Devblog 44

Lots of stuff happening at the same time this week.

Radtown Loot

The way loot spawns has been changed. Previously you'd always find boxes in the same position and most of the time they were empty. Now the boxes disappear when they are looted and respawn at a random position. We’ve also modified the loot tables quite a bit to be slightly more generous when it comes to boxes in rad towns. You will also notice that Rad Towns spawn barrels at random positions. This means no more dummy barrels! There are also different tiers for the barrels, some with better, some with worse loot.

Updated Terrain Generation

Terrain generation was updated with new sand dunes (including a new sand texture), small lakes and steep cliff. The overall terrain resolution was increased by a factor of four, which allows for more details in both the heightmap and ground texturing. The updated procedural generation algorithm also provides a lot more control parameters, which means we’ll have a much easier time to address terrain layout issues in the future. In addition to the improved terrain shape, the server now spawns around four to five times as many trees per world unit by default and a much higher percentage of the overall landmass is turned into forest. Bush density was also greatly increased and they no longer disappear a few hundred metres away but instead turn into billboards that can be seen from any distance. Last but not least, radtown placement was improved to fit the surrounding terrain in a smooth and more natural-looking way.

Join Timeouts

If you have a crappy internet connection you probably haven't been able to join a Rust server in the last couple of weeks. I've been looking at it and I'm hoping I've made stuff better for those guys but at the moment it does seem to be a universal problem with Lidgren. I'm keeping an eye on it and will evaluate our options once I'm done with the UI stuff.

Satellite dish

Vince has finished work on the satellite dish monument! It's got a lot more rusty.

Admin Commands

We've started a secret chat room for server owners to give us feedback, so have made a few changes based on that. All of the admin commands should now give a confirmation response. So if you add a moderator, it should now tell you that it completed successfully. Added removemoderator (steamid) Added removeowner (steamid) Added unban (steamid) Let us know if there are any other admin features you would like. I don't want us to get into a situation where you feel you have to install server mods to moderate your server.

UI Progress

I've been spending all week on the new UI. It's not ready yet. My plan is to have it ready for early next week, then put it on the development branch for testing - and then release it to main on thursday/friday. I have been having a lot of fun doing the UI. Unity's new UI system isn't totally without its issues, but I'm confident in saying it's the best I've ever used.

Summary

We resisted putting out patches during the week because they were going to require a wipe - so hopefully the patch I put out after typing this doesn't have any big problems.