<![CDATA[The~expedition - Rust Devblog]]> https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/ Tue, 05 May 2026 22:05:40 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Devblog 117]]> https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=16 Sat, 09 Jul 2016 19:38:56 +0200 https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=16
No patch as we’re focused on the XP update for next week. On the prerelease branch you can try the new UI, the quick crafting menu, and the level-up animation. The blog also has details on making gunplay great again, upcoming armour, and more.

XP SystemMaurino Berry
We’re on track for merging prerelease into Main and launching the XP system on the 7th. This doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect, it just means it’s good enough to be part of the main game while we improve it.
When we merge prerelease into Main, we’re going to fork the existing version of Rust off into a separate branch, so you can opt into it and continue playing that version of Rust “as is” in case you want to. It will not be maintained or improved upon similar to Legacy, but should be fun to revisit and play in the future.
Regarding progress, I finally merged “Item Ownership” into prerelease and so far it’s been a blast. There were, however, many bugs and crashes that have since been resolved. I’ll spend the next few days writing code that takes advantage of the system a little more than it currently does. Such as earning XP from using up resources, when you drink water you ‘created’, using your deployables (furnace/repair) etc. I’ve also got to solve a few annoying problems, such as implanting items on downed players and reviving, and giving ownership to you when looting a dead person (it was really annoying to kill someone and then not want to use their tools because you didn’t want to earn them XP). I’ll be watching and listening for more exploits and fixing them as we go. If you can’t wait until next Thursday you can always opt in to the prerelease beta and give it a try.
Quick CraftGarry Newman
There’s a big space free on the right of the inventory menu since we moved the crafting stuff to its own menu. I filled it slightly with the quick craft menu.
[Bild: 0d6d.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
This shows only items that you can craft, based on what you have in your inventory and what you’ve unlocked. It still needs a bit of love–to give feedback when you’ve actually clicked on it–because right now all the crafting stuff is hidden behind the spawnmenu, so it’s not that clear.

Hitscan ProjectilesGarry Newman

Previously, when you shot a bullet it came out of your gun and traveled at a certain rate, had gravity and drag applied to it, then slowed down. It’s as you would expect in real life, except in Rust the bullets travel a lot slower than in real life to emphasise this effect

This felt like shit at short range, but it worked over long range. The shitty feeling was made worse by the fact that the bullet doesn’t move until the frame after it has been fired, which means firefights were client side frame rate dependent. Which is terrible, really.

So now when you shoot your gun, the bullet immediately travels a set number of meters (this is ammo dependent), and then it carries on as normal. The end result is that close quarters gunplay is effectively hitscan, but long range retains the effects of gravity that we originally implemented.

Build TimesGarry Newman

I wasted a day-and-a-half trying to get our build times to not suck. At the moment it takes just under an hour from us committing to the build uploading on Steam and playable by millions of people. A few years ago this would have been a pipe dream, but now it’s not good enough.

It is feasible for this to come down to about 5-10 minutes, if we compile Linux, Mac, win32, win64 and asset bundles in parallel. The issue with this is that multiple Unity instances can’t compile from the same project file at the same time. So we need to mirror the project file. Which is fine, it’s 20gb a project file, so we’re talking 100gb for all the platforms, double it for debug and release mode, so 200gb.

Except that’s bullshit, because when you open a project Unity likes to mirror the contents of it to its own bloaty Library folder, so we’re talking 40gb a project, so 400gb. Which is okay if you can spare it, and didn’t spend a ton of money on super fast but super small PCIE SSD hard drives.

But then it turns out, after a day of programming, that Unity 5.4 hates running in parallel anyway, so it was all a big waste of time and effort. For some reason, when multiple instances are compiling it keeps losing its license, so I have to manually log in and activate it. Then there’s some port conflicts when compiling shaders, so it just hangs indefinitely.

It would have been nice to get it working, to make us more agile, but fuck it for now – I’ve already wasted too much time on it.

UI TweaksGarry Newman

We’re entering a fix and polish stage of the prerelease branch at the moment. The basics of it are done, so it’s about going back over stuff now and improving.

The pie menu got some performance enhancements. I also updated the animation to make it a bit more fluid, so when it closes you can move your view immediately instead of waiting for the animation to finish.

I went through the UI fixing the scroll speeds of various panels that were scrolling too slow when you moved the mouse wheel. I improved the look of the crafting queue, and made it more obvious that clicking cancels.

Level Up NoticesGarry Newman
There wasn’t any feedback on levelling up, beyond the level number increasing. It should be a song and dance. I added a new HUD system for notices, so we can queue shit up there. Now when you level up it pop up a notice and play a sound.
[Bild: 816e.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]It’ll then list all the new shit you just unlocked.
[Bild: 7aa2.jpg]
The sounds are hilarious and placeholder. I’m sure Alex will find his way to making it some eagle sound or something… just as soon as he catches one.

Lone WolfsGarry Newman
We do listen to you guys, and I know we were a bit dismissive and rude about lone wolfs last week, so I wanted to surprise you guys and prove that we really do pay attention to what you want.
So from now on all of the wolves in the game do 10 times more bite damage. This doesn’t affect bears. Hopefully this will put an end to this “lone wolf vs group of wolf” discussion we’ve been having a lot lately.
Sentry CostsMaurino Berry
Sentries aren’t used as much as they should be and because we wanted them earlier than the AK47. I’ve changed their crafting recipe to only require 75HQM instead of 50HQM + Ak47. Hopefully we’ll see them used a little bit more.
Throwable WeaponsAlex Webster
This week’s been about getting all throwable weapon work onto prerelease, as well as some balancing. Have a play and let me know what you think:

Airfield ReworkVincent Mayeur

I have been working on the go for the past week and managed to get stuff done at a decent pace between trips and flights. Progress on the airfield is good: I do not have many close ups shots to offer as some buildings are still work in progress, but I took some overall shots for you guys, though they’re from my laptop and a not at the highest quality settings. It’s getting there and most of the buildings fell into place like I wanted.
[Bild: airfield_004.jpg?resize=596%2C335][Bild: airfield_003.jpg]
Double-Barreled Shotgun ArtworkTom Butters

I’ve made some good progress on the Double-Barreled Shotgun. The change from the concept to include the screwdriver handle seems to have really added to the makeshift look. Take a spin and see for yourself!
I have a couple of materials to create, like the pin trigger for the springs, but that should be done in no time at all. Then onto the LODs.
This weapon, like the SMG, will be customisable. If you notice on the concept Paul drew, there’s two versions: one with a longer barrel plus sights and an actual stock, so I’ll work on those when I can.
Heavy ArmourTaylor Reynolds
I’ve finished up baking down the lower half of the heavy armour. It still needs skinning and lodding, and I’d like to dull the metal a little – I think it’s looking way too shiny for rust at the moment. It’s nice to see it looking suitably bulky though, especially when you see its component parts.
[Bild: HeavyArmour_2.jpg]
Bone Armor ReworkPaul Bradley

Some of our armors definitely suck at the moment, and you see this stuff a lot so they deserve some more attention and refinement. We hate the Bone Armor the most: it’s goofy and janky, mainly because it was originally designed to fit over existing stuff and protect practical areas, which made the aesthetics suffer. Now we’re just making something that looks way cooler and not worrying about it fitting over other things. We will explore light/medium/heavy types of armor, so for the bone were gonna go with something that fits a light armor type, and has a more primitive feel with a mix of hide/leather and bone. Shoutout to da9L88 for his awesome bone helmet concepts the other week, I couldn’t help but take some inspiration from those!
[Bild: RUSTBonearmorredux1.jpg?resize=723%2C600&ssl=1]
MusicAlex Rehberg

The beta version of Unity we’re using right now has been crashing a TON on OSX so I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a different FP game this week, but I’ve made some progress on the music system and finished chopping up the rest of the existing songs. I ended up ditching one of them that just wasn’t feeling right in game, and will continue to write more as we move forward. Since we’ve only got a handful of songs right now they’ll all play in any environment/time of day but as I write more we’ll start separating them out more too.

I added the ability to allow/disallow individual clips fading in and out in the middle of a section of music on a per clip basis. Previously we would only fade clips in if the intensity was increasing, or fade them out if the intensity rose above their max intensity. This worked pretty well but I wanted more fine-grained control. This is really nice for things like preventing a melodic line from starting in the middle of a phrase or making sure a drum part will always play in full once it starts and won’t fade out.

I did a bit more cleanup and made some final tweaks to prep the music system for launch. It’s disabled by a convar by default right now. Tomorrow (or I guess today once you’re reading this) I’ll be giving everything a final once over and then merging into prerelease so I can test this stuff out in a live server, and assuming that testing goes well this will all go live when the XP system is released.

Make Gunplay Great AgainAndré Straubmeier

There’s been a lot of talk about the current state of gunplay in Rust, and we mostly agree with the common opinion on this: it feels random, unsatisfying and sluggish. This week I sat down with Helk and discussed what has to be changed to make things better. It all seems to boil down to this:
  • Predictability

  • Precision

  • Feel
To me, personally, the lack of consistency is probably the biggest issue right now. Things simply feel far too random to be enjoyable. This is caused by a number of things, so let me explain what I’ve been working on this week and our reasoning behind it all. Everything in this section is still under active development, but I’m hoping to get it onto the prerelease branch either next week or the week after.

It all starts with the damage and hitbox system Rust has been using ever since the reboot. We’ve tried various variations of this but none of them seemed to work out the way we wanted, so it’s time to let go. At the moment hitboxes use the exact player model and clothing meshes as their colliders – if you hit a piece of metal you’ll do far less damage than when you hit skin or cloth. This is neat in theory, but it completely breaks down in hectic firefights since nobody intentionally aims for the tiny vulnerable spots between clothing items, essentially leading to completely random damage multipliers being chosen. I’ve replaced this with a much simpler hit area system. Clothing now specifies the body parts it protects and damage is reduced based on which body part has been hit rather than the exact visual mesh. This means projectiles never randomly bypass protective gear. It also means that gloves can add to the overall body protection instead of only protecting the hands, which makes them far more useful.

The second issue caused by using clothing meshes as colliders was that clothing affected the size and shape of player hitboxes. Things like the bucket helmet, and to some degree even the metal facemask, made the head hitbox so huge that they were essentially useless. I threw this out the window so now the body part that was hit is determined by a player collision mesh that doesn’t change with clothing. We still have the option to apply reduced damage when hitting the bigger clothing hitbox and not the player hitbox, but I won’t add it solely based on guessing. We’ll see how it all works out first.

Next I added the option to use per-weapon damage multipliers for certain body parts. This can for example be used to increase the headshot multiplier of a weapon type that’s very precise (sniper rifles) or reduce it for weapons where they occur more randomly (shotguns). We’re not entirely sure in which direction to take this yet, but it made sense to add support for it while reworking the underlying systems.

Lastly I started working on best-fit hit detection for projectile weapons – similar to what I added for melee weapons a couple of months ago. The thinking behind this is that hitting a hand that’s directly in front of a head should really count as a headshot since players cannot control their exact animation state. I still need to figure some stuff out, but this should make things feel less random and more predictable once it’s done.
Overall the changes I’ve been working on this week should help us get some much needed predictability and precision back into the gunplay of Rust. Next on the list will be weapon feel, but Helk might be better suited to tackle that.]]>
No patch as we’re focused on the XP update for next week. On the prerelease branch you can try the new UI, the quick crafting menu, and the level-up animation. The blog also has details on making gunplay great again, upcoming armour, and more.

XP SystemMaurino Berry
We’re on track for merging prerelease into Main and launching the XP system on the 7th. This doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect, it just means it’s good enough to be part of the main game while we improve it.
When we merge prerelease into Main, we’re going to fork the existing version of Rust off into a separate branch, so you can opt into it and continue playing that version of Rust “as is” in case you want to. It will not be maintained or improved upon similar to Legacy, but should be fun to revisit and play in the future.
Regarding progress, I finally merged “Item Ownership” into prerelease and so far it’s been a blast. There were, however, many bugs and crashes that have since been resolved. I’ll spend the next few days writing code that takes advantage of the system a little more than it currently does. Such as earning XP from using up resources, when you drink water you ‘created’, using your deployables (furnace/repair) etc. I’ve also got to solve a few annoying problems, such as implanting items on downed players and reviving, and giving ownership to you when looting a dead person (it was really annoying to kill someone and then not want to use their tools because you didn’t want to earn them XP). I’ll be watching and listening for more exploits and fixing them as we go. If you can’t wait until next Thursday you can always opt in to the prerelease beta and give it a try.
Quick CraftGarry Newman
There’s a big space free on the right of the inventory menu since we moved the crafting stuff to its own menu. I filled it slightly with the quick craft menu.
[Bild: 0d6d.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
This shows only items that you can craft, based on what you have in your inventory and what you’ve unlocked. It still needs a bit of love–to give feedback when you’ve actually clicked on it–because right now all the crafting stuff is hidden behind the spawnmenu, so it’s not that clear.

Hitscan ProjectilesGarry Newman

Previously, when you shot a bullet it came out of your gun and traveled at a certain rate, had gravity and drag applied to it, then slowed down. It’s as you would expect in real life, except in Rust the bullets travel a lot slower than in real life to emphasise this effect

This felt like shit at short range, but it worked over long range. The shitty feeling was made worse by the fact that the bullet doesn’t move until the frame after it has been fired, which means firefights were client side frame rate dependent. Which is terrible, really.

So now when you shoot your gun, the bullet immediately travels a set number of meters (this is ammo dependent), and then it carries on as normal. The end result is that close quarters gunplay is effectively hitscan, but long range retains the effects of gravity that we originally implemented.

Build TimesGarry Newman

I wasted a day-and-a-half trying to get our build times to not suck. At the moment it takes just under an hour from us committing to the build uploading on Steam and playable by millions of people. A few years ago this would have been a pipe dream, but now it’s not good enough.

It is feasible for this to come down to about 5-10 minutes, if we compile Linux, Mac, win32, win64 and asset bundles in parallel. The issue with this is that multiple Unity instances can’t compile from the same project file at the same time. So we need to mirror the project file. Which is fine, it’s 20gb a project file, so we’re talking 100gb for all the platforms, double it for debug and release mode, so 200gb.

Except that’s bullshit, because when you open a project Unity likes to mirror the contents of it to its own bloaty Library folder, so we’re talking 40gb a project, so 400gb. Which is okay if you can spare it, and didn’t spend a ton of money on super fast but super small PCIE SSD hard drives.

But then it turns out, after a day of programming, that Unity 5.4 hates running in parallel anyway, so it was all a big waste of time and effort. For some reason, when multiple instances are compiling it keeps losing its license, so I have to manually log in and activate it. Then there’s some port conflicts when compiling shaders, so it just hangs indefinitely.

It would have been nice to get it working, to make us more agile, but fuck it for now – I’ve already wasted too much time on it.

UI TweaksGarry Newman

We’re entering a fix and polish stage of the prerelease branch at the moment. The basics of it are done, so it’s about going back over stuff now and improving.

The pie menu got some performance enhancements. I also updated the animation to make it a bit more fluid, so when it closes you can move your view immediately instead of waiting for the animation to finish.

I went through the UI fixing the scroll speeds of various panels that were scrolling too slow when you moved the mouse wheel. I improved the look of the crafting queue, and made it more obvious that clicking cancels.

Level Up NoticesGarry Newman
There wasn’t any feedback on levelling up, beyond the level number increasing. It should be a song and dance. I added a new HUD system for notices, so we can queue shit up there. Now when you level up it pop up a notice and play a sound.
[Bild: 816e.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]It’ll then list all the new shit you just unlocked.
[Bild: 7aa2.jpg]
The sounds are hilarious and placeholder. I’m sure Alex will find his way to making it some eagle sound or something… just as soon as he catches one.

Lone WolfsGarry Newman
We do listen to you guys, and I know we were a bit dismissive and rude about lone wolfs last week, so I wanted to surprise you guys and prove that we really do pay attention to what you want.
So from now on all of the wolves in the game do 10 times more bite damage. This doesn’t affect bears. Hopefully this will put an end to this “lone wolf vs group of wolf” discussion we’ve been having a lot lately.
Sentry CostsMaurino Berry
Sentries aren’t used as much as they should be and because we wanted them earlier than the AK47. I’ve changed their crafting recipe to only require 75HQM instead of 50HQM + Ak47. Hopefully we’ll see them used a little bit more.
Throwable WeaponsAlex Webster
This week’s been about getting all throwable weapon work onto prerelease, as well as some balancing. Have a play and let me know what you think:

Airfield ReworkVincent Mayeur

I have been working on the go for the past week and managed to get stuff done at a decent pace between trips and flights. Progress on the airfield is good: I do not have many close ups shots to offer as some buildings are still work in progress, but I took some overall shots for you guys, though they’re from my laptop and a not at the highest quality settings. It’s getting there and most of the buildings fell into place like I wanted.
[Bild: airfield_004.jpg?resize=596%2C335][Bild: airfield_003.jpg]
Double-Barreled Shotgun ArtworkTom Butters

I’ve made some good progress on the Double-Barreled Shotgun. The change from the concept to include the screwdriver handle seems to have really added to the makeshift look. Take a spin and see for yourself!
I have a couple of materials to create, like the pin trigger for the springs, but that should be done in no time at all. Then onto the LODs.
This weapon, like the SMG, will be customisable. If you notice on the concept Paul drew, there’s two versions: one with a longer barrel plus sights and an actual stock, so I’ll work on those when I can.
Heavy ArmourTaylor Reynolds
I’ve finished up baking down the lower half of the heavy armour. It still needs skinning and lodding, and I’d like to dull the metal a little – I think it’s looking way too shiny for rust at the moment. It’s nice to see it looking suitably bulky though, especially when you see its component parts.
[Bild: HeavyArmour_2.jpg]
Bone Armor ReworkPaul Bradley

Some of our armors definitely suck at the moment, and you see this stuff a lot so they deserve some more attention and refinement. We hate the Bone Armor the most: it’s goofy and janky, mainly because it was originally designed to fit over existing stuff and protect practical areas, which made the aesthetics suffer. Now we’re just making something that looks way cooler and not worrying about it fitting over other things. We will explore light/medium/heavy types of armor, so for the bone were gonna go with something that fits a light armor type, and has a more primitive feel with a mix of hide/leather and bone. Shoutout to da9L88 for his awesome bone helmet concepts the other week, I couldn’t help but take some inspiration from those!
[Bild: RUSTBonearmorredux1.jpg?resize=723%2C600&ssl=1]
MusicAlex Rehberg

The beta version of Unity we’re using right now has been crashing a TON on OSX so I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a different FP game this week, but I’ve made some progress on the music system and finished chopping up the rest of the existing songs. I ended up ditching one of them that just wasn’t feeling right in game, and will continue to write more as we move forward. Since we’ve only got a handful of songs right now they’ll all play in any environment/time of day but as I write more we’ll start separating them out more too.

I added the ability to allow/disallow individual clips fading in and out in the middle of a section of music on a per clip basis. Previously we would only fade clips in if the intensity was increasing, or fade them out if the intensity rose above their max intensity. This worked pretty well but I wanted more fine-grained control. This is really nice for things like preventing a melodic line from starting in the middle of a phrase or making sure a drum part will always play in full once it starts and won’t fade out.

I did a bit more cleanup and made some final tweaks to prep the music system for launch. It’s disabled by a convar by default right now. Tomorrow (or I guess today once you’re reading this) I’ll be giving everything a final once over and then merging into prerelease so I can test this stuff out in a live server, and assuming that testing goes well this will all go live when the XP system is released.

Make Gunplay Great AgainAndré Straubmeier

There’s been a lot of talk about the current state of gunplay in Rust, and we mostly agree with the common opinion on this: it feels random, unsatisfying and sluggish. This week I sat down with Helk and discussed what has to be changed to make things better. It all seems to boil down to this:
  • Predictability

  • Precision

  • Feel
To me, personally, the lack of consistency is probably the biggest issue right now. Things simply feel far too random to be enjoyable. This is caused by a number of things, so let me explain what I’ve been working on this week and our reasoning behind it all. Everything in this section is still under active development, but I’m hoping to get it onto the prerelease branch either next week or the week after.

It all starts with the damage and hitbox system Rust has been using ever since the reboot. We’ve tried various variations of this but none of them seemed to work out the way we wanted, so it’s time to let go. At the moment hitboxes use the exact player model and clothing meshes as their colliders – if you hit a piece of metal you’ll do far less damage than when you hit skin or cloth. This is neat in theory, but it completely breaks down in hectic firefights since nobody intentionally aims for the tiny vulnerable spots between clothing items, essentially leading to completely random damage multipliers being chosen. I’ve replaced this with a much simpler hit area system. Clothing now specifies the body parts it protects and damage is reduced based on which body part has been hit rather than the exact visual mesh. This means projectiles never randomly bypass protective gear. It also means that gloves can add to the overall body protection instead of only protecting the hands, which makes them far more useful.

The second issue caused by using clothing meshes as colliders was that clothing affected the size and shape of player hitboxes. Things like the bucket helmet, and to some degree even the metal facemask, made the head hitbox so huge that they were essentially useless. I threw this out the window so now the body part that was hit is determined by a player collision mesh that doesn’t change with clothing. We still have the option to apply reduced damage when hitting the bigger clothing hitbox and not the player hitbox, but I won’t add it solely based on guessing. We’ll see how it all works out first.

Next I added the option to use per-weapon damage multipliers for certain body parts. This can for example be used to increase the headshot multiplier of a weapon type that’s very precise (sniper rifles) or reduce it for weapons where they occur more randomly (shotguns). We’re not entirely sure in which direction to take this yet, but it made sense to add support for it while reworking the underlying systems.

Lastly I started working on best-fit hit detection for projectile weapons – similar to what I added for melee weapons a couple of months ago. The thinking behind this is that hitting a hand that’s directly in front of a head should really count as a headshot since players cannot control their exact animation state. I still need to figure some stuff out, but this should make things feel less random and more predictable once it’s done.
Overall the changes I’ve been working on this week should help us get some much needed predictability and precision back into the gunplay of Rust. Next on the list will be weapon feel, but Helk might be better suited to tackle that.]]> <![CDATA[Devblog 116]]> https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=13 Fri, 24 Jun 2016 19:53:50 +0200 https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=13
Look at that! The beginnings of a graphical overhaul. Also, XP system details, anti-hack changes, menu rework, and more. We’re upgrading servers with this patch, so there will be some extended downtime. We’ll tweet when that’s all resolved.

Motion BlurGarry Newman
Motion blur is back. Some people hate it, some people love it (especially lone woolfes). Either way there’s an option to turn it off if you don’t like it.
[Bild: 38d0.jpg?resize=601%2C345]
[Bild: 2a2c.jpg?resize=591%2C345]
Main MenuGarry Newman

The main menu has been altered slightly to help lone woulfes on prerelease. The options screen looks a bit less terrible.
[Bild: c62d.jpg?resize=1200%2C670]
NametagsGarry Newman

Making nametags bit more visible is something lone woolfs have asked for a long time. Previously, they were completely hidden at night, but on the prerelease branch they’re slightly visible.

[Bild: collage.jpg]
While this might seem too visible, it’s important to keep in mind that you can’t see nametags unless they’re practically standing next to you.

Crafting MenuGarry Newman
If you’ve been lone wulf’ing on the prerelease branch, you probably had trouble with the crafting menu. I’ve made it so that in the specific categories it now shows locked and upcoming items. Locked items can be unlocked with XP, and upcoming items you’ll be able to craft or unlock when you next level up.
[Bild: 44c8.jpg?resize=1200%2C589]
OwnershipMaurino Berry

I want to clear up some confusion from the previous devblog. The term “ownership” is something we’re using internally to keep track of who has a share of what item. This lead to some confusion when talking about an “ownership split” of resources. Just to be perfectly clear, you won’t actually receive resources from someone using your tool to harvest, you’ll just be part owner of the generated resources for XP purposes. I’m going to write a long and convoluted explanation of how this works, so if you don’t really care about the internals you can skip this section and just know that if you help people by giving them stuff you will end up earning little trickles of XP when they perform actions with what you gave them, and if those people help others you’ll get a piece of that too, pyramid scheme style. Here we go:

Let’s say Garry gives Andre the resources to craft a hatchet: Andre crafts the hatchet and the “ownership” is split 80% Andre, 20% Garry (because Garry provided the resources). When that hatchet is used to generate XP in some fashion, that XP will be split up according to the ownership of the tool. So if a barrel gives you 1 XP every time you hit it (not a real in-game number), and Andre was using the tool we previously described, he would earn:

Zitat:0.5(action split) + 0.5(tool split) * 0.8 (tool ownership amount) = 0.90xp

Garry would earn 0.1 XP.

Where it gets really interesting is when we start applying ownership to resources based on the tool used. If Andre harvests resources with this tool and hands them over to someone else, who then crafts a tool and harvests more resources, Andre would receive a small cut of XP, and so on and so forth. Everyone along the way up the chain is going to get a (small) piece of the action. The more you help, the more you earn. There have been some concerns voiced on reddit by the lone walves about a team of 10 people all working to prop up one player, who can then level up quickly and produce items for everyone. I don’t really think this is as big of an issue as some are making it out to be, but we will be watching closely in case it somehow gets out of control.

As I said, this feature is largely complete aside from balance, testing for exploits (please share potential ones!), and bugs. I’m going to merge it into prerelease sometime in the morning so I can be around for to fix anything game breaking. It’s barebones but functional right now, and I’ll be expanding upon it as we go. I hope to do things like have it so when you cook food you become the owner (split with the campfire deployer) and when someone eats the food the food owners will get some XP. Or if people use your repair bench you’ll earn XP, as will the resource provider, and the person doing the repairing will be added as a partial owner of the item they repaired, etc. The possibilities are endless!

Of course this all might end up being a load of shit and we’ll have to remove it, but, hey, nothing ventured nothing gained. Right?

Rock BasesAndré Straubmeier

I took another stab at fixing the known exploits that allowed people to construct bases inside rocks. Our tests look like they’re all covered now, but we’ll keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks to verify this and make adjustments where needed. The aim is to be rock base free in the next wipe cycle, but I don’t want to lean myself out of the window too far at this point.

Throwable Weapon VerificationAndré Straubmeier

Having successfully rolled out server side verification systems for projectile and melee weapons I moved on to the last weapon category this week – throwable weapons. The exploits for those worked a bit differently than the ones for projectile and melee weapons, but the changes should prevent all known hacks that utilized throwable weapons to destroy cupboards and storage boxes inside bases. With this we have closed the last known loophole for those kinds of hacks and urge server owners who are still running community anti hack mods to switch back to the official anti hack system since it should now be significantly more secure.

Update ScheduleAndré Straubmeier

We’re releasing a small update this week that contains a number of fixes, game anti hack improvements and an updated version of EAC – all of which are things I wanted to address before switching over to more gameplay oriented work on the prerelease branch. There may or may not be another small update next week, but only if there are important issues we need to address. For everything else make sure to check out the prerelease branch on Steam.

Airfield ReworkVincent Mayeur

Before working on new dungeons and the tunnels, I decided it would be better to focus on improving quality of visuals and gameplay in places that need it the most. Thankfully, there’s not many areas of the game that truly look bad anymore, except airfield’s hangers, and the lighthouse.

I started to rework the airfield dungeon, and although there’s nothing to show currently, I will break it down to you: I’ll be giving it a military feel. It will still have a perimeter wall, but this one will be bigger concrete slabs planted into the ground, coupled with a few watch towers. I’ll have a small office building added into the mix and nice concrete runways. Altogether it should make the airfield one of the best places to be again, and most importantly more fun to traverse and explore.

Graphics OverhaulPetur Agust

I decided to finally look into our rather ghastly looking outdoor environments, so I made a new branch, and pretty much wiped it clean.

The goals are:
  • The most crappy looking trees thrown out.

  • The less crappy looking trees improved.

  • Lighting for all times of day redesigned from scratch.

  • Terrain/biome tones revisited.

  • Spawn tables overhauled. (What bushes/rocks/trees/mushrooms spawn where, and in what quantity and size.)

  • Individual biomes given more distinct character.

  • Weather revisited. Maybe made more harsh.

  • And finally, performance not diminished.
I’ve only just started, and there’s no timeline for when this goes live, but the header image is a super early appetizer. Here’s what night currently feels like.
[Bild: 2016-06-23_10-51-48.jpg?resize=1200%2C652]
MusicAlex Rehberg

I’ve been chopping more music up this week and I’m almost done with the existing songs! I’ve got a fairly good system going now for deciding out how to divide the different sounds and instruments into layers. This varies a bit from song to song. But generally, first we have a base layer of ambience that plays at any intensity level. After that there’s a calmer more melodic layer that plays at lower intensities. Then we have a mid-intensity layer that’s usually smaller drums, staccato string instruments, pulsing bass synths and things like that. Finally we have a high intensity layer that’s strong drums, big synths, etc.

There’s been a few spots where there were fairly heavily engineered transitions between parts of songs which I’ve had to massage a bit to fit well with the approach we’re taking. They’ve all worked out eventually, but I have some ideas for ways to tweak the arrangement system that I might explore next week which should make all the snags I’ve hit into total non-issues.

While I’ve been chopping these songs up I’ve also been writing a few more parts for some of them and expanding layers that were under-represented in the initial drafts. Most of the stuff I’ve written so far has a lot of good ambient and melodic content to use as the song progresses, but the tense sections have been fairly short, so I’m spending a good bit of time fleshing out mid and high tension parts to make sure the songs don’t sound like a single drum loop if the intensity is high the whole time. There’s quite a lot more to think about for a single song under this system than just writing a traditional piece of music but it’s been a really fun challenge so far.

I’ve also fixed a couple more bugs in the playback system and added support for playing music on menu screens (and flagging which songs are allowed to play on menus).

Since we’ve all been asked to work on the prerelease branch until XP goes out, this stuff should all pop up on there for you guys to check out in the next few days.

Throwable WeaponsAlex Webster
Last of the two-handed weapons completed this week. I’ve also started to look at simplifying the spear throwing too, as under the hood it had a one & two handed holds, which weren’t triggering in-game. The plan is for them to work the same way as all the other updated throwables.
All being well, I’m looking to merge this new system to the prerelease branch in time for next week’s update.

Heavy ArmourTaylor Reynolds

I’ve been baking down the high-poly of the heavy armour, and I’ve made a start on the texturing. In an attempt to break up to large areas of metal, I’ve been trying to work in a lot of smaller details. Duct tape, bolts, rivets – anything to make it look unique and hand-crafted. Tom’s guns do this really nicely and it’d be cool to give the armour the same level of personality.

[Bild: HeavyArmour.jpg]

Female ClothesMinh Le

I went over some of the clothing for the female and noticed they had really poor deformation around the chest areas. In some cases it looked like the player was hiding sharp objects in their chest. I smoothed it out so it looks more natural.

[Bild: tshirt_boobs.png?resize=537%2C443][Bild: hoodie_boobs.png?resize=655%2C443]

Changelog

Added protection against some exploits for construction placement inside rocks
Added protection against a number of throw weapon hacks
Fixed flyhack_protection 2 false positive when jumping on floating ice caps
Fixed projectile line of sight protection issue inside caves
Fixed projectile line of sight protection issue on fence and twig building blocks
Fixed rare false positives in the server side melee weapon repeat rate verification
Fixed chain link fence exploits against turrets and the patrol helicopter
Fixed issues when connecting to a server from the in-game main menu
Updated EAC]]>
Look at that! The beginnings of a graphical overhaul. Also, XP system details, anti-hack changes, menu rework, and more. We’re upgrading servers with this patch, so there will be some extended downtime. We’ll tweet when that’s all resolved.

Motion BlurGarry Newman
Motion blur is back. Some people hate it, some people love it (especially lone woolfes). Either way there’s an option to turn it off if you don’t like it.
[Bild: 38d0.jpg?resize=601%2C345]
[Bild: 2a2c.jpg?resize=591%2C345]
Main MenuGarry Newman

The main menu has been altered slightly to help lone woulfes on prerelease. The options screen looks a bit less terrible.
[Bild: c62d.jpg?resize=1200%2C670]
NametagsGarry Newman

Making nametags bit more visible is something lone woolfs have asked for a long time. Previously, they were completely hidden at night, but on the prerelease branch they’re slightly visible.

[Bild: collage.jpg]
While this might seem too visible, it’s important to keep in mind that you can’t see nametags unless they’re practically standing next to you.

Crafting MenuGarry Newman
If you’ve been lone wulf’ing on the prerelease branch, you probably had trouble with the crafting menu. I’ve made it so that in the specific categories it now shows locked and upcoming items. Locked items can be unlocked with XP, and upcoming items you’ll be able to craft or unlock when you next level up.
[Bild: 44c8.jpg?resize=1200%2C589]
OwnershipMaurino Berry

I want to clear up some confusion from the previous devblog. The term “ownership” is something we’re using internally to keep track of who has a share of what item. This lead to some confusion when talking about an “ownership split” of resources. Just to be perfectly clear, you won’t actually receive resources from someone using your tool to harvest, you’ll just be part owner of the generated resources for XP purposes. I’m going to write a long and convoluted explanation of how this works, so if you don’t really care about the internals you can skip this section and just know that if you help people by giving them stuff you will end up earning little trickles of XP when they perform actions with what you gave them, and if those people help others you’ll get a piece of that too, pyramid scheme style. Here we go:

Let’s say Garry gives Andre the resources to craft a hatchet: Andre crafts the hatchet and the “ownership” is split 80% Andre, 20% Garry (because Garry provided the resources). When that hatchet is used to generate XP in some fashion, that XP will be split up according to the ownership of the tool. So if a barrel gives you 1 XP every time you hit it (not a real in-game number), and Andre was using the tool we previously described, he would earn:

Zitat:0.5(action split) + 0.5(tool split) * 0.8 (tool ownership amount) = 0.90xp

Garry would earn 0.1 XP.

Where it gets really interesting is when we start applying ownership to resources based on the tool used. If Andre harvests resources with this tool and hands them over to someone else, who then crafts a tool and harvests more resources, Andre would receive a small cut of XP, and so on and so forth. Everyone along the way up the chain is going to get a (small) piece of the action. The more you help, the more you earn. There have been some concerns voiced on reddit by the lone walves about a team of 10 people all working to prop up one player, who can then level up quickly and produce items for everyone. I don’t really think this is as big of an issue as some are making it out to be, but we will be watching closely in case it somehow gets out of control.

As I said, this feature is largely complete aside from balance, testing for exploits (please share potential ones!), and bugs. I’m going to merge it into prerelease sometime in the morning so I can be around for to fix anything game breaking. It’s barebones but functional right now, and I’ll be expanding upon it as we go. I hope to do things like have it so when you cook food you become the owner (split with the campfire deployer) and when someone eats the food the food owners will get some XP. Or if people use your repair bench you’ll earn XP, as will the resource provider, and the person doing the repairing will be added as a partial owner of the item they repaired, etc. The possibilities are endless!

Of course this all might end up being a load of shit and we’ll have to remove it, but, hey, nothing ventured nothing gained. Right?

Rock BasesAndré Straubmeier

I took another stab at fixing the known exploits that allowed people to construct bases inside rocks. Our tests look like they’re all covered now, but we’ll keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks to verify this and make adjustments where needed. The aim is to be rock base free in the next wipe cycle, but I don’t want to lean myself out of the window too far at this point.

Throwable Weapon VerificationAndré Straubmeier

Having successfully rolled out server side verification systems for projectile and melee weapons I moved on to the last weapon category this week – throwable weapons. The exploits for those worked a bit differently than the ones for projectile and melee weapons, but the changes should prevent all known hacks that utilized throwable weapons to destroy cupboards and storage boxes inside bases. With this we have closed the last known loophole for those kinds of hacks and urge server owners who are still running community anti hack mods to switch back to the official anti hack system since it should now be significantly more secure.

Update ScheduleAndré Straubmeier

We’re releasing a small update this week that contains a number of fixes, game anti hack improvements and an updated version of EAC – all of which are things I wanted to address before switching over to more gameplay oriented work on the prerelease branch. There may or may not be another small update next week, but only if there are important issues we need to address. For everything else make sure to check out the prerelease branch on Steam.

Airfield ReworkVincent Mayeur

Before working on new dungeons and the tunnels, I decided it would be better to focus on improving quality of visuals and gameplay in places that need it the most. Thankfully, there’s not many areas of the game that truly look bad anymore, except airfield’s hangers, and the lighthouse.

I started to rework the airfield dungeon, and although there’s nothing to show currently, I will break it down to you: I’ll be giving it a military feel. It will still have a perimeter wall, but this one will be bigger concrete slabs planted into the ground, coupled with a few watch towers. I’ll have a small office building added into the mix and nice concrete runways. Altogether it should make the airfield one of the best places to be again, and most importantly more fun to traverse and explore.

Graphics OverhaulPetur Agust

I decided to finally look into our rather ghastly looking outdoor environments, so I made a new branch, and pretty much wiped it clean.

The goals are:
  • The most crappy looking trees thrown out.

  • The less crappy looking trees improved.

  • Lighting for all times of day redesigned from scratch.

  • Terrain/biome tones revisited.

  • Spawn tables overhauled. (What bushes/rocks/trees/mushrooms spawn where, and in what quantity and size.)

  • Individual biomes given more distinct character.

  • Weather revisited. Maybe made more harsh.

  • And finally, performance not diminished.
I’ve only just started, and there’s no timeline for when this goes live, but the header image is a super early appetizer. Here’s what night currently feels like.
[Bild: 2016-06-23_10-51-48.jpg?resize=1200%2C652]
MusicAlex Rehberg

I’ve been chopping more music up this week and I’m almost done with the existing songs! I’ve got a fairly good system going now for deciding out how to divide the different sounds and instruments into layers. This varies a bit from song to song. But generally, first we have a base layer of ambience that plays at any intensity level. After that there’s a calmer more melodic layer that plays at lower intensities. Then we have a mid-intensity layer that’s usually smaller drums, staccato string instruments, pulsing bass synths and things like that. Finally we have a high intensity layer that’s strong drums, big synths, etc.

There’s been a few spots where there were fairly heavily engineered transitions between parts of songs which I’ve had to massage a bit to fit well with the approach we’re taking. They’ve all worked out eventually, but I have some ideas for ways to tweak the arrangement system that I might explore next week which should make all the snags I’ve hit into total non-issues.

While I’ve been chopping these songs up I’ve also been writing a few more parts for some of them and expanding layers that were under-represented in the initial drafts. Most of the stuff I’ve written so far has a lot of good ambient and melodic content to use as the song progresses, but the tense sections have been fairly short, so I’m spending a good bit of time fleshing out mid and high tension parts to make sure the songs don’t sound like a single drum loop if the intensity is high the whole time. There’s quite a lot more to think about for a single song under this system than just writing a traditional piece of music but it’s been a really fun challenge so far.

I’ve also fixed a couple more bugs in the playback system and added support for playing music on menu screens (and flagging which songs are allowed to play on menus).

Since we’ve all been asked to work on the prerelease branch until XP goes out, this stuff should all pop up on there for you guys to check out in the next few days.

Throwable WeaponsAlex Webster
Last of the two-handed weapons completed this week. I’ve also started to look at simplifying the spear throwing too, as under the hood it had a one & two handed holds, which weren’t triggering in-game. The plan is for them to work the same way as all the other updated throwables.
All being well, I’m looking to merge this new system to the prerelease branch in time for next week’s update.

Heavy ArmourTaylor Reynolds

I’ve been baking down the high-poly of the heavy armour, and I’ve made a start on the texturing. In an attempt to break up to large areas of metal, I’ve been trying to work in a lot of smaller details. Duct tape, bolts, rivets – anything to make it look unique and hand-crafted. Tom’s guns do this really nicely and it’d be cool to give the armour the same level of personality.

[Bild: HeavyArmour.jpg]

Female ClothesMinh Le

I went over some of the clothing for the female and noticed they had really poor deformation around the chest areas. In some cases it looked like the player was hiding sharp objects in their chest. I smoothed it out so it looks more natural.

[Bild: tshirt_boobs.png?resize=537%2C443][Bild: hoodie_boobs.png?resize=655%2C443]

Changelog

Added protection against some exploits for construction placement inside rocks
Added protection against a number of throw weapon hacks
Fixed flyhack_protection 2 false positive when jumping on floating ice caps
Fixed projectile line of sight protection issue inside caves
Fixed projectile line of sight protection issue on fence and twig building blocks
Fixed rare false positives in the server side melee weapon repeat rate verification
Fixed chain link fence exploits against turrets and the patrol helicopter
Fixed issues when connecting to a server from the in-game main menu
Updated EAC]]> <![CDATA[Devblog 114]]> https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=4 Thu, 09 Jun 2016 21:32:41 +0200 https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=4

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.
[Bild: dungeons_art_075.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]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
[Bild: RUSTdoublebarrledshotgun2.jpg?resize=1200%2C633]

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/]]>

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.
[Bild: dungeons_art_075.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]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
[Bild: RUSTdoublebarrledshotgun2.jpg?resize=1200%2C633]

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/]]> <![CDATA[Devblog 113]]> https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=1 Sun, 05 Jun 2016 01:18:51 +0200 https://the-expedition.lima-city.de/Forum/showthread.php?tid=1 [Bild: dungeons_art_069.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
It’s a wiping update today. A new dawn for servers that brings updated dungeons, weapon attachments, performance improvements, and more. We also have an update on the upcoming XP system.
XP System
[Bild: xp_tree_new.png?resize=1200%2C277&ssl=1]
I’m still working on this. It’s not live with this patch, but it’s playable on the pre-release branch on Steam. On there I’ve gone through and rebalanced the tech tree and I’m happy-ish with it from a gameplay perspective thus far. I’ve also written some code that calculates the cost of items based on the level they unlock at as well as how many other items are unlocked at that level. Basically, I’ve made it so when things become eligible for unlocking, you’ll be able to afford 66% of the items in that level. This will give players some choice. Do you unlock something that will help at that moment, or bank that XP so you can afford to unlock something better later on? Next week, I’m going to work on making the system a little more intuitive and adding proper “gamefeel”, so you know when you’re leveling up and whats available. I’m also going to add several new ways to earn XP (when players use tools you crafted, when players use resources you gathered, when crafting items, etc.) and tone down or eliminate the XP you get from simply hitting trees and rocks.

There’s going to be some obvious oversights, and I’m patching the tech tree several times a day and adjusting as we go. Response on prerelease has been great so far and I’m constantly requesting feedback on the server, so please give it a try and let me know your suggestions. The sooner we get this balanced the sooner we can push it out to main!
Muzzle Mods Added
[Bild: muszz.jpg?resize=1200%2C574]
Thanks to a bunch of attachment bugs being fixed we’re pleased to launch the two new muzzle modifications for weapons. As stated in the previous devblog, the muzzle brake allows you to stay on target a lot easier at the expense of some errant shots (think more CoD style spread), while the muzzle booster increases the fire rate of your weapon. I know for a fact this will need rebalancing next week so I will be listening.
Attachment Costs
[Bild: attachment_sale.jpg?resize=616%2C104&ssl=1]
I’ve gone ahead and lowered the cost of weapon attachments by about half (apart from the Scope). They really weren’t being used enough, and when they were it was only by people with so much HQM to spare that they may as well waste it on them. This should lower bar for entry to poorer players as well as increase their usage in general.
Attachment Bugs (lol)
Wow this is embarrassing.
For the longest time the modifier effects for attachments were active even if they weren’t set to enabled. This means the Scope was doing things like lowering bullet velocity by 30%, and the Silencer was increasing fire rate. Haha. Now we get to see how unbalanced (or balanced?) the game will be now that everything is working properly. Rage on.
Dungeon Art
This time I had the chance to finish a couple of interesting structures. There’s the pigeon nest, a structure you can find in canyon and water treatment plant. Remember bird poop? There’s plenty of it on that tower, and it will lead you up the tower, marking places that you can jump on. I did make the climbing of the tower easier to achieve by tweaking a few of the jumps, and it’s now more predictable where you gotta jump from and land now.
I worked on the sewage tanks that you can traverse in the water treatment plant, pretty much only cosmetic changes for those. There’s a few things that might still be a bit rough around them but we’ll get that sorted over time.
[Bild: dungeons_art_068.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
Also since this week’s patch is a wipe you benefit from all the previous dungeons artwork for this month.
Heavy Armour
[Bild: Helmet.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
I tentatively started work on the heavy armour that Paul concepted a few weeks ago. It’s still in a very early stage, and the design space for this one is very delicate. It should definitely feel like a niche choice based on circumstance and not be objectively better than other armour choices. I’ll probably take my crappy blockout and stick it in game next week to make sure the armour set is suitably vulnerable to a flanking attack, especially if the wearer has poor mobility.
Floating Ration Box Art
[Bild: MMYzM2l.jpg?resize=1200%2C713]
I’ve finished off ration box art! Rations include beans, chicken dinner and mashed potato, water, and fuel. The essentials for surviving Rust, especially the mashed potato (all will be available individually). Have spin with the preview above and below is a pic of how it’ll look when added to the game.
Changelog
Fixed bug where a gun’s magazine would spawn out of thin air in 1st person during reload
Dungeon art monthly progress
Weapon mods can both offset and scale all weapon stats
Fixed weapon hip aim cone parameter being ignored
Fixed that only the first weapon attachment was receiving the weapon aiming state
Added layer.toggle, layer.show, layer.hide and layer.culling admin console commands
The restart console command now takes the number of seconds as an argument
The default restart timer is now 5 minutes instead of 60 seconds
Calling restart -1 cancels the server restart
Don’t try to update Steam stats if Steam is not initialized (server error)
Fixed projectile weapon repeat / reload delay inaccuracies
Optimized entity linking on both client and server
Fixed a no clipping exploit
Player model state is now updated and verified once per frame instead of once per tick
Fixed an exploit to access the F1 menu admin tools
The object quality slider no longer uses far too low quality meshes at close range
Suicides are displayed in separate column in the stats console command
Weapon attachments are no longer invisible when attached to the held weapon
Fixed being able to stack boxes partially inside walls
Fixed admins getting violations when disabling no clipping while moving very fast
Added flyhack_protection mode 2
Increased projectile LOS penalty for player to player damage
Building blocks store a unique building ID
Buildings have to keep a distance of two meters between each other
Fixed sign update issues for clients with slow connections
Stripped the .prefab extension from death screen kill messages
Procedural Map: Fixed holes in mountains
Procedural Map: Increased distance between mountains
Procedural Map: Increased monument and road density
Procedural Map: Increased minimum powerline distance
Procedural Map: Tweaked airfield and cave monument topology
Procedural Map: Increased overall number of caves on the map
Procedural Map: Decreased minimum distance between caves
Procedural Map: Enabled shore wetness on the road material
Procedural Map: Tweaked water to landmass ratio
Fixed revz related particle issues; e.g. missing fly swarm
Fixed scattering related particle issues
Added experimental large scale occlusion
Added Muzzle Booster
Added Muzzle Brake
Halved (more or less) attachment costs
]]> [Bild: dungeons_art_069.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
It’s a wiping update today. A new dawn for servers that brings updated dungeons, weapon attachments, performance improvements, and more. We also have an update on the upcoming XP system.
XP System
[Bild: xp_tree_new.png?resize=1200%2C277&ssl=1]
I’m still working on this. It’s not live with this patch, but it’s playable on the pre-release branch on Steam. On there I’ve gone through and rebalanced the tech tree and I’m happy-ish with it from a gameplay perspective thus far. I’ve also written some code that calculates the cost of items based on the level they unlock at as well as how many other items are unlocked at that level. Basically, I’ve made it so when things become eligible for unlocking, you’ll be able to afford 66% of the items in that level. This will give players some choice. Do you unlock something that will help at that moment, or bank that XP so you can afford to unlock something better later on? Next week, I’m going to work on making the system a little more intuitive and adding proper “gamefeel”, so you know when you’re leveling up and whats available. I’m also going to add several new ways to earn XP (when players use tools you crafted, when players use resources you gathered, when crafting items, etc.) and tone down or eliminate the XP you get from simply hitting trees and rocks.

There’s going to be some obvious oversights, and I’m patching the tech tree several times a day and adjusting as we go. Response on prerelease has been great so far and I’m constantly requesting feedback on the server, so please give it a try and let me know your suggestions. The sooner we get this balanced the sooner we can push it out to main!
Muzzle Mods Added
[Bild: muszz.jpg?resize=1200%2C574]
Thanks to a bunch of attachment bugs being fixed we’re pleased to launch the two new muzzle modifications for weapons. As stated in the previous devblog, the muzzle brake allows you to stay on target a lot easier at the expense of some errant shots (think more CoD style spread), while the muzzle booster increases the fire rate of your weapon. I know for a fact this will need rebalancing next week so I will be listening.
Attachment Costs
[Bild: attachment_sale.jpg?resize=616%2C104&ssl=1]
I’ve gone ahead and lowered the cost of weapon attachments by about half (apart from the Scope). They really weren’t being used enough, and when they were it was only by people with so much HQM to spare that they may as well waste it on them. This should lower bar for entry to poorer players as well as increase their usage in general.
Attachment Bugs (lol)
Wow this is embarrassing.
For the longest time the modifier effects for attachments were active even if they weren’t set to enabled. This means the Scope was doing things like lowering bullet velocity by 30%, and the Silencer was increasing fire rate. Haha. Now we get to see how unbalanced (or balanced?) the game will be now that everything is working properly. Rage on.
Dungeon Art
This time I had the chance to finish a couple of interesting structures. There’s the pigeon nest, a structure you can find in canyon and water treatment plant. Remember bird poop? There’s plenty of it on that tower, and it will lead you up the tower, marking places that you can jump on. I did make the climbing of the tower easier to achieve by tweaking a few of the jumps, and it’s now more predictable where you gotta jump from and land now.
I worked on the sewage tanks that you can traverse in the water treatment plant, pretty much only cosmetic changes for those. There’s a few things that might still be a bit rough around them but we’ll get that sorted over time.
[Bild: dungeons_art_068.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
Also since this week’s patch is a wipe you benefit from all the previous dungeons artwork for this month.
Heavy Armour
[Bild: Helmet.jpg?resize=1200%2C675]
I tentatively started work on the heavy armour that Paul concepted a few weeks ago. It’s still in a very early stage, and the design space for this one is very delicate. It should definitely feel like a niche choice based on circumstance and not be objectively better than other armour choices. I’ll probably take my crappy blockout and stick it in game next week to make sure the armour set is suitably vulnerable to a flanking attack, especially if the wearer has poor mobility.
Floating Ration Box Art
[Bild: MMYzM2l.jpg?resize=1200%2C713]
I’ve finished off ration box art! Rations include beans, chicken dinner and mashed potato, water, and fuel. The essentials for surviving Rust, especially the mashed potato (all will be available individually). Have spin with the preview above and below is a pic of how it’ll look when added to the game.
Changelog
Fixed bug where a gun’s magazine would spawn out of thin air in 1st person during reload
Dungeon art monthly progress
Weapon mods can both offset and scale all weapon stats
Fixed weapon hip aim cone parameter being ignored
Fixed that only the first weapon attachment was receiving the weapon aiming state
Added layer.toggle, layer.show, layer.hide and layer.culling admin console commands
The restart console command now takes the number of seconds as an argument
The default restart timer is now 5 minutes instead of 60 seconds
Calling restart -1 cancels the server restart
Don’t try to update Steam stats if Steam is not initialized (server error)
Fixed projectile weapon repeat / reload delay inaccuracies
Optimized entity linking on both client and server
Fixed a no clipping exploit
Player model state is now updated and verified once per frame instead of once per tick
Fixed an exploit to access the F1 menu admin tools
The object quality slider no longer uses far too low quality meshes at close range
Suicides are displayed in separate column in the stats console command
Weapon attachments are no longer invisible when attached to the held weapon
Fixed being able to stack boxes partially inside walls
Fixed admins getting violations when disabling no clipping while moving very fast
Added flyhack_protection mode 2
Increased projectile LOS penalty for player to player damage
Building blocks store a unique building ID
Buildings have to keep a distance of two meters between each other
Fixed sign update issues for clients with slow connections
Stripped the .prefab extension from death screen kill messages
Procedural Map: Fixed holes in mountains
Procedural Map: Increased distance between mountains
Procedural Map: Increased monument and road density
Procedural Map: Increased minimum powerline distance
Procedural Map: Tweaked airfield and cave monument topology
Procedural Map: Increased overall number of caves on the map
Procedural Map: Decreased minimum distance between caves
Procedural Map: Enabled shore wetness on the road material
Procedural Map: Tweaked water to landmass ratio
Fixed revz related particle issues; e.g. missing fly swarm
Fixed scattering related particle issues
Added experimental large scale occlusion
Added Muzzle Booster
Added Muzzle Brake
Halved (more or less) attachment costs
]]>