MAINTENANCE

[Iuliana]

MAINTENANCE

This month’s update is a little lighter than recent, focused on tackling a number of long-standing bugs and improvements. We’ve been working through community feedback to smooth out some of the more persistent issues and make everyday gameplay feel that bit better. Normally, if bugs persist for several years, there’s usually a good reason for that, whether it’s being difficult to reproduce or requiring a lot of work to resolve.

Looking ahead to November, we’re lining up some strong meta and balance changes. If you’ve got suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them with us across our socials, including Discord, we’re always keeping an eye out and reading through what you send.

November will bring the much-anticipated Naval update. This will introduce modular boats with cannons, of course, and much more. You’ll be able to customise your vessel, set sail across the high seas, explore new ocean-based monuments, and even discover smaller outlying islands beyond the horizon.

In December, we'll be celebrating 12 years of Rust, what the heck. 12! 

Additionally, we'll soon be announcing the Warhammer X Rust crossover DLC.

LONG DISTANCE GUNSHOTS

Networking range in Rust is made up of grids. These grids are a fixed size and can be adjusted by server owners, they are sometimes reduced on high-populated community servers to lower network overhead. When these grids are reduced, it also reduces things like: gun audio. This makes the world feel incredibly small and closed off.

We can now run gunshots at different distances to the network range: helping make Rust feel more alive and shaking up the meta by giving advantages/disadvantages to certain weapons.

The old default was around 350 meters.

The new values are as follows:

• Pistols / SAR / SKS / SMGs / Shotguns - 400 meters

• AK / LR - 500 meters

• LMGs / Minigun / Long Distance Rifles (Bolt Action Rifle / L9) - 600 meters

This means that players will now be able to hear you from much further away if you're choosing to use stronger weapons such as the AK or a Bolt Action Rifle. 

TEAM BAG LABELS

It was hard to see what bags belonged to which team members, even if they named them correctly: it could be a pain to figure out.

Provided you now have Building Privilege and a Hammer out, you will now be able to see which bags are owned by which team members when looking at them.

MINICOPTER DAMAGE INDICATORS

Added visual and audio damage indicator effects to provide clearer feedback on minicopter health status. Players will now see progressive visual cues as the minicopter takes damage, with thresholds at 45% and 20% health remaining. Now if you see a mini leaving a raid trailing smoke and you can't hit the driver, you'll know to aim for the chassis itself!

FOLIAGE DISPLACEMENT IMPROVEMENTS

Foliage displacement has been improved to allow for smooth transitions. This includes when objects are removed and also makes displacement from moving sources like players look more realistic and natural.

VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS ENABLED BY DEFAULT

With the last patch, we introduced new volumetric clouds as an alternative to the 2D clouds.  However, we put them under experimental settings and kept them disabled by default.

With this patch, the volumetric clouds are now enabled by default, with the long-term goal being to completely replace the 2D clouds.  The setting for them has been moved under the normal graphics settings tab, and the quality levels are tied to graphics presets.  Additionally, the graphics.vclouds convar has been replaced by graphics.volumetric_clouds.

NOTABLE CHANGES

Automated Workshop Screenshots

Workshop submissions using the in-client skin creator tool now automatically take screenshots that are included in the upload.

Players Eyes

For several years, a bug has caused players eyes to sometimes appear closed, this is now fixed!

Invisible Respawn

Fixed players being invisible when respawning, whilst asleep

RF C4

Fixed C4 not being stackable after enabling RF

Tugboat Rug

Fixed rugs deleting deployables when picked up, if on a tugboat

Barricade placement

Fixed barricade deployment being blocked on sand dunes around giant excavator

EXHIBIT DECOR PACK DLC

Taking the stage this month is the Exhibit Decor Pack, an illuminating collection of deployable items to glow up your base. 

The pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store

Bulb String Lights

Get that warm and fuzzy feeling with these decorative bulb string lights. Hosting a garden party or wiping a raiding party - it’ll look fabulous.

Clothing Mannequin

Goes by “Manny”. Dress him up in your favourite attire and pose him for style. He’ll even swap clothes with you if you want a quick wardrobe change. 

Wall Cabinet 

Place on the wall and store your smaller items inside or on the shelf below. Has 18 slots.

Moveable Spotlights

Light-up the action with these moveable spotlights. Target them with the hammer and they’ll orient towards you! Comes both in wall and floor mountable varieties. 

Fairy Lights

Smaller and more twinkly than the Bulb String Lights, these Fairy Lights bring a touch of magic to the wasteland.

Fluorescent Strip Lights

Giving off a strong UV light, these strip lights will be a great addition to any grow-op. Comes both in wall and ceiling mountable varieties. 

Chandelier

Give a touch of elegance to your base with this adjustable Chandelier light. Raise and lower it to the perfect height. Time to fit a grand staircase in your 2x1. 

Electric Table Lamp

Settle down for the long dark night with this cozy Electric Table Lamp. Maybe get a buddy to read you a story.

Beanbag Chairs

Sit back and relax in these Beanbag Chairs. Comes in two varieties. 

Wallpapers

Interior design to the max with these unique and sparkly wallpapers. Included are a dark shaggy carpet, hexagonal wall tiles and painted gold stars ceiling decoration! 

PARALLEL PLAYER PROCESSING - PART 2

Threading Player Updates

Back in Jungle Update blog, I wrote about experimenting with batched processing of players on our servers. To summarize, I talked about how we needed to restructure code and start doing more operations in batches instead of on individual basis, and I showcased how it allowed us to leverage Burst and parallel job execution to speed up NoClip checks on the server.

This update I'm taking it a step further - I've converted more parts of our player update code to batch/pipeline form, which allowed to clearly see dependencies between processing stages. This, in turn, confirmed which parts we can try to process in parallel on worker threads. As a result, we can now offload a bunch of player-related logic over to worker threads, speeding up the main thread:

Right now it's gated behind UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 server variable, as an experimental mode. We've been running this on our EU Staging Server for a couple weeks to confirm that things are stable - and so far it's holding, but I don't have clear guarantees on how it will scale on high-population servers. In theory, thanks to these points:

• Faster server occlusion (more on that below)

• Avoiding redundant calculations of player state by using frame caches

• Use of managed threads for work offloading (sending entity snapshots and destroy messages have been converted)

I'm hoping that it'll allow the server to scale better with a higher player count and make player processing less of a bottleneck.

The plan is to roll it out gradually to release servers, while confirming server stability & performance - so far it's been developed in a lightly stress tested EU Staging, so I'm missing real world data. After roll-out is successful, I'll be able to identify further bottlenecks and work on expanding parallel processing.

Server Occlusion Optimizations

As part of the above rewrite I took a look at server occlusion, as I noticed that it has been running too many checks per frame. In addition to other problems, this caused server occlusion to eat up to 8ms in some cases, like bellow:

Having to process 10k occlusion queries for 350 players seems to be excessive, even if it eventually boils down to only 500 paths to check.

I've reworked the relevant code to benefit from the following improvements when UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 is enabled:

• We now deduplicate occlusion queries - if player A and player B want to check for visibility of each other, it's enough to just check A->B

• We run occlusion queries in parallel

• We cache results of occlusion queries for the duration of a frame, allowing us to skip them throughout the rest of the frame

I'm hoping that the gains will scale with the player count and become substantial once we're testing with 350+ players.

Going Forward

The rewrite of player update allows us to see more clearly how the execution and data flow, but it's lacking further optimizations(aware of 1 bottleneck) and tuning (controlling worker batch sizes). My plan is to use the new telemetry to guide where to focus efforts as I continue to expand UsePlayerUpdateJobs further. I currently don't see a specific end in sight, as the more is converted, the more opportunities to capitalize on data/execution patterns we get.

If things go well for UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 during this patch, it's likely the mode will be promoted to level 1, and a new experimental stage will begin.

ENCRYPTION CHANGES CONTINUED

As mentioned in last patches devblog, we are going ahead with requiring a minimum encryption level of 2 on servers that wish to be considered 'secure' and appear on the Rust Client server browser.

As a reminder, encryption level 2 is the default configuration for Rust Dedicated Servers and as a result the vast majority of server owners do not need to take action. For those that do, you will need to update your server.encryption convar to 2 and restart your server.

Additionally, we are going ahead with the removal of the server.secure convar. As previously mentioned, any insecure servers will now need to pass the '-insecure' parameter on server startup instead.

SAVE THE DATE - TWITCH DROPS

September 20th-30th 

Rust Kingdoms 3 returns bigger and better! Watch for socials to see the lineup and what drops you can collect!

Head to https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect to sync your Twitch and Steam accounts.

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