https://youtu.be/yjTUf9VT4q8

At Bossa Studios we love taking risks and making stuff that no one dares to do in order to create great original experiences for players. Worlds Adrift was an ambitious undertaking for us: a community crafted MMO built on freedom and player agency with multiplayer physics, set in a huge world. We are proud of what we achieved with the game since development began five years ago out of a humble game jam.

We are immensely grateful for every Traveller that’s come to experience this community crafted world. However, Worlds Adrift just hasn’t reached the level of popularity it needs to continue. The challenges that came with our ambitious project meant that all our work went into making the game work rather than making it the experience we wanted it to be. As a result we failed at making a game that could capture the imaginations of millions. Creating an MMO like Worlds Adrift is a huge financial commitment and unfortunately the game is just no longer commercially viable.

What does the end of Worlds Adrift mean for its community?

Bossa Studios will be continuing as a developer and publisher of games, but Worlds Adrift is coming to a close. To provide a special experience in the game’s final months, all the cosmetic items in the in-game shop will be given out to every player. Additionally, Worlds Adrift Founder Captains will receive a free copy of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread as a thanks for joining this journey, and to give a glimpse into the kinds of experiences we’re looking to create going forward. Founder Captains’ names will also be immortalised on the game’s website, which will remain live as a tribute to the world we’ve built together.

Worlds Adrift will not be sailing quietly into the night. We will host an End of the World event which will be live streamed on Twitch and will feature an AMA with the team. The exact date and details of this event will be announced here and on our other community channels (Twitter, Facebook, Steam Forum and Discord) soon.


We know you’ll have questions, so please take a look at our extensive Q&A below.  If you can’t find the answer to your question there, then please contact us.


We’ve really appreciated all your feedback on Worlds Adrift throughout development and we’d love your ongoing support with our unannounced titles. Our Bossa Studios Creator Club is a group where like-minded and also not-so-like-minded individuals help us make the very best games we can, through surveys, playtests and more. Anyone can join the Creator Club and you can find more details on how to do so here.

Thank you all for joining us on this incredible journey,

The Worlds Adrift Team.

BLIGHT 2.0

• Improvements to telegraphing:
  • Made the Blight screen overlay transparent when looking away from the centre of the storm to make it clearer which direction to travel in to get out.
  • If you can see particles you're at risk of destruction (you're near the destruction radius)
  • Destruction VFX will last longer. Now it will fade to black over 7.5s and 'dissolve' over 2.5s. Colliders should also be disabled halfway through the dissolving process.
  • New lightning VFX to make the Blight look more dangerous
  • Blight will now turn on if the server hits 75% time dilation for 30 seconds and disable when it gets to 85% time dilation for 30 seconds
  • Blight is now visible from 6km away
  • The Blight will now smoothly fade out when it disappears. Also, it's now more visibly windy in weather walls and inside the Blight!
• Improvements to Blight logic:

• Initial Blight position is no longer based on weather cell positions but on a K-Means cluster analysis of the priorities and positions of all of the entities on the FSIM
• Blight will now cancel if it hasn't fully activated but the server has recovered
• While active, Blight will now continually refine its position to move towards the highest priority entities in its radius. It has a maximum speed that varies based on time dilation. So the worse the FSIM is performing the more aggressively the Blight will chase ships!
• Blight will fully retarget (analysing all entities) every 30s to avoid destroying a ship in its entirety when there is a more important one somewhere else
• Blight will attempt to retarget if enough stuff has been destroyed.
• Below 25% time dilation, entity destruction cooldown will smoothly get lower, tending towards 0.
• Docked ships will be not be consumed by the Blight within an hour of their construction.
• Destruction priority is now based on the following:
  • More colliders = more expensive
  • Manually determined importance to the player
  • Entities attached to ships that have registered revivers will have double the player importance (so lower destruction priority)
  • Only entities that are 'dynamic' (meaning they have physics) should be considered
  • Metal scrap and atlas shards will now be cleaned up
  • Nothing should be destroyed unless it has been 'logged in' for at least 2 minutes
  • Entities in the Blight will be destroyed every 10s by default but this can be overridden per entity type.

KNOWLEDGE REVAMP

• Revamped knowledge tree to include various set schematics previously found on islands. These are categorised into branches that reflect what they are used for, such as exploring or shipbuilding.
• Scanning an island or island object displays the number of databanks still to scan on the island.
• Knowledge nodes will be automatically unlocked if you had previously found and learned the schematic.
• Knowledge gained is now displayed in the same fashion as gaining resources.
• Removed Knowledge from scanning every object on islands, except databanks..
• Scan UI has been revamped and moved from the bottom left corner and is now much more clear.

SHIP STORAGE REFACTOR

• Deleting offline ships from server memory Improving server response.
• Saving ships to a per deployment cloud storage.
• Refactor the way ship/reviver/player are linked using ShipReviverBookeeping unique authority
• Added feedback giving Reviver lost reason when online. Customer Service will have access to that information and can use it during ticket handling.
• Customer service has a greater capacity to help in the event of the loss of a ship, however, it is not guaranteed.

LOGOUT REVAMP

• Ship logout flow now has a new design.
  • Logout has been updated to differentiate between Logout and Exit game especially when the player has a reviver attached to the ship.
  • The logout button will keep your character in-game until the ship logs out completely if you are the last player in-game with a reviver attached to the ship.
  • The Exit button will log your character out whilst your ship will stay in the world for some time. (30s in Pve, 3 minutes in PvP)
  • Any interaction with the ship during logout (except players logging out) will interrupt the logout sequence.
  • If a player logouts or exits while standing on a ship they are not attached to, they will respawn either in their own personal reviver or in the closest ancient respawner.

NOTABLE CONTENT AND FEATURES

• Marauder Chests loot adjusted to be more valuable, they really liked hoarding their quality 10 metals.

NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES

Changes

• Fixing ship parts not interactable by relying on hierarchy state instead of accumulate state, and checking whether it’s the root before trying to set the root to none. This should fix the helm bug.Added shipyard placement feedback.
• Give marauder compass item health state.
• Added logic where a ship will ask whether it should approach or not to the shipyard instead of approaching regardless of the shipyard state. Shipyard can refuse which will display a message to the owners of the ship saying they cant approach.
• Changed logic between ship and shipyard slightly, so you can only dock on your own or abandoned shipyards
• Update the new Bossa NTP server.
• Maintenance should kick player correctly
• Added range feedback to Salvager and Repair tools
• Added range feedback to Ship Building tool
• Impact damage on the ship was removed
• Patch Notes: increased sail HP, increased gear duration, lifter weight increased, rebalanced some food recipe costs, bandage healing increased.
• Increased Rhegus greaves climbing speed
• If a client crashed or player closes the application, materials are returned that are on player's multi-tool crafting slots.
• Simplified and reduced the length of various tutorial prompts
• Tool reticles now have unique icons, and animate and look good no matter screen resolution or UI size.
• Add a cooldown overlay on buff icon.
• Added skip tutorial option at character creation time.
• Added Rarity display to Stash
• added select server text above server select
• changed logo colour to white
• Increased knowledge gains from salvaging schematics.
• Procedural schematic loot drop rarity now better matches the biome you are in, so now the Badlands will have significantly higher chance of Exotic schematics.
• Significantly increased drop rate of potion mats by around 4x in the Badlands, but also a bit in the Expanse and Remnants.
• Minimum metal and wood quality in the Badlands is now 7!
• Added a 2s timer on enabling the confirm button when taking an action that would cause you to unregister from your reviver. Also added this timer to skipping the tutorial.

Fixes

• Fixed the duping bug linked to Delete action in inventory.
• Fixing one of the barrel variants being disabled...
• Fixed the marauder compass doesn't drop off when attached ship part is destroyed.
• Bonus bug fix - Potentially fixing an exception that completely stops the UI from working…
• Fixing an error popup that appears when unlocking nodes with connected bonus nodes
• Stash UI bugs.
• Fixing missing decks crazy race condition!
• Randomizing death clouds destruction to avoid all parts being destroyed at once.
• fix to respawn SFX being in 2d in certain situations
• Fix to respawn sounds being 2D is some instances
• clipping fix on the male fugitive torso
• Made default wind direction nicer for main menu prettiness
• added hair to the store masks
• Barrels should now always spawn properly!
• Fix to Ship panels z-fighting
• Fixed the bug where if a player learned new schematics that had no cipher slots unlocked even they have them unlocked in the knowledge tree
• Fixed issue where if the user tries to enter the game on Offline Mode, it would remain on a black screen forever.
• Fix the bug where schematics have more cipher slots then the unlocked slot number.

NOTABLE KNOWN ISSUES

• Validating message for Wings can be wrong when trying to place wing on deck.
• If a player is blocked from crafting at a crafting station, they will be prevented from crafting at any crafting station they place subsequently. They must either complete crafting or clear obstruction preventing an item being crafted
• The Capulca engine does not update to have the correct number of cipher slots
• The schematic counter is inaccurate
• A player will be unable to interact with their marauder compass for 10 minutes. This happens if it is placed on a ship and only for the 1st 10 minutes after logging in

(Credit to Neon Sirius from the Official Worlds Adrift Discord for the screenshot \m/)

PTS Issues

On Friday we pushed the code we've been working on for the past couple of months to the PTS and we encountered the minor issue of most players not being able to login at all! This was highly likely given the fact that we've almost completely rewritten the entire login/logout system. We didn't however expect the issues to be this drastic as obviously we hadn't seen this during our QA process.

Initial observations indicate that logins work fine at first but then abruptly stop working completely. We can see this in the log history, green bars are successful logins, red bars are failures:



We suspect what's happening is a concurrency issue (such as a deadlock) that only happens when there are enough players logging in at the same time, but we need to be sure of diagnosing the issue so before we push a new build to the PTS we're adding as many diagnosis tools as we can think of:

Profiling the number of messages sent between various systems. We're seeing more in the queue than we would expect, in particular on PTS. We don't think this is causing the problem, but it definitely is an issue.
Initial profiling of message sending rates doesn't seem to be excessive, which indicates that we're not processing messages fast enough so the queues get too big. To figure out if this is the case we've added profiling to determine how long each message takes to process.
We're adding a system heartbeat to determine what is the last line of code executed before everything freezes up.
Improve logging so that failures appear as errors not info.
Added a debug command to spam login attempts.

We're hoping to get new builds to the PTS with various changes soon, it's unlikely we'll have a potential fix for the login issue unless the debug command to spam logins lets us reproduce it, so we're going to need your help to break the server once again.

If you'd like minute to minute updates on the status of the PTS the best place to look will be on our official Discord server: https://discord.gg/worldsadrift

Fly safe (on the main servers…)
Dave

PTS - Update 30 Patch Notes

BLIGHT 2.0

• Improvements to telegraphing:
  • Made the Blight screen overlay transparent when looking away from the centre of the storm to make it clearer which direction to travel in to get out.
  • If you can see particles you're at risk of destruction (you're near the destruction radius)
  • Destruction VFX will last longer. Now it will fade to black over 7.5s and 'dissolve' over 2.5s. Colliders should also be disabled halfway through the dissolving process.
  • New lightning VFX to make the Blight look more dangerous
  • Blight will now turn on if the server hits 75% time dilation for 30 seconds and disable when it gets to 85% time dilation for 30 seconds
  • Blight is now visible from 6km away
  • Initial Blight position is no longer based on weather cell positions but on a K-Means cluster analysis of the priorities and positions of all of the entities on the FSIM
  • Blight will now cancel if it hasn't fully activated but the server has recovered
  • While active, Blight will now continually refine its position to move towards the highest priority entities in its radius. It has a maximum speed that varies based on time dilation. So the worse the FSIM is performing the more aggressively the Blight will chase ships!
  • Blight will fully retarget (analysing all entities) every 30s to avoid destroying a ship in its entirety when there is a more important one somewhere else
  • Blight will attempt to retarget if enough stuff has been destroyed.
  • The Blight will now smoothly fade out when it disappears. Also, it's now more visibly windy in weather walls and inside the Blight!
• Destruction priority is now based on the following:
  • More colliders = more expensive
  • Manually determined importance to the player
  • Entities attached to ships that have registered revivers will have double the player importance (so lower destruction priority)
  • Only entities that are 'dynamic' (meaning they have physics) should be considered
  • Metal scrap and atlas shards will now be cleaned up
  • Nothing should be destroyed unless it has been 'logged in' for at least 2 minutes
  • Entities in the Blight will be destroyed every 10s by default but this can be overridden per entity type.
• Shipyards with docked ships will no longer be consumed by the Blight for 1 hour.
• Below 25% time dilation, entity destruction cooldown will smoothly get lower, tending towards 0.
• Fixing ship parts not interactable by relying on hierarchy state instead of accumulate state, and checking whether its the root before trying to set the root to none. This should fix the helm bug.

KNOWLEDGE REVAMP

• Revamped knowledge tree to include various set schematics previously found on islands. These are categorised into branches that reflect what they are used for, such as exploring or shipbuilding.
• Scanning an island or island object displays the number of databanks still to scan on the island.
• Knowledge nodes will be automatically unlocked if you had previously found and learned the schematic.
• Knowledge gained is now displayed in the same fashion as gaining resources.
• Removed Knowledge from scanning every object on islands, except databanks..
• Scan UI has been revamped and moved from the bottom left corner and is now much more clear.

SHIP STORAGE REFACTOR

• Deleting offline ships from server memory Improving server response.
• Saving ships to a per deployment cloud storage.
• Refactor the way ship/reviver/player are linked using ShipReviverBookeeping unique authority
• Added feedback giving Reviver lost reason when online. Customer Service will have access to that information and can use it during ticket handling.
• Customer service can now restore your ship entirely based on ticket requests and log history.

LOGOUT REVAMP

• Ship logout flow now has a new design.
  • Logout has been updated to differentiate between Logout and Exit game especially when the player has a reviver attached to the ship.
  • The logout button will keep your character in-game until the ship logs out completely if you are the last player in-game with a reviver attached to the ship.
  • The Exit button will log your character out whilst your ship will stay in the world for some time. (30s in Pve, 3 minutes in PvP)
  • Any interaction with the ship during logout (except players logging out) will interrupt the logout sequence.
  • If a player logouts or exits while standing on a ship they are not attached to, they will respawn to the closest ancient respawner.

NOTABLE CONTENT AND FEATURES

• Marauder Guitar
• Some secret shop items

NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES

Changes

• Added shipyard placement feedback.
• Give marauder compass item health state.
• Added logic where a ship will ask whether it should approach or not to the shipyard instead of approaching regardless of the shipyard state. Shipyard can refuse which will display a message to the owners of the ship saying they cant approach.
• Changed logic between ship and shipyard slightly, so you can only dock on your own or abandoned shipyards
• Update the new Bossa NTP server.
• Maintenance should kick player correctly
• Added range feedback to Salvager and Repair tools
• Added range feedback to Ship Building tool
• Impact damage on the ship was removed
• Patch Notes: increased sail HP, increased gear duration, lifter weight increased, rebalanced some food recipe costs, bandage healing increased.
• Increased Rhegus greaves climbing speed
• If a client crashed or player closes the application, materials are returned that are on player's multi-tool crafting slots.
• Simplified and reduced the length of various tutorial prompts
• Tool reticles now have unique icons, and animate and look good no matter screen resolution or UI size.
• Add a cooldown overlay on buff icon.
• Added skip tutorial option at character creation time.
• Added Rarity display to Stash
• added select server text above server select
• changed logo colour to white

Fixes

• Fixed the duping bug linked to Delete action in inventory.
• Fixing one of the barrel variants being disabled...
• Fixed the marauder doesn't drop off when attached ship part is destroyed.
• Bonus bug fix - Potentially fixing an exception that completely stops the UI from working…
• Fixing an error popup that appears when unlocking nodes with connected bonus nodes
• Stash UI bugs.
• Fixing missing decks crazy race condition!
• Randomizing death clouds destruction to avoid all parts being destroyed at once.
• fix to respawn SFX being in 2d in certain situations
• Fix to respawn sounds being 2D is some instances
• clipping fix on the male fugitive torso
• Fugitive store outfit added to project, male and female
• Made default wind direction nicer for main menu prettiness
• added hair to the store masks
• Barrels should now always spawn properly!
• Fix to Ship panels z-fighting
• Fixed the bug where if a player learned new schematics that had no cipher slots unlocked even they have them unlocked in the knowledge tree
• Fixed issue where if the user tries to enter the game on Offline Mode, it would remain on a black screen forever.
• Fix the bug where schematics have more cipher slots then the unlocked slot number

NOTABLE KNOWN ISSUES

• Wings cannot be placed onto ship frames
• If a player is blocked from crafting at a crafting station, they will be prevented from crafting at any crafting station they place subsequently. They must either complete crafting or clear obstruction preventing an item being crafted
• Players will be thrown into the air after crafting a ship frame
• The Capulca engine does not update to have the correct number of cipher slots
• The schematic counter is inaccurate
• A player will be unable to interact with their marauder compass for 10 minutes. This happens if it is placed on a ship and only for the 1st 10 minutes after logging in

(Screenshot courtesy of гʌꬶѻπγгє on the official Worlds Adrift Discord (https://discord.gg/worldsadrift)

Greetings Travellers,

For my last Tech Tuesday, I described how we are going to save all of the offline ships in the world and then delete them all in a subsequent update.

Well, it turns out that as of late the PvE deployment, in particular, has been really struggling with the sheer amount of ships in the world so strange bugs such as ships not appearing have started to happen much more frequently.

Due to this, we've decided to bring forward the work of deleting all of the offline ships and respawning them when registered players login. I completed the work to delete offline ships today and the results are even better than we expected, so here are some graphs!

First, here's the graph showing the number of entities in the world:



It peaks at 3 million entities as it takes a while for SpatialOS to load the massive snapshot. Over the course of an hour, we save all of the ships and then delete them hence the linear drop in the number of entities. We end up at just 43 thousand entities, an absolutely massive reduction.

This has had a huge impact on the CPU usages of our servers!



Firstly, the resting CPU has decreased pretty much linearly with the reduction in the number of entities. This is surprising to us because profiling showed that the offline ships weren't directly doing a lot of work. What we think is happening is that they were indirectly causing everything to be more expensive just by being in lists of things to process as well as making garbage collection more expensive.

The other thing to note is that the CPU spikes from taking snapshots are effectively gone. We suspected that these spikes may have been translating to large in-game lag spikes, so fingers crossed there will be a big improvement there.

There is something quite mysterious going on here though. About 10 minutes after the last ship is destroyed, CPU usage shoots up temporarily. We think this may be explained by the next graph - memory usage:



Strangely, memory usage initially falls, but then begins to increase again as more and more ships get deleted. Then, once it reaches its previous peak we get the huge CPU spike and the memory usage drops. My theory is that the heap is massively fragmented at that point and it reaches a threshold at which the Java Virtual Machine decides to defragment the memory. I would expect to see garbage collection CPU usage increase at that point, but it doesn't, however, that could just be due to profiling only measuring the sweep phase but not the defrag phase of garbage collection.



So what does this mean for latency? Here's a graph of the current PvE deployment:



You can ignore the green line, which is player latency, but the next line below shows the latency of the worst server. It's 180ms which is pretty crazy considering the machines are located in the same data center! Here's the new deployment with ships being removed:



Granted there are no actual players on this deployment, but you can actually see the physics server latency dropping all the way down to 50ms as the ships are removed, and no sign of that enormous CPU spike! It's going to be really interesting to see how this change impacts player latency.

Overall we expect this should fix a lot of technical issues with the game, as well as having other cool benefits in terms of the new features based on the ship saving (blueprints) and other random things like it only takes 2 minutes to clean the world snapshot now so maintenance should also be much faster!

Fly safe!

Dave

(Screenshot by Spacebar Jazz on the Worlds Adrift Discord (https://discord.gg/worldsadrift))

Knowledge And Scanning Revamp

Update 30 will bring the first big changes to scanning and progression in Worlds Adrift.

First things first; scanning has been heavily reworked. We have removed the need to scan every individual object in the game. They no longer give any knowledge but their description text remains. From now on knowledge is primarily gained from databanks, lore pages and salvaging schematics.

Another quality of life change we’ve made is a new cursor icon when holding your scanner and it will change colour to highlight when something is in range to scan.



These features have also been added to the other tools such as salvage and shipbuilding tool.

We’ve also added the ability to “complete” islands. This will become more substantial in the future but the initial feature will let you know how many databanks are on an island and how many you have found.



As you may have noticed the scanning UI has also been revamped. It will now be far more prominent on the right hand side of the screen rather than tucked away in the bottom corner.



The next part of the revamp is the knowledge tree. From now on you will gain most of your schematics by progressing down the various branches, rather than relying on RNG from island chests.

So let me introduce you to the new knowledge tree.



Upon learning Shipbuilding you will have many new branches to choose from. They have been based on various aspects of the game and will unlock schematics related to those areas.

This means that those schematics can no longer be found in the world, and if you have already learned those schematics they will automatically be unlocked in the knowledge tree once you reach them. There are still, of course, many schematics to be found out in the world, some being among the rarest and most difficult to find.



The intention behind these changes is making your progression through the game about what you choose rather than looting chests and hoping for the schematic you want. You can pick what a branch to specialise on or unlock a little bit from each one. This also gives new players a better sense of direction and points them to the many options and playstyles the game has. Eventually you will be able to unlock the entire knowledge tree so it should satisfy any completionists out there!

Greetings Travellers,

Worlds Adrift hasn't been wiped for quite some time. On the PVP that's not really a big deal because people blow each other up, but on the PVE server it means this:



Yup, that's a lot of ships, specifically offline ships…

Recently we put in place optimisations to reduce the impact of offline ships on the servers, but it's impossible to completely remove all impact, in particular from the system that periodically saves the state of the entire world to disk every 10 minutes in case the servers die.

Here's what the server load looks like:



Every 10 minutes there is an enormous spike as the entire world gets saved. This is probably manifesting as lag in game

In order to improve this situation we're taking steps to completely remove offline ships from the world. The first step is to start saving ships to a separate server. While we've had the ability to save sand spawn ships for debug purpose for a long time, a lot of important information wasn't saved such as inventory, revivers, dyes, marauder compasses etc.

We would have done this sooner, but as covered in recent blog posts it's difficult to do such a large change while also adding new features to the game.

We have now upgraded this system to save all the required information to spawn your ships back into the world exactly as they were. In update 30 we will save every ship in the world to a new server and begin testing that these ships are respawning as intended. This will also give customer support the ability to respawn ships lost due to bugs.

In future updates, we will remove all of the offline ships from the world and begin respawning them when required. We're hoping this will make a huge difference to server performance.

Now, while this probably will make some difference to your gameplay experience, it's not exactly a flashy new feature, but it does enable something pretty awesome - the ship blueprints system! That's right, no longer will you have to spend hours rebuilding sunken ships, you'll just have to farm the mats and click a button! Ok, maybe a few buttons... Ships are complicated beasts and we want you to have the options to prevent parts spawning, swap out the metals etc. But that's for another day.

Fly safe!
Dave

(Credit to 'Keebs' on the official Worlds Adrift Discord for the screenshot!)

Hi there,

Since its very inception, Worlds Adrift has been at the cutting edge, innovating in quite a few areas at the same time. We released the game to players very early in development, to test and co-develop the design and technology of the game that were unique in so many ways, and therefore rather unknown to us all.

Worlds Adrift is often compared against higher budget games, and given the size of the team and resources available, we’re immensely proud and humbled by this. However, despite our best efforts in delivering a game that provides hundreds of hours of unique gameplay, a social space for all to share and a whole lot of love, Worlds Adrift hasn’t yet achieved the commercial success we wanted or hoped for. It’s clear if you look at player figures over the course of the project they’ve been relatively stable and consistent but growth is something that remains elusive. While we’re not entirely motivated by commercial success, however, we also cannot ignore the fact that Worlds is an expensive game to develop and maintain.

Worlds Adrift’s development has been hurt by some key technical issues since the beginning. We weren’t ignorant of this but believed in the project and team enough to meet these challenges head-on. Recently, this was exacerbated by a fundamental change in the underlying spatialOS architecture that has left us stuck on an older version and moving onto the new one would require rewriting more than 40% of our code base -- the break in retro compatibility in SpatialOS is such that we would have to rewrite the server-side code in a different language!

We’ve tried a whole bunch of things to give Worlds Adrift an extra push and as I have written in previous posts (and Tech Tuesdays) we have too often prioritized features at the expense of stability and reliability of the core components of the game. This explains our recent shift of focus to fixing revivers and ship blueprints for example. Both of those will improve the game experience but also improve the guarantees around the persistence of your ship.

We’ve been very reactive to the community’s suggestions through dozen of constant updates (we’re now closing in on Update 30 plus non-numbered hotfixes) with features requested by the players such as PvE servers; we have a public roadmap with every feature and fix explained and prioritised; we put a huge amount of time in discussing every upcoming update with the players; and yet we don’t seem to be progressing towards the inflection point for the game if the feedback we get and the game’s reviews are anything to go by.

Thus we have decided to refocus on the development of the game in a more deliberate way while deprioritising resources dedicated to features, community and social media. This means you will not see new large scale gameplay features such as territory control and skywhales until these stability and performance issues are fully resolved. We will still be working on quality of life improvements especially if they are linked to the aforementioned core systems, but they will take the backseat to the technical clean-up we’re now embarking upon.

Going forward, the improvements we will be making will not be flashy but they are necessary. With this new approach, we will be dialling back commercial activity for Worlds Adrift and will have less overall bandwidth to engage in communication across all channels. The team members who remain on those channels (official forums, Discord, Twitter) will be focused on support and live-ops -- we’re committed to providing help if our players require it -- but otherwise will focus on the priorities we believe are key to take the game forward in the right way.

Stay tuned for Tech Tuesdays and keep an eye on the roadmap for further news and updates, as we’ll keep on informing everyone of our priorities for the development of Worlds Adrift.

Sylvain Cornillon - CTO

Hi, Sylvain here, CTO at Bossa Studios, dropping in to give you quick summary of what we are tackling right now.

As some of you may have noticed if you read the forums, the Worlds Adrift team is currently undertaking some big technical upgrades to quite a few of the core systems. Whilst these upgrades will bring significant quality of improvements for players; they aren’t without their challenges. The issue with these systems is that they are usually touching a lot of the game code which was initially implemented years ago and more often than not for older versions of SpatialOS too. Code that is as fragile as it is essential. As a result, any changes made need to be scrutinised and implemented with a prudent mindset. We have planned to tackle these systems for a while, however, other features/fixes in Worlds Adrift’s release schedule took priority.. So, what we have at the moment is a few of the key systems of the game mostly working but not being as stable or as transparent as you, or we, would like.

One of those systems is the revivers and login/logout procedure. Until now, this system has been functioning most of the time, however, we have been made aware of edge-case reports that some players have lost their ship after logging back into the game. As I have stated before, in the early alpha and closed beta days of the game, losing your ship was an annoyance but due to the lower time investment, it wasn’t a complete game breaker for the majority of people.. Also, there were and still are multiple legitimate ways to lose you ship after logout; for example, someone might have stowed away on your ship and destroyed it after you logged out, one of your shipmates might have logged in while you were away, lost the ship somehow and not told anybody and that doesn’t even take into account environmental hazards due to the logout timer. This made it easier to underestimate the size of the issue while prioritizing the work.

Since then, the game has evolved and we cannot ignore the fact that losing your ship without explanation has always been but is now more than ever a huge disappointment for anybody playing Worlds Adrift. So what are we doing about it?

The link between a player, their ship and their reviver was previously implemented in a series of bidirectional links between the game entities. If at any point these links got out of sync and one of the systems failed to find the others, it sometimes would default to severing the link and respawning you at the nearest respawn chamber. A consequence of this could be anything from a minor inconvenience like having to travel back to your ship to something as serious as your ship not logging back in at all. To update and improve this system, we now use a centralized authority, which will be updated every time you link to a reviver, or a reviver is removed from a ship, etc. One of the many upsides to this is that we can now inform you via in-game messaging if any operation fails and will also keep a history as to why you lost your ship link. This should allow us to make things clearer but crucially, allow us to recover more easily when something does go wrong.

One of the major pain points we have been hearing with some regularity is that lack of assurance that your ship was safely and successfully logged out. We are reworking the logout sequence to guarantee that if you choose the slow logout, and you get out of the game, you ship will logout safely with you.

When these changes eventually go live, the logout timer will increase to match the ship logout timer. This functionality will be consistent on both PvE and PvP servers, however, the values of the timer may vary. Any enemy contact will still stop the log out as it currently does. The intention of this is to give players definitive knowledge that their ship is safe and they don’t need to worry about it. As always, feedback on these purposed changes is welcome! Please let us know on our usual channels or in the comments what you think.

These changes are a key part of our strategy to improve stability and ship persistence, hence the name of our next update; Smooth Sailing. Keep an eye out for these changes when they make their way to a PTS near you!

May your sailing be smooth!

(Thumbnail courtesy of FearlessJake on the official Discord)

Greetings Travellers,

Hope you've had a lovely week and are enjoying the new startings of the store as well as the slightly less common Blight! More to come.
We launched a hotfix! Patchnotes - HERE

The store WHY and HOW explained - HERE

Tech Tuesday: What's Hot? - HERE

• Network optimizations and other assorted QOL things
• Ship Imposters
• Added a system to make messages in the server more reliable
• Working on the new player login pipeline to make it more reliable
• Island completion task design
• Blight balancing
• Collider optimisation on some ship parts
• Knowledge tree redesign work
• Using new ship reviver bookkeeping system:
  • Ship login/logout refactor
  • Player logout refactor
  • Registering reviver refactor
• Inventory item move/swap logic rework
• Resolving Assorted backend issue (migrating and inspecting one of our game database)

 

As always, see you in the skies!

Love,
J + WA Team