5:40pm EST - We wiped our main server about 20 minutes ago because it hit the 150k entity mark. You can find the new map here.

1:05pm EST - It’s a brand new week in Rust development and the team is trucking. Overall, the game is running pretty well, as long as the entity count stays below 150,000. Unfortunately, the issues with physics are still showing up after that mark. Our main server is already at 140k and counting, so don’t be surprised if that map gets wiped later today. As always, none of the changes below will be live on the main branch till Thursday. Let’s get into it...

Return of ambiance

After a very short stint in the game, ambient sounds (you know, birds chirping, water flowing, wind blowing) were disabled several weeks ago due to an issue in the Unity audio engine causing client freezes. These sounds have now been re-enabled by default (along with a gulp from Garry). I really hope the issue in Unity has been fixed because it’s amazing what a difference a little ambiance makes to the immersion of the game.

Blue hair syndrome

Garry continues work today on the character variants. One of the wonky things with some characters thus far has been a weird blue / green hue to the hair on certain models. This should be remedied now (although, I just logged into our updated dev test server and my hair still looked a little moldy).

More skin variations

In addition to fixing up some hair, Garry has added some more skin variations. That means, come Thursday, your character model may be looking slightly lighter or darker. After just testing on dev, it looks like my character spent the weekend at the beach, buffing up that base tan.

Procgen7

Andre continues work on the procgen7 branch. As you may recall, the procgen branches are for improving the procedural map generation and making the terrain more interesting. Don’t expect to see any of these changes live this week, the procgen iterations tend to be several weeks in the making and force a map wipe upon launch. I’d guess we’ll be seeing this branch merge into main closer to April 1.

Wind power

Howie is exploring some options for wind power generation. Here’s some thoughts and pictures he posted on trello:

first way as I explained would be as simple as placing it within the existing building pieces. If windmills have tiers and/or weight the underlying structure would need to support it

another way is to just have a pre-made model for the player to place on an open spot on the ground. Gives us more control of how it's designed so it always looks good but takes away some flexibility/creativity from the player and bases might start to look repetitive since everyone will be using the same windmill model

and last, similar to the first method except there would specific scaffolding building pieces players would use when constructing functional architecture like the windmill. The scaffolding signifies a functional piece of architecture and creates an interesting silhouette. Scaffolding could also be upgraded to support higher tier windmills

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com