Witness the body horror that allows Rust players to look down and see their legs

Rust
(Image credit: Garry Newman)

It's fun to get a look at how the sausage is made in games, and Rust developer Garry Newman opened the doors to his butcher shop in a blog post today. The post reveals that Newman has wanted for years to let players look down in first-person and see their own legs while playing Rust, rather than traveling through the world as a disembodied camera in the same manner as most first-person games.

"We have a skeleton with the player model on it (which is what casts the localplayer shadow)," the post reads. "We want to show it, but we also want to manipulate the bones in a way that they don't conflict with the player's view. But if we do that the shadow would be all fucked."

The solution Newman finally came up with? Rendering a different model. "So what we do is basically copy the third person model (which creates the shadows) and manipulate the bones. The manipulation isn't anything complicated, it's just a case of tucking shit behind the camera," Newman writes.

Above: Gif made from video at Garry.tv

"There's a couple of extra things we have to do. When you're crouched and look down, we pull the viewmodel back so it doesn't clip through your knees."

While that solution does indeed look convincing from a first-person perspective (above), it's both funny and a little alarming to see what's happening behind the scenes to achieve it:

Above: Gif made from video at Garry.tv

As you can see, the player's shadow is intact and both it and their body will look perfectly normal to them, but "tucking shit behind the camera" technically turns the player into a weird stretched taffy monster. It's reminiscent of the disturbing gymnastics required to let players peer over cover in Crysis.

You can read the full post for more behind-the-scenes magic (there's a reason the models above don't show the player's arms) at Newman's blog. And while we're on the topic of Rust, we also learned this week that it'll release its first paid DLC next month, which will contain 10 new playable musical instruments.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Latest in Adventure
Inside
Limbo and Inside studio demands compensation from co-founder Dino Patti for alleged 'unauthorized use of Playdead's trademarks and copyrighted works'
Two characters sitting on a bench talking
Wanderstop review
Zoe showing off in front of Mio
Split Fiction review
Rusty Rabbit chomping a carrot like a cigar
Rusty Rabbit turns Yakuza's Kazuma Kiryu into a fluffy bunny
Pathologic 3 screenshot
Get ready to get weird in Pathologic 3: Quarantine, a free 'prologue chapter' about a young doctor looking for immortality in the world's most miserable town
A young woman's face bathed in light
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 review
Latest in News
Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.
Go ahead and complain the discounts aren't as steep as they used to be, but Steam just had its biggest year ever for seasonal sales
Valve Steam Deck OLED handheld PC
'The future of hardware at Valve is bright': Valve celebrates the success of Steam Deck and Steam OS
Key art of the videogame Lunacid, showing a pale, long haired knight in purple armor contemplating a purple, flaming sword surrounded by the different phases of the moon.
One of my favorite indie RPGs is getting a follow-up made with FromSoftware's 25-year-old Super Mario Maker for first person dungeon crawlers
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 image - Henry riding a pink and blue striped horse while holding a fish
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 now has Steam Workshop support, and of course one of the first mods lets you adjust the 'jiggle physics'
Still image of Bastion holding a bird, taken from Microsoft's Copilot for Gaming reveal trailer
Microsoft unveils Copilot for Gaming, an AI-powered 'ultimate gaming sidekick' that will let you talk to your console so you don't have to talk to your friends
Erenshor - A player and two simulated MMO party members stand on a plateau in front of a yellow landscape
This RuneScape-looking 'simulated MMORPG' has all the nostalgia without the drama because all the other 'players' are NPCs