1:00pm EST - Our update preview stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST - We’re at the halfway point of the month for Rust development and the team is making some great progress.

Our update preview stream goes live at 1pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Gestures menu

Waving at fellow friendlies or taunting your foes with a chicken dance from up high will soon be much easier with the work being done on the Gestures_2 branch. Jarryd and Alex have been chucking commits left and right, building out a fresh gesture menu along with improving the overall animations and logic behind gestures. 

No visuals yet as it’s still on a separate branch. That said, it does seem as though this body of work will soon be hitting the main branch, so stay tuned for a full rundown once that occurs. 

Card Games

Also on the list of branches getting a shitload of commits, the CardGames project appears to be coming along nicely. We’re still a little hazy on the details as much of the earlier commits to this branch were of the hidden variety. Even so, we’re able to infer a couple things about this upcoming addition to the game.

It appears as though poker will definitely be one (if not the only) of the card games able to be played. As expected, it seems these games will be played at Bandit Camp, replacing the current decorative card tables with actual functioning games. It’s not yet clear if you’ll be able to play card games anywhere else on the map, but if these games are like any of the other gambling dynamics in Rust, they’ll be confined to good ole’ Bandit.

Like most current projects, this is still on a separate branch, so no more specifics to report on quite yet. As always, we’ll post a full writeup once these appear on the staging branch.

Effects 2021

A new branch has appeared in the past week, taking up the torch of Unity’s high definition render pipeline. First seen on the ‘HDRP’ branch, then on the ‘HDRP backport’ branch, this body of work now lives (at least partially) on the ‘effects_2021’ branch. 

Long story short: this stands to transition a ton of the visual effects in the game to the Unity high definition render pipeline, which in theory should improve performance while also giving a fidelity boost to the overall graphics. We haven’t seen any teaser shots of what this will look like since the days of the ‘HDRP’ branch, but if it’s anything close to those, this stands to drastically improve the look of certain elements in the game. It’ll hopefully optimize the overall client performance too, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Submarines

More progress on the newest water-based vehicle in the game. Unlike the boats, this Submarine will allow for more in depth water exploration in Rust. Although we only have some visuals from Tom Butters’ Twitch streams, we have seen him commit several graphical / initial setup related items to the Submarine branch.

One thing we do have more potential insight into is the capacity of said sub. The commit from yesterday of, ‘solo sub initial setup’ leads us to believe this vehicle will be a one person show. Nothing has been confirmed yet, as it’s still a work in progress on a separate branch. That said, we’ll post more as it surfaces.

Edit: ThatGermanGuy just let me know there are actually 2 subs being worked on, one solo and one duo. He was kind enough to share this image:

Random optimizations

Speaking of optimizations, Lamalove is working on a whole branch dedicated to random performance improvements. So far, it appears to be just that: a bunch of random commits that, in theory, should improve performance. It seems that many of these commits are related to server overhead and performance, but there do appear to be some client related tweaks as well.

Poor server performance

If you’re wondering why they are working on these random optimizations - I mean, you’re probably not, but anyway - it’s due to a known issue with server performance being degraded on high population / entity servers. Facepunch is continuing to investigate this issue and will hopefully have a fix pushed soon. In the meantime, if you’re experiencing more lag than usual in Rust, it’s likely related to that.

Other stuff

• Unity updated to 2019.4.22f1

• Potential water performance improvement

• Enabling incremental GC on macOS as a test

• More progress on new AI (animal and other NPC)

• Tweaks to slots (payout changes and hand animation for spins)

• A new branch by Helk named ‘contacts/treebird’ - no word quite yet on what this may be