Nov 9, 2018

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Greetings Wanderers of the vast and unknowable universe,

We released two hot fixes, how are you?

Community Council

Podcast

We are back with EPISODE 12 the Worlds Adrift Dev podcast, with Malford the Magnificent, LegendAry Luke and Jolly Julia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtIMnc7oGxQ

Topics we discuss:

Community Cloud Council - restructure, clarifying selection process.
Hotfixes this week: A duping exploit relying on latency has been fixed. / Performed an optimisation on ships to improve server performance.
Island Creator Winner
Answering Community Questions

Want us to answer your questions? Comment below and we will pick a few awesome ones to ask our next guest(s)!

We are now on iTunes and Spotify, so if you're enjoying the podcast give us a review to help us get heard!

Spotify: Clicky HERE!

iTunes: Clicky HERE!

Chat to us on Discord: discord.gg/worldsadrift

Like us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/worldsadrift/
Follow us on Twitter:
@WorldsAdrift

Luke - @eternz
Malford - @Malford_
Julia - @lady_jeanette

🔥 FLIGHT SCIENCE 🔥 Stream

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/332865006

What have the devs been up to this week?

Client optimisations are in, so lets see how much it helped and what I now have to fix ;) - Andy
Also this... Started work on a system to highlight things for tutorial and other such things - Andy

Overheating and Steam inventory integration for Stash items - Murillo
New lamp and bugfixing - Jack
Ship building tutorial - Tamas
Voice chat authentication and bugs - Ben
Fixed deployment tag (making doing maintenance easier) - Kexin
Cipher, split stack, customization feature/bug fixes - Kexin
Cipher balancing - Luke
Adding new metals - Luke
Setting up ship paint and clothing dye schematics and what parts can be painted - Luke
Designing better player interaction options - Luke
All the new hotness - Moster (new things)
New clothes - Rebecca
New cooking stuffs! - Malford
Discord Rich Presence, REST server issues, cipher icons - Maurizio
Tutorial improvements - Allan
Optimising server performance. Unjerking ships. - Dave

Happy Weekending, folks!

See you in the skies,

Julia + W.A. Team

Nov 2, 2018

⛵Captain's Log⛵ - Community Cloud Council 2.0

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Greetings Wanderers of the vast and unknowable universe,

As many of you have been buzzing about this, the new CCC selection is upon us.

Community Council

For those of you who missed the initial post you may find it here, but in a nutshell - the Council is a community focus group helping us get concise feedback across the board as we make decisions in development and represent and represent community sentiment. You want to build a bigger, better community for yourself and your friends!

We have looked into various online voting platforms and it’s looking like with enough dedication one can easily cheat the system.

The CCC members sign NDAs, and Herb and the devs can contact them in regards to questions they have. Examples from the last CCC sessions: PvE server, feature implementations, player-facing bug prioritisation. This means you have to be an active player.

Sometimes Herb will ask “should we do a thing?”, sometimes tell you “hey, we’re doing a thing.” and we will have a short period of very passionate debate from some CCC representatives, better preparing us for bringing the new changes to the wider community, and knowing what problems to anticipate.

Basic Requirements:

60+ hours of gameplay
Of good community character regardless of in-game playstyle
Very well familiarized with game mechanics and lore
Understanding of fellow player needs and desires when it comes to the game
All in-game playstyles are welcome
No recent in-game bans

Good to have:

If you are already a part of the Feedback/Playtest channels on discord ran by Tania is certainly a huge bonus
Previous game community council experience
Managing Worlds Adrift related content is a huge bonus (e.g.: fan pages, videos, streams, podcasts, etc.)

What will be required of a CCC member:

Council members will have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement
Continue to play the game frequently and represent the community sentiment
Be comfortable voicing their opinions at Community Panel meetings/calls in a professional manner
Helpful to new players out and hopefully in-game (unless provoked)

Email me on http://mailto:Community@bossastudios.com or respond to this thread with nominations. Response deadline is the 16th of November.

A panel of Bossians will do an initial screening of all candidates. Final 10 candidates will be selected at random on stream.

Podcast

We are back with EPISODE 11 the Worlds Adrift Dev podcast, with Malford, Low Energy Moster and Julia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqs5nj5vZWs

Topics we discuss:

Update 29 feature lock pending
Stack splitting, and the work going on right now!
Halloween stuff - Orange dye, Pumpkins, Jack-o-Lantern's, Pumpkin Spice Curry, Witch's Brew and Horns of Olk
Community Cloud Council - restructure and voting

Want us to answer your questions? Comment below and we will pick a few awesome ones to ask our next guest(s)!

We are now on iTunes and Spotify, so if you're enjoying the podcast give us a review to help us get heard!

Spotify: Clicky HERE!

iTunes: Clicky HERE!

Chat to us on Discord: discord.gg/worldsadrift

Like us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/worldsadrift/
Follow us on Twitter:
@WorldsAdrift

Moster - @fatt_mo
Malford - @Malford_
Julia - @lady_jeanette

Herb Q&A Stream

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/330209148

Herb getting rapidfire questions. It's good times.

New Tasty Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aECijGshCvQ

What have the devs been up to this week?

Island shader optimisations, continued work on distant island impostors - Andy
Crafting customization system - Kexin
Cipher fixes - Kexin
Overheating rehaul - Murillo
Adding ship paint and adjusting dyed cloth schematics - Luke
Rebalanced cannon damage against players - Luke
Fixed wooden ailerons appearing on metal wings - Luke
Redesign scanner and metal deposits - Luke
Loom and post-Haven tutorial stuff - Tamas
Zone transition text when entering a new biome - Tamas
Fixed a bug with alliance leader being blocked after changing public/officers notes - Anastasiia
Preview bonuses stats for crafting station depending on materials player uses for selected schematic - Anastasiia
More VOIP features and fixes - Shane
New recipes - Malford
Weird drinks - Malford
Onboarding improvements - Allan
Finished the art for the Marauder horn - Rebecca

Happy Weekending, folks!

See you in the skies,

Julia + W.A. Team

Oct 26, 2018

⛵Captain’s Log⛵ – Pumpkin Patch

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Greetings Travellers,

WE LAUNCHED 28! SPOOPY PUMPKIN PATCH! Have you read the Patchnotes?

Latest Podcast Episode

We're back with EPISODE 10 of the Worlds Adrift Dev Podcast with Malford, Moster and Julia!

https://youtu.be/n835F2voGqM

Topics we discuss:

Laggy McLagface
Halloweenies
Update 28
And sorta Update 29
User questions

Tutorial Video Series

As you know, New Foundations marked the largest introduction of new features since Worlds Adrift launched into Early Access back in May. As such, we thought (Well, Strite is the daddy of this one) it might be handy (or should that be hooky?) to start a new series of tutorial videos. To kick things off, we’re discussing the differences between the PvP and PvE servers, the deadly new threats you’ll encounter on islands, and the measures we’ve introduced to counter griefing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAU5JUi2ba0

Halloween Competition

Original post: HERE

Using the free Worlds Adrift Island Creator tool (shameless plug: each and every one of the 300 gorgeously intricate islands that make up the world of Foundation was made by a member of the community), we want you to create a Halloween-themed island, based on one of the following (if not all three!) themes…

1. House on the Haunted Hill

2. Purgatory

3. The Abandoned Carnival

But sky pirate that you are, what about that glittery prize we hear ye’ ask? Well… all entries will be reviewed by our illustrious production team, who’ll not only be looking for flair and creativity, but something that would thematically fit within Worlds Adrift. As well as being added to the world, the winning island will be lovingly transformed into a wall-worthy watercolour by our eminent in-house artist, Dan Lish, for you to keep! Plus, we’ll also present the winning entry, as well as two runner-ups, with one of the aforementioned (and in very much limited supply!) goat masks.

What have the devs been up to this week?

More visual optimisations, specifically Occlusion Culling and Runtime Impostor Rendering - Trying to make the islands cheaper to render basically, jury's out on the results and the technical issues that'll follow - Andy
Making the Marauder ship horn and concepting future clothing items - Rebecca
Blight related fixes, looking into onboarding and tutorial improvements - Allan
Concepting outfits, finishing off different colouring/lighting for Remnants and Badlands biomes, starting on NEW THING - Jack
Memory leaks and VOIP for update 29 - Shane
Stack splitting - John
Duping bug - Kexin
Bug fixes with player inventory - Anastasiia
Various bug fixes related to player crafting - Anastasiia
fixing marauder loot etc - Luke
Progression revamp - Luke
Recording and editing the PVP/PVE video - Dean
Post-Haven on-boarding, Overheat hand-off, new material finalization, Quest system design - Moster
Made ships 'smooth' over server boundaries, or at least as smooth as they can ever be due to the laws of computing and mathematics and stuff. Now it's time to start testing all the edge cases (of which there are many) before handing it over to QA - Dave
We broke the game - QA
General Bugfixing - Tamas (previously Lieutenant general)
Trying to wrap up crew beacon fix (still) and digging into frame rate and latency analytics - Semi
Attempted to bugfix (but only manage to better bugobserve) servers being d***s and General Helpfulness - Maurizio ("Helped people with their bugs, and worked on some & RandomRespawn doesn't respawn you in the same island anymore")
Refactoring random expensive server operations everywhere - Murillo
Checking Steam Inventory API - Murillo
Being mini Sylvain - Murillo
Working on validating my ship part optimisations actually improves performance - Murillo

Have a spooktastic weekend, and we will see you in the skies :D

Julia & WA Team

Oct 25, 2018

The Pumpkin Patch: Update 28 Patch Notes

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

FEATURES

Spooky seasonal items available in game for a limited time only... Find the schematics, and it's yours for keeps! Available from Loot Ruins, Loot Containers and Loot Chests.

OPTIMISATIONS

Ships should no longer regularly teleport. They should also no longer experience regular rubberbanding. They will have much lower latency overall, so should feel more responsive and be closer to their position on the server. Upon transitioning to a different physics server, however, there will still be some discontinuity. This is being worked on.
Added a Very High option for Shadow Quality, and a new setting for Shadow Distance. Shadow Distance in particular should have a large effect on framerate as it has a large impact on the number of draw calls.
VFX optimisations. They should lower in quality at distance much better now.
Ship frames are more performant on the server and client now.
Metal scrap and wind trails optimisations.
SFX optimisations.
Optimisations to ship crafting effects.

FIXES AND CHANGES

The PVP combat-logout rules (in place on Driss-PVP and in the Badlands on Kubo-PVE) have been fixed. Non-owners can again prevent a ship from logging out by interacting with it or standing on it.
Logging out while on the torch tutorial no longer completely corrupts your character data. Other issues with the torch tutorial fixed. Whew.
Any update to the player inventory would re-equip all items worn by the player, which turned active gear off. This has now been fixed.
A full inventory now prevents the player from picking up an object, rather than allowing the action and then deleting the item due to lack of space. This has the biggest impact on Marauder compasses.
Marauder compasses, explosives (theoretically), and future ship-attachable objects will now log out with the ship.
Players can now drag items outside the inventory to delete again, and also click outside the chat to close.
Unlearning a schematic now properly updates your UI without needing to relog.
The “Unlearn” button no longer appears in the assembly station interface.
Island turrets should now fully repair after understorms, r
ather than be repaired to 1 HP.
Fixed rotation limit on Heavy Kioki turrets.
Updated damage values for turrets hitting ships.
Updated Marauder chest loot tables. Mostly affects clothing rarities.
Fixed Marauder schematics to allow for correct dyeing.
Fixed multiple situations where the crew beacon would fail.
Fixed a bug that allowed the player's crew or alliance membership to not be updated correctly.
Fixed the possibility of crew and alliance notifications (e.g. invites, membership changes) being lost due to network effects.
Fixed the player not being damaged by her own bomb when mounted on a ship part in PvE.
Haven islands should no longer spawn fuel canisters.
Minor text and color changes to all tutorial steps in Haven.
Fixed issue where the shipyard wasn't showing any schematics on very first play.
Fixed masks items’ icons.
Fixed certain clothing items being invisible.
Creating a new character no longer allows players to skip the server availability check.
The default ship schematics have been updated to be smaller and less frustrating.
Physical knockback on ships from cannonfire reduced.

Oct 23, 2018

Tech Tuesday: Performance Anxiety

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Greetings Travellers,

It’s Sylvain here, your CTO (Chief Tricks Officer) here at Bossa.

It is pretty clear you have been concerned about Worlds Adrift’s performance, and wondering how come it’s not completely fixed already. I’ll try to give you some explanations as to why it is a hard problem to track and how you can help.

This is long one, so if you do not care about the reasons we have issues, but still want to help, then just jump to the last section.

Framerate, Performance, Optimization, Lag, Stutter - what does it all mean?

The game you see is an animated sequences of rendered frames, if anything on screen does not update fast enough (25 frames per second at least) your brain perceives what it sees as a sequence of frozen frames rather than smooth movement. We have what we can call missed frames issues.

The second effect on some game implementation is that your control becomes sluggish as something called time dilation happens. This is when what was supposed to take, for example, 33ms (30 FPS) to render now takes more. The effect on screen is that things (animation, creatures, character control, etc) start to move slower. You could experience that even with a smooth game running at 30FPS instead of a planned 60FPS. The time dilation issue can be solved usually by performing any operations in the game proportionally to the duration of the render frame (we cheat and use the previous frame duration). E.g : if the software runs at 30FPS rather than 60FPS, move twice as much as you would per frame. All of Worlds Adrift code does this and only when reaching very slow frame rates would time dilation be a problem on your computer.

The third effect can be actions taking longer to respond than acceptable. This one is definitely specific to MMOs and Worlds Adrift in particular. This is related to any non-physical action you take in the game (change inventory, learn knowledge, access a chest. etc..) if the servers running that logic are under too much load then these operations that cannot be ignored start queuing and until the queue is empty, you will experience delayed response to your actions. This is the only one that does not take the effect of a sluggish game or animation, but of an unresponsive system. Operations take longer than expected to take effect. So usually this starts becoming a problem when the delay hits 1 second or more. Let’s call it Delayed Online Logic because we need to give it a name.

Different types of missed frames

So let’s look at the different types of missed frames we can identify.

Bad FPS : the whole screens starts to be rendered at too low an FPS, when rotating the camera, you can perceive each frame separately or a slight stutter, controls can feel slightly more sluggish. Depending on your sensitivity and your hardware, this can start being a problem at any point under 60FPS, but it is usually considered that 30FPS or more is OK for an adventure game. Racing games and competitive shooters usually expect 60FPS. In VR this goes up to 80-90FPS. When we get bad FPS, each frame in a sequence we consider too slow, despite being stable-ish. There are two types of bad FPS:

- Orientation dependent FPS issues : the FPS becomes better when looking at the floor and worse when looking at some distant object. This is usually due to rendering issues (too much to render, GPU overloaded, etc).

- Constant FPS issues : the FPS is bad wherever you look. This is usually due to NON-rendering issues. (In reality, looking at the floor almost always helps. How much it helps is the defining factor; if when looking at the floor the FPS is still not great then you have a constant issue.)

Frame Stutter : This is when one or a few frames out of a lot is significantly slower than the others. For example this can happen when an operation is running that stalls the whole computer; it could be due to Worlds Adrift or some other software (Windows has become a lot better at dedicating all of your computer to your game but it still happens). In Worlds Adrift this happens when reaching new islands and loading them or spawning at the beginning. Once this event is passed, the game then resumes its normal average framerate.

Object Stutter : When an isolated object is not updating at the right framerate. This sometimes happens due to optimizations (object in the distance not updating at the full framerate) or because animation missed frames due to bad implementation. Your framerate is smooth, with no stutter (camera rotation is smooth) but something on screen is not animated smoothly. Worlds Adrift has few of these, but it has a lot of the next one.

Online Physics stutter: This one is specific to Worlds Adrift and Multiplayer physics games (not that there are a lot of those). This is object stutter due to the online simulation not updating the object position on your screen often enough. This results is stuttering tree chunks, creatures jumping about and sometimes even other players’ animation being jumpy. This is usually due to bad network connection or very high Online time dilation (see under).

Online Physics time dilation: This one is also specific to worlds adrift and online physics simulated games. In Worlds Adrift, almost all non-player related physics simulations are run on the servers. If for some reason the physics simulation is so taxing that the servers cannot run the simulation at 1 second every second, the simulation will start time dilating. The effect on screen is physical objects (tree chunks, creatures, ships, etc.) starting to move sluggishly.

Ship Stutter/Rubberbanding: This is another example of Online Physics stutter, affecting ships. Because of their complex implementation, Ships suffer from specific issues with regards to stutter on top of all the other physics online issues. The main one is around authority handover. This is when the physics simulation of a ship gets handed over from one physics server to another. There is obviously a complex smoothing system to cover for these issues but sometimes things take longer than expected and no server is simulating your ship for a few frames. Also, of course being a more complex system, there are places where the code could be improved. Working on this actually requires understanding 8 different timelines, which are not only single point in space but points in space-time with some of these timelines potentially happening at a slower pace. If you were confused by the plot of Interstellar please do not apply for fixing these bugs.

Who’s fault is it then?

First is code optimization, or the lack thereof. Worlds Adrift is made of 3 separate code bases for the runtime rendering the frames, plus a bunch of other ones for slower systems like login, etc. Each system you see on screen has part of its functionality on more than one of those three parts. Until the whole game runs together with players putting load on it, it is hard to know what will be expensive and optimizing everything before knowing what is expensive can be an infinite time sink - one of the most effective ways to never release a game. So we needed information about what what to fix and how much effort to put towards it, and how to prioritize it against delivering actual game features. You can help with that.

The Worlds that are Adrift are big: each part of the world is simulated by different servers and this can make it difficult to even know that there is a problem. We cannot observe every part of the world at all times, and knowing that there are issues and where they’re at is part of the Early Access process. Some will result in needed optimization, some in modifying the server configuration, and some in changing the game map. As a result, knowing which area of the game world is having performance issues is important. You can also help with that.

This is your game too: By that I mean that most of what happens on screen is an expression of players’ choices. The islands were player created, the ships are player created, the players gathered together trading are based on player choices. We really only fully control the clouds and the creatures (they still react to players in some ways). This makes it hard for us to anticipate which parts of the system the player choices are going to put under stress. Knowing what players choose to do and where and how much/often and with whom is critical in focusing our development efforts. Knowing which scenarios you put yourself when experiencing performance issues is important. You can help with that.

Why should you care?

Worlds Adrift is a technological achievement and an ambitious design. Made by an indie studio, it achieves what no AAA studio even dares to tackle. Online multiplayer freeform physics play in a massive world created by players, with huge customization options. And it works… most of the time. So when it does not as well as expected, it is easy to ignore all of that and put out a review complaining about general performance issues. But if you want to help make Worlds Adrift better, please provide as much information as you can when reporting issues. Anything from that list (or all of it!) helps:

Which server you were on
Character name or steamID (not in a review or on public forums)
Time/date of the issue
Location on the map (if you have it, we made it hard on purpose), any info can help
Type of issues experienced, it can be multiple ones from the list I gave above
Duration (did it get better?)
Number of ships/players around
Your hardware configuration
Are you using a VPN?
Where are you in the world (the real one)

The amount of information helps us differentiate between the report being a statistical bit of info helping prioritize to actually pointing at one specific issue that we can then fix right away.

In the end, rest assured that your issues reports are all helping us. Even the general “Performance issues” ones. They help us decide where to focus our efforts and what to fix first for the biggest positive impact on gameplay.

We have already prioritized fixes for the upcoming updates : Ship rubberbanding (Updates 27, 28, 29), Delayed Online Logic (Update 29), general bad FPS issues (Updates 28 and 29), Frame stutter (Updates 27 and 29). These will not fix all of these problems completely, so please keep reporting as you have been already!

Thank you for your support and your help in making game history.

Sylvain