Status Report #001

I don’t know whether we’ll get an update out this week. We’re going to Seattle to Steam Dev Days . Please don’t take that to mean that we’re rich now so we’re abandoning Rust in favor of jetsetting around the world. We’re doing it for you guys! In the meantime, here’s some stuff that is important to us – that we will be working on and thinking about.

Sales and Online Players

Sales have been strong. Stronger than strong . We really have been knocked on our arses by sales. Our plan was to release the alpha on to Steam in a low-key way and slowly build up steam until the game was in a decent state. But our player counts have exploded our wildest dreams . So we’ve obviously felt a bit shell-shocked by the popularity explosion we’ve seen and it’s scrambled our plans a bit. We’ve had to work with GSP’s to bring more servers online – and make them more manageable via RCON and stuff. This is something we didn’t think we’d have to do for a while because we thought we’d only need about 10 servers. Then we had the DDOS issues – which has taken a week or two to get past (we’re still seeing residual attacks on individual servers/websites – but for the most part they seem to have subsided). So thanks to everyone that has joined us on our journey so far. We’re going to be working hard to help you justify spending that $20 on our early alpha game and hope you enjoy the progress we make over the coming year.

Cheating

Well over 1,000 people have been VAC banned from Rust for cheating. We have also done a lot of work on both the client and server to make some cheats impossible. That’s not to say that cheating is eradicated. That’ll never happen. Even if we somehow manage to totally stop software based cheats.. people will still be wrapping dental floss around their monitor to form a crude crosshair. But it should now be pretty clear and obvious to people that VAC is active and if you cheat you stand a good chance of being banned. So don’t. We have been looking at other cheat solutions. Things like Punkbuster don’t really appeal to us. We don’t like the idea of forcing you guys install a cheat client on your PC to play Rust. Especially since VAC is already installed and works just as well. There are serverside solutions like Fairfight – which do appeal.. but we’re not so sure of their effectiveness or accuracy. The last thing we want to do is ban legitimate hard working players. It’s an area we will continue to test and review.

Client Performance

It pains us to see people posting videos and screenshots of Rust with the grass turned off. They are obviously doing this for performance reasons – and if it gained us 20fps extra we’d turn it off too. Performance is something we’re keeping a close eye on and looking for opportunities to improve FPS at every turn.

Server Performance

It’s not something that most of you have probably noticed or even care about. 128 player servers run kind of great. 256 player servers are pushing it. 512 player servers are non existent (I don’t think Steam technically even supports them). Server performance is something we hope to work on and improve. The problems probably aren’t apparent when you join a freshly made server.. but once the server has