Welcome to a new week in Rust development. The building system continues to be Garry’s focus, with the goal of merging into the development in the next several days. The rest of the team is working on some cool stuff too. The last client update was Friday evening. Lets get into it…

Building system

Garry is heads down in the construction2 branch again. Today he’s converted the remaining elements to the new system, made the placement guides work (the white / red translucent thing as you're placing) and added the initial stats for the building components.  

Enjoy your hammering upgrades this week because, as we read on the Friday devblog, it will soon be a thing of the past:

With this new way of thinking comes a new way of building. Someone mentioned to me that they spend most of their time in Rust hammering shit, and it’s true. As cool as all that is.. it isn't really what Rust was meant to be about. So that’s gone. No more hammering to upgrade stuff, the resource cost should be the tax – not the 5 minutes of hammering.

So, building and upgrading appears as though it will be a lot faster in this new build system. That, in conjunction with the new tool cupboard, will shift the balance of raiding drastically. I’m curious to see if the demolish times for walls stay the same or if they shift also. Either way, I'm getting mentally prepared to re-write both of our building guides.

FPS relief

Many people have been reporting massive FPS drops since Fridays update (especially in certain areas of the map).

I hypothesized one of the causes was that PVT was stuck on. This was weird because there were commits not too long ago saying PVT was disabled. After submitting a bug, Diogo set the record straight: PVT is totally gone (commented out of the code) and replaced with ‘atlas’. So, a more accurate statement would be: Atlas is on and it needs some optimization.

Thankfully, Diogo agreed to create some different levels of the ground shaders, making the lowest one very simple and fast. We saw the related trello card update yesterday evening so we should see some FPS improvement in the next update. Thank you Diogo!

In the mean time, if your FPS is shit, try finding a location on the map where it is improved and set up shop there.

Render distance of players

Last week, I provided a tip of the day to look for floating heads in the distance. This was because players body parts were rendering at different distances (the head rendering farthest away). As of Friday, this has shifted. Players complete bodies appear to be rendering from farther away now. I am very happy about this one; the render distance of players should be as far as possible.

Chicken

Goose has moved from seafood to poultry, starting on the chicken model today. More animals the merrier! I'd also love to see and hear birds flying overhead some day. Little things like this greatly improve immersion. In the mean time, I can't wait to taste the succulent wolf meat I get from a chicken.

Camera sway for attacks

Mihn has tweaked the camera sway for attacks.  You can see it in action here. As someone who enjoys the occasional drink while I'm playing, I think these movements may be a little severe.

Pie menu

We all saw the pie menu example in the friday devblog (If you didn't, see it here). First of all, this implementation is greatly improved over the current vertical list. More options, less mouse movement needed, and icons to enhance the visual element.

I wanted to point out something: You see how responsive this is? It appears to be much quicker than the other menu elements. It got me thinking, is this the first step we see towards using Unity’s built in UI system? Garry did mention in devblog 31 they were going to start playing with the built in UI system and I have a hunch this is the first glimpse of that we're seeing.

Yes, the CoherentUI system allows for much quicker development, but holy fuck is it a laggy piece of shit! I hate being delayed because the UI hasn't caught up with me yet. This is not only a nuisance but it seriously affects gameplay (if you can't equip your weapon fast enough, you're dead).

This is all speculation, we'll have to wait and see when construction2 is merged into the development branch.

Tool cupboard radius change

I already talked about the tool cupboard last week. If you don't know what it is, check out my post from then. I just wanted to point out a slight change mentioned in the devblog: It will block building within 30 meters (as opposed to the original 50). This works for me, I think 30 meters is plenty of space and 50 may have been a bit much. As with all things, balance will found through trying something out and the tweaking it. I'm excited to try these out!

New concepts

Megan has posted up some new art to the trello concept art board. Specifically, we’re seeing the concept of diving gear for the first time. Also, some mountain lights. I always geek out at this concept art because it reminds me of all the cool shit that will be added into the game in time.

Spectate needs to be admin only

Lets be honest, the spectate mode should not be available to all people. I get the logic behind making it available originally: it allows more people to test and find bugs in the game. 

But heres the thing: Not only is it a privacy concern for players, there are some serious fucking glitches in the system. I'm not going to go into details, but there are reports of people being able to spawn on others bags after spectating. Players are waking up with their loot room trashed and stuff despawned but no breach in their base. After some testing, I was able to recreate the issue several times. This is completely unworkable. I know this bug may be a pain to track and fix so making spectate admin only would be an easy, workable stopgap. I couldn't find a suggestion on the support site for this yet so I just created one.

Support site email floods

When you comment on the support site, you automatically get email alerts when a new comment is added to that ticket. I'm all for this because it is easier than checking back on the site all the time. That being said, several times now I wake up with a flood of emails from old comments on tickets. I'm not sure if this is someone attacking / exploiting the site, or if the email system just shits a brick every now and again. Either way, you may want to consider creating some mail filters for emails coming from noreply@facepunch.deskpro.com.

Tip of the day

Given the spectate issue listed above, here’s my tip of the day: Don't sleep or put your bag in your loot room! Also, don't sleep with valuables on your person. You want to make sure that if someone uses this exploit on you, the worst they can do is kill your sleeper then suicide themselves because they are locked in.