2:07pm EST - It is a new day in Rust development and the team is making some good progress. Less forward facing progress today, a lot of the work is on internal processes. Before we get into that, let's talk about performance...

Performance

Yesterday, the big update launched. Overall, it went pretty smooth as far as update launches are concerned. Although client FPS has improved in this update, server performance is still suffering with high populations. Our server FPS was hitting the single digits consistently last night after we were maxed at 200/200 people for several hours. With many reports of desync and invisible players, I ran a restart and turned off animal AI (which helped slightly).

I’ve spoken with Garry about this and he will be adding some profiling stuff this week to help diagnose the cause of the performance hits. Also, I’m really hoping Raknet will solve some of these issues as well. In the mean time, I will keep animal thinking and movement off and run restarts when desync gets out of hand.

ItemSystem2

If you follow @RustUpdates, you’ll notice many of the commits today are to an ItemSystem2 branch. I asked Garry what ItemSystem2 is and he told me it’s some internal reconfiguring. Basically, they are moving the item editing from the website in to Unity. This will make the devs lives easier, but unfortunately, take away a lot of statistical insight from players. Although I do enjoy looking at the raw JSON data on the item site, I’d rather the developers be able to produce functionality and new items faster.

Projectile damage changes

One of the big gameplay changes existing in the ItemSystem2 branch is that damage is now defined by the projectile rather than the weapon used. This means the Thompson and Eoka (9mm) will do the same damage and the AK and Bolt (5.56) will do the same damage. Given this change isn’t yet available on the dev branch, I can’t test specific numbers at the moment. One thing is for sure, the projectile damage stats I provided on yesterday’s post are going to change on the next update.

Corpses spew loot again

Maurino added back in the functionality to have corpses spew loot again. That means, when you’re harvesting a players corpse, any items left on their person will spew out around you (rather disappear completely with the corpse). Note: this is set to only spew 75% of the corpse contents, so some items will still be lost.

Movement / melee changes

One of the most noticeable changes to gameplay on yesterdays update was the inability to do a melee attack while running. This has been changed by Maurino just now to allow the melee attack, but stop the running. Also, he's made it so you can't run for a short time after landing.

Bow nerfed

Maurino also changed the bow damage. At the moment (as of yesterdays update) it's doing 65 damage. Today it has been lowered to 50 (which is still more than the 40 it was last week). 

Roads

Andre is still trucking along on the roads branch. If you remember from last week, this first iteration will connect landmarks and monuments together with trails (see here). He's making some great progress today, including the addition of bridges it appears. The current goal is to get this branch merged into development at some point this week.

Corrugated metal

Vincent is working on the new top tier building skin, corrugated metal. He’s been tweaking textures and getting this skin ready for prime time. I have to say, it’s looking pretty nice!

Character variants

In the character variant realm, Tom is working on some more expressions for our Newman. Today he posted angry and sad:

Terrain mesh

Diogo is working on some terrain mesh blending. I don’t know exactly what a lot of this means (Weights are defined via vertex alpha channel.) but I do know he’s working on making the terrain look nicer and perform better. That is welcomed work in my book!

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com