing Projectiles
There’s been a long-standing issue where the server was spamming messages about missing projectile IDs and even though we addressed a number of situations that could cause this we never completely eliminated it. Turns out the one remaining issue was the server side weapon firing rate not compensating for client to server delay and effects from weapon attachments. This could lead to fairly wonky weapon firing rates, especially for people with unreliable connections and inconsistent server pings
Decay Improvements
I got back on decay this week in order to continue our efforts for better client and server performance, especially deep into the wipe cycle. I added decay to many more deployables, like wooden boxes, in order to fight escalating entity counts. As a counterweight I made it such that opening a storage containers resets the decay timer on them, which should help smooth over the transitional period. Doors of course still reset decay on both building blocks and deployables, but I’m now using the building ID I added last week to only reset decay on building blocks that belong to the same building as the door.
Server Owners
Over the course of the week we tested the advanced fly and jump hack protection mode on some high population official and community servers. After fixing the initial chunk of issues it now finally seems to be ready for prime time. In our tests it didn’t affect server performance in any way, but if you’re a server owner and notice performance issues with this patch, try reverting to flyhack_protection 1 and let me know if that fixes the issue.
Prerelease Branch
We had some difficulty getting everything from main merged into prerelease but finally got everything up and running, sorry for the outages throughout the week and thanks for continuing to play and provide feedback. Due to these changes we can now maintain parity between main and prerelease much more seamlessly. This brings us to the D3D11 crashes which are now are highest priority. Based on our research so far, these crashes seem to be related to Unity’s multithreaded D3D11 implementation and can be avoided by using the -force-gfx-direct command-line parameter in the game’s launch options. Unfortunately, this option forces single-threading and may affect performance considerably so please consider using D3D9 until we get this problem sorted out.

We also had the chance to nail down some new XP earners in prerelease. After much internal discussion and debate we decided on adding fractional ownership for items. Let me explain how this works: first of all, ownership of items is going to dictate how much XP is earned when the tool is used. So if I craft an item and give it to you, I’ll earn a percentage of XP when that item is used somehow. Now with fractional ownership it basically means that each item will store what % of the item is owned by whom. This means if you harvest the resources and craft a hatchet, you’ll be 100% owner. But if you were given the resources by someone else and craft it, you and the provider will both be 50% owners. This comes into play if you decide to give that hatchet to a third party and they begin to harvest resources with it: the harvested resources are then split 33% by the crafter, the harvester, and the provider. Ultimately the goal here is so there is a big incentive to helping other players. While you don’t need to do this, being a provider for new players can lead to you having many XP streams and advancing faster than a recluse. This is something we need in Rust. It’s very hard to make people cooperate and very easy to make everyone want to kill each other. I think this will be a good first step.
After this is added I want to phase out earning XP from harvesting rocks and trees and instead have that XP distributed when those resources are actually used to craft something. These changes should be live in the next couple of day,s barring any insane roadblocks. I’ll make a post on reddit asking people to try it
Dungeons Art
Some good stuff done this week, one big prop or structure rather: the trainyard crane. This was the last of the bigger structures for the industrial set of buildings I have been working on. I have given it a small room at the top, which will provide you with a tiny shelter in case you found the cranes to be a bit too over exposed.

I moved on to the smaller things. We needed garage doors and a set of doors so I’m tackling this at the moment. Doors in dungeons will work exactly like players doors, with an action to open/close. You cannot pick them up, and I think only a minority of them you will be able to destroy. Generally doors there should stay unbreakable for the sake of keeping the experience balanced for everyone.
Now the question I can read on everybody’s lips, ‘Will we be able to place those doors in our bases since they use the same technique?’ Answer is yeah, probably but later.
Pipe Shotgun Tweak
Helk wanted me to address a dubious tactic: some players would fill up their quick slot inventory with several Pipe Shotguns, allowing them to fire a shot, switch to another loaded Pipe, and fire another shot. The delay when deploying the shotgun was too short so I adjusted the deploy animation to take a little longer. Now the delay between switching shotguns and firing them looks like this.
Double Barreled Shotgun


Changelog
Hapis/Savas Maintenance update and bug fixes
Fixed large scale occlusion (graphics.lso) not working in some cases
Fixed various false positives with flyhack_protection set to 2
Changed the flyhack_protection default value to 2
Added server side melee attack verification (distances, line of sight)
Added lag compensation to server side projectile firing rate
Changed decay.scale convar to affect both delay and duration
Added decay to more deployables
Opening storage containers resets decay on them
Doors only reset decay on building blocks that belong to the same building

all you can see: https://playrust.com/devblog-114/