12:00am EST - Great progress in Rust development as we hit the halfway point for the month.

Our update preview stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Steamworks integrations

If you have joined the staging branch over the past several days, you may have noticed some peculiar things such as weird placement of buttons, UI elements changing, and maybe issues joining servers. This is all due to the Steamworks ‘trial by fire’ which Garry started earlier in the week.

This body of work relates to the integrations between Rust and Steam - all which run through a system called Steamworks. For a while now, Facepunch have been working on a C# library for Steamworks, called Facepunch.Steamworks. The goal of this project is to make working with Steamworks in C# a much easier process.

What better way to try this new framework out than with a full fledged game with existing integrations with Steamworks? This is exactly what Garry is doing. The end result should be cleaner and smoother integrations of Rust with Steam, along with some massive improvements to the Facepunch.Steamworks platform. The only downside is: shit may be broken on the staging branch for a little while.

5/20 Edit: Some improvements to the UI and server browser have been released. Here’s a preview of what’s in store:

Incremental garbage collection

A new feature of Unity 2019.1 is being trialed this month. Incremental garbage collection splits up the garbage collection process over multiple frames with a goal of reducing the number of jarring hitches and frame drops in games. If it works, this could drastically increase the overall smoothness of the game by reducing those annoying frame rate spikes.

Improved player movement

Helk has made a small but valuable quality of life change with regards to movement. Requiring less jumps, player movement will now automatically bump over small curbs and steps.

Visual fixes

Helk also completed several miscellaneous visual fixes this week. Here is a summary:

• UI scope no longer scales with UI scale

• Viewmodels no longer lag behind when in vehicles

• Scope no longer freaks out and lags behind when on vehicles

• Muzzle flashes no longer simulate at low fps when in the distance

Bandit town fog

Petur has tweaked some of the fog effects in Bandit Town. It is now about half as saturated, and a bit more brownish. Also, the fog is less bright at twilight and the render distance has been tweaked.

Other stuff

• Helk is working on a ‘vehicles’ branch - no news on what this entails

• Fixed water junkpiles despawning when players were nearby

• More work on skin loading and unloading

• Doorways render as full walls in reflection pass to prevent light bleeding

• Giant Excavator progress - still on for a June launch

• More work on reworking weapon textures and VFX