7:00pm - Some great work in the past several hours, here’s an update:

UI Reboot

Garry continues to crank out commits to the UI Reboot branch. He’s got chat working (with steam avatar icons). I’ve obtained an exclusive sneak peek of this new UI and am writing up a post summarizing the changes. Expect this to drop later tonight.

Animal fixes

Zon has fix a bunch of stuff around animals today. Specifically, he fixed an issue where animals weren’t spawning in all biomes (that sure could explain the lack of them). Also, he has reduced the chicken spawn chance. That is good because chickens have the lowest resource yield of all animals.

Voice fixes

Maurino has adjusted the levels for voice communication with the intention of making it easier to hear people. The new levels are:

Full volume at 4m
50% at 15m
20% at 25m
and 0 at 60m

Although they may still need tweaking, initial tests have voice coming through loud and clear.

Water is looking much better

I was playing around on the development server and realized water is looking a hell of a lot better. Compare this screen to the one above (which was taken on the current main branch):

Screen Shot 2015-01-27 at 6.50.54 PM.png

1:45pm EST - Another fine day for Rust development. Not a ton of forward-facing stuff going on today, most activity is happening on the UI Reboot branch. Although we expect the UI branch to go live on dev in the next day or two, the next update to the main branch probably won’t happen till Friday. Before we get into it, I want to talk about performance…

Performance

Since last Friday’s update, server and client performance has been poor. This is causing lower FPS for many clients along with increased jerkiness in player interactions. There are several likely contributors to this decreased performance.

First and foremost, the resource count is too damn high! I love dense forests as much as the next person, but having so many resources available clutters the map and allows people to build enormous structures with minimal effort. Also, even with 200 people in the server, rock nodes are spawning out of control, littering the landscape. We wiped less than 24 hours ago and already there are over 100,000 entities on server.

Second, animals are too damn smart! Zon has been doing some excellent work on the animal ai system, however, as with any new functionality, optimization is required. For the time being, I’ve turned off animal movement and thinking (ai.move 0 and ai.think 0). Changing these settings increases our average server FPS from 10 to 40. Also, unlike rock nodes and trees, animals are not spawning nearly often enough. Bringing some balance and optimization to the animals will drastically improve playability.

Unfortunately, performance optimizations are taking a backseat to the UI Reboot at the moment. That means we will just have to live with this for the next several days. Hopefully, Garry will make time before the end of the week to address some of these issues.

UI Reboot

Garry is still grinding on the UI Reboot. We’ve seen a slew of commits today ranging from dragging and dropping to blueprints and crafting. Still no freaking clue what any of this will look like. That mystery will hopefully be solved in the next day or two when the UI Reboot goes live on the development branch.