11:55am EST - We are at the halfway point for Rust development this week. We saw a big update yesterday and the team is trucking along on some great things today. Before we get into it, lets look at the current state of the game...

State of the game

Yesterday, we saw a pretty large update (for the specifics of what was included, check out yesterdays post). All in all, this update was about as smooth as they come. A whole ton of welcomed fixes and functionality was added and no new game breaking bugs were introduced.

To stress test this update, I upped the slots to 150. The server ran smooth for about 13 hours till performance dropped and we had to wipe. Granted, we were still getting the mass drops every hour or so, but that is to be expected till the fix for that is launched (which, as you may recall, is tied up in the weapon refactor branch).

So here's the long and short: Client performance is up, lots of cool new functionality, and no new game breaking bugs. Unfortunately, no breakthroughs in the realm of server performance. With that in mind, I dropped the slots to 80 when we wiped last night. This has us seeing the mass drops less often (I was able to get a full night sleep without having to wake up and restart the server!) and hopefully, we'll be able to go a bit longer before performance takes a nose dive. When the next update launches, I will up the slots again to stress test the fuck out of it.

Weapon refactor

Garry is still heads down in the weapon refactor branch. As with most of the refactors Garry does, the commits are pretty code dense. Things like, “Converted planner” and “Converted deployer.” I don't know what the hell this means, and frankly, I don't care. Here’s what you need to know: Garry is unfucking the weapons so PvP should be a lot better. Last I heard, his goal is to get this out by Friday. Will that goal be met? It seems like a stretch to me, but your guess is as good as mine. Keep rocking out that code, Garry!

More on this in the held items trello card.

Giving PVT a final shot

Diogo is working on some more optimizations for the terrain shaders. Our old friend PVT has entered the picture again. You may remember this was disabled for atlas the other week. Are we making a full switch back to PVT? Maybe. PVT, atlas, opus, I don't care what is used as long as lower end machines can run smooth. Two things of note:

• PVT is enabled because performance seems to be improved as on Unity 5 Beta 14
• The terrain shader LOD is now affected by the terrain quality slider on the F2 menu.

Read more about this on the trello card.

Sound tweaks

We're seeing some more tweaks to the sounds in game. Here’s a summary:

• Maurino has modified footsteps so you can’t hear them 300 ft away anymore
• He’s also increased the volume of doors
• All weapon effects are now routing through the audio mixer. My guess is this will fix some of the weapon sounds not registering or getting cut off at random points.

Animal survival

Zon has merged hunting wolves into the main branch. This means, as of next update, wolves should be more intelligent killing machines.

Lighthouse

We've got a bunch of commits around fixing materials on the lighthouse. Looks like they are almost there with it so maybe we'll finally see the lighthouse in game as of the next update!

Edit: According to this reddit post, people have found the lighthouse in game already. I have not confirmed if this is on the main branch or the devbranch yet. Please comment below if you've seen it in game on the main branch.

In game buildings

Daniel is continuing work on the updated map buildings. Here’s some screens he posted earlier:

Bone knife animations

Minh is working on updating the animations for the bone knife to make the slash a bit more slashy. He also added a stabbing animation. Looking at the raw JSON data on the admin inventory site, I can no longer find a specific damage stat for this bad boy. Hopefully that means they are in the process of making it less of a useless piece of shit. See the video here.

Craftable wind turbines

Megan has posted some concept are for craftable wind turbines. See the trello card here.

Rustafied guides

With all these recent changes, some of our guides are out of date. Part of my team building this week has included creating a guide team. We're having our first meeting tonight and will be attacking this from several fronts:

• Updating the current guides
• Adding the guides for the new building system
• Adding some more guides such as PVP techniques, base protection and more.

The team and I will be focusing on these items for the rest of the week so expect some big updates to the guides soon!

Tip of the day - Aim ahead

Now that melee attacks have been slowed significantly, landing your hits is more important then ever. That is why I recommend aiming a bit ahead of your target. Look at where they are going and aim there because there is a delay from when you hit fire to when your strike actually lands.

Credit for this tip goes to Friendly Jon. Got a hot tip? Email rustafied@gmail.com