Devblog 48

Thursday Dev Blogs & Updates

Remember how we used to release patches on a Friday and then changed to Monday. Well, we're changing it to Thursdays, alongside the devblog. The problem with Friday updates is that we lose our weekends because we're fixing bugs.. and in turn that ruins your weekends of playing Rust because bugs go unfixed, or we patch while you're playing - restarting servers and in the worst cases wiping. The problem with Monday updates is that we tell you what's in it on Friday. If there's going to be a wipe then playing over the weekend feels like a waste of time - because all your progress is gone on Monday. And no-one really wants to jump on the dev branch because the dev servers are unstable as we need to wipe a lot when testing. So it's good for no-one. So we're trying Thursday. Close enough to the weekend to give everyone something fresh, far enough away that we can patch any game breakers. We're moving the devblog here too - because that just makes good sense.

Bootstap Error

A lot of users were getting a "bootstrap error" where the game wouldn't load, it'd just sit at the bootstrapping screen. This was something blowing up in Unity Analytics. I've put a try catch around it, so we should be protected from that now.

Animal Hide Clothing

Xavier's animal hide clothing has made it in. We have boots, a vest, pants and a poncho. There's some incompatibilities with the poncho and the vest when wearing them together (terrible zfighting) - but I've nudged xavier about it and hopefully something can be done.

Footsteps

Alex has been playing with the footsteps. He's replaced all the sounds, and added a bunch of variations for running and crouching. He's also some a lot of tweaking to avoid playing the sounds when they shouldn't be played. I'm sure a lot of people will be glad to hear that footsteps created by the local player are quieter - and are played in 2D so it doesn't sound like someone is running around you in circles.

Metal Tier

Vince has done an awesome job on the metal tier. The price and health of all of the blocks have all been balanced to suit the new tier.. and blocks aren't all wood anymore - when you hit a metal block you'll get sparks, when you hit a stone block you'll get dust - just like you'd expect.

Raknet

We've changed the networking system to use Raknet. This is likely to have fixed a bunch of networking issues people were having, and it's even more likely to have created some new ones. Raknet is a really common networking library which was bought by Oculus and made open source. The main difference between it and Lidgren (which we were previously using) is that Raknet is coded in C++, whereas Lidgren is coded in C#. Some people will suggest that this should give us a massive performance boost, but I don't really agree with that, but it definitely shouldn't be slower. But we might see other benefits in terms of garbage collection. Raknet is a tried and tested solution so if something is fucking up then we know it's our fault and it's fixable. That isn't something we had with Lidgren. This has also been a good chance to clean the networking