1:08pm EST - Happy Friday everyone, you all know what that means: devblog coming soon. As you may recall from last week, we are on a new development release cycle. That means the next big update to main won’t be till Monday. Although I’m eager for an update, it’s damn good it is not happening today, dev is just not ready yet...

State of the development branch

It’s been a trying week for dev branch players. With the huge item system change in the beginning of the week, much of the focus the past few days has been on making the core gameplay dynamics function again. Thankfully, most things appear to be working again and there have been some impactful additions to the game: reloading guns, roads, and potentially even the metal building tier and repair bench by Monday.

At the moment though, many textures / shaders are totally fucked. The team is actively working on this and I think this branch will be ready to go live by Monday. In the mean time, if you want to play on dev, expect shit to be broken.

Procgen 5

Andre has been working for several days on the procgen5 branch, tweaking and improving the way procedural maps are generated. Earlier today, he merged all these changes into main. After running around the dev server for a couple minutes, I can say the terrain is noticeably more diverse and interesting than ever before.

New admin powers

Maurino has given some abilities which only developers have previously had to moderators (people with moderatorid set). This includes the freeroam cam and super speed / jump ability. Some may squirm at the idea of admins have speed hacks, and I get it. That said, in lieu of teleport ability, this is a powerful tool in helping admins do their job. To access these commands, use Shift P and Shift L. I haven’t been able to get these to work, so I’m not sure they are live on development yet.

Guns reloading

The simple reload system is in and it’s pretty straight forward: Shoot a gun, press r to reload. Here’s a video of gun reloading in action:

Stat changes

One of the biggest changes to gameplay this week has been with regards to item statistics. No longer are the stats pulled from JSON data on the admin inventory site, all stats now exist in Unity. With this transition, the majority of item stats have been modified. This includes gather rates on items, damage done by each weapon, and even amount of protection provided by each article of clothing.

These stats have changed multiple times this week and the dev branch has been fucked more often than not, making it pretty much impossible to test. For the last couple hours, most players on the dev branch are blind due to a shader error. A fix just came out so we’ll be testing a whole bunch of shit to get a summary of what the big changes are. Check back here later today or keep an eye on our twitter for updates.

Wiping main

Our main server is once again littered with buildings. In the interest of having smooth gameplay over the weekend, I will be wiping the server and picking a new map at 5pm EST today. I will post the new map here after the wipe.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com