Scrap Helicopter is here!

We’re just two weeks from the big update and the team is making great strides on various projects. We also have a brand new air vehicle making its way in!

Our update preview stream goes live at 3pm EST. Stay tuned to @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Scrap Transport Helicopter

After making its way onto the staging branch late last week, the newest vehicle to take to the skies of Rust, the Scrap Transport Helicopter, is seeing some improvements this week. Along with fixing some mounting positions for the pilot and copilot, Helk has made it so the copilot can use weapons. He’s also added the ability to repair, fixed some weird no clip issues, and added server gibs. 

As you may recall, the Scrap Helicopter is a larger air vehicle which has two seats in the front and a whole bunch of room in the back for players to pile in. It has 2500 hp and runs on Low Grade Fuel. It’s currently not spawning around the map by default, but is expected to be live in the game for the next update on September 5th. Stay tuned for more details on this exciting new vehicle as we approach the new month.

Debug camera improvements

Andre has made some significant improvements to the debug camera. Although this is only used by moderators, developers, and content creators, it is great to have a bit more control over this feature. Here are the details:

• R reset camera

• Q/E move vertically

• Z/Y/C and +/- control zoom

• Arrow keys control roll

• Disabled inventory and crafting menus when in debug camera

• Added debugcamera_save and debugcamera_load console commands

Optimizations

Performance improvements continues to be a priority for the team at Facepunch. This week we’re seeing forward progress on multiple fronts. Along with the instancing mentioned below, the team has been improving texture streaming and applying some miscellaneous changes and trade offs for testing purposes. 

There’s also been work on IL2CPP which stands to have some notable performance improvements. All this, coupled with the HDRP branch progress, stands to have the game be optimized at a level we’ve never seen before in the near future.

Instancing

Optimizations in the form of instancing are being worked on this week. GPU instancing allows for a client to render multiple instances of the same mesh at one time, drastically reducing the calls required to load a scene. This was added to terrain, tools, and various other materials this week. Unfortunately, the terrain changes had to be reverted due to some issues. Nevertheless, these changes stand to improve performance and reduce hitches, especially when loading new areas of the map.

Vehicles 

Bill continues his work on the upcoming modular vehicles. This week he’s completed the basic framework for the engine, seating, and storage modules. He’s got some modules actually working, and made it so the flatbed module spawns storage. He’s also got it so seat modules now add mount points to the base vehicle. Although some work is still needed on actually getting the player to sit, this is some excellent headway on the project.

No word on exactly when these will make it into the game. That said, once they do, players of Rust will be able to navigate the terrain in ways never before possible.

Instruments

Thai continues his work on the instruments branch. Along with tweaking the textures on the Trumpet this week, he’s implemented the first work in progress version of the Bass. As you may recall from previous weeks, there are a slew of instruments being added to Rust, including: 

Comp branch

Rohan continues his work on the ‘comp’ branch. After adding a Potentiometer last week, he’s set a flag for when it’s allowing electricity to pass through. He’s also made it so 0 resistance isn’t allowed on the Potentiometer. Finally, he’s added support for notification directly to players and teams.

This body of work, although still a bit ambiguous, stands to include some sizable changes to electricity and base protection. We’ll keep you posted as more comes to light.

Ignitable branch

Adam is working on a new branch called ‘ignitable.’ Although it’s not exactly clear what this will entail, work appears to be focusing on the basics of igniting and extinguishing things. Along with the basics, rates, and flags for this, he’s added a temporary interaction menu with options to ignite and extinguish for easier testing.

Other stuff

• Various work on power lines and electrical wires.

• Miscellaneous garbage collection improvements (reduce stutters)

• Simplified "perf" convar (1=FPS, 2=frame time, 3=memory, 4=everything)

• Set fog/smoke overlay to ignore parent canvas group so that disabling the hud doesn't let you see through smoke.

• ItemModConsume now takes pending health into account when checking < health requirement

• Clean ups for when an item is ent killed

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