We’ve been following the feedback on framerate issues and temporary client freezes while playing the game, and have come up with a much-needed fix to make the gameplay smoother. Here’s the story behind the improvements and what’s next for the team on this front, so you are up to date with our latest work.

When a studio gives its devs the best rigs around in order to improve their productivity while creating a game, it also risks causing a serious side-effect: routinely the team packs more graphical demands into the title than they should, unaware they’re breeding performance issues for most players later down the line who don’t run on such top-end machines.

You would be forgiven to think this is the case with Worlds Adrift, given its hardware requirements. But that’s not the entire story…

When we started development on the game, the decision was made to use ‘texture atlases’, which are large 4K texture files that contains textures for several different objects – so instead of the client having to load tons of small textures, it uses a few shared large ones, intended to save on graphics memory by being referenced multiple times by different objects.

The problem is, due to the nature of how the game packs and streams its content from the server to the client, the opposite happened: large 4K textures were duplicated in the client for every object in the scene. This resulted in humongous graphics memory usage, generating lower framerates and, at times, client freezes that spoiled the game experience.

We’ve been hard at work fixing this issue, which happened to be more complex than its nature suggests, and interlinked all over the place with the way the game communicates with the server. There was (and still remains) some code detangling to do, but we’ve already achieved significant savings and improvements to memory usage, which should now be reflected as better FPS and less severe freezes in the last game update.

We’ll continue to improve this on the next updates, doubling-down on optimising the game on other fronts to improve rendering on current machines, and adding graphical settings to make it compatible with a wider range of GPUs and CPUs. The goal is to make the game very easy to run on lower-end machines (with settings turned down), and lightning-fast on high-end setups without compromising its visuals.

Lastly, there’s an incoming round of VFX optimisations aimed at making most visual effects more striking and beautiful, while also improving their performance. We’ll share these in another update shortly so you can see what it’s coming… the work to make Worlds Adrift better all the time continues!

Henrique

Gamer-in-Chief

Hello Skyfarers,

IGP (= Indie Game Promoter) is regularly covering Worlds Adrift on his channel since we launched into Closed Beta at the end of May. His Worlds playlist already has ten videos by now and each one represents really a lot of work and cares for the game and community.

He is also a really good YouTube host, the videos are very entertaining to watch so we wanted to make sure to share his latest video where he builds a new Armored ship and explained in details how to build the same. You might find a few ideas to inspire your next ship design or maybe you can go on his channel and give him extra tips!

https://youtu.be/vYV_539BS7Y

Greetings travellers,

Over the last couple of days, we’ve received a number of reports of cheating in Worlds Adrift, and videos that were shared online showing how to cheat in the game. We aren’t the first game to deal with this problem, and in hindsight we should have rolled out anti-cheat mechanisms by now, but we thought that during Closed Beta we could do without it… this was clearly our mistake.

We’d like to make two statements regarding cheating:

First, the dev team has now elevated this to the highest priority. We are moving developers off feature development to anti-cheat. We will have a solution in place soon, during Closed Beta.

Secondly, we will be handing out permanent bans for the players we identify as cheaters. It should come as no surprise that modifying the client in order to gain an advantage, especially via third party programs, is a violation of our Terms & Conditions http://www.bossastudios.com/terms-condition/

If you find a bug, or an exploit, or a cheat, the right way to help the team and support the game is to reach out to us using this link: https://support.bossastudios.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thanks for understanding, and see you in the skies!


The Worlds Adrift team

Greetings travellers,

We are glad to share that more Founder's Packs are now available on our official website.The packs are expected to be available until Friday around 11:59 pm (UK time)

Last month, OliverAge24 & Henrique created a series of tutorial that we shared in this blog article. The goal was that it could be used as a good entry point to Worlds Adrift if you are new and want to have a few tips that aren't specifically explained in the game. Worlds Adrift was created with the idea that discovering things on your own through experimentation is part of the fun, and this is how we encourage you to get into Worlds Adrift. Having said that, not everyone approaches the game with that mindset -  some players are interested in getting more info, more tips, more explanation a little bit faster, and this is totally fine.

This is where YOU, the great Worlds community, come to the rescue and help us with the official wiki. Sometimes it can be a bit tricky to browse a wiki, and usually, you need to know what you are looking for. What about a guide? Like an old school manual you used to find in the box of games that you bought? We have three amazing players that have created really in-depth guides that cover a lot of topics from getting started with the basics to game mechanic explanation and even shared some tricks!

fviktor created this great guide (updated during Closed Beta 0.1.3.7) - http://www.ferenczi.eu/worlds-adrift/guide/

Jamesm2w worked on this steam guide, it's even available in Turkish! (updated today, August 16) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=932986882

Ashguard has a series of question and answers available here and he is also super active in the comments to reply any question. (updated today, August 16) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=941099276

ZomB Turtles and Sneaky Emu made this one (updated on May 29) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933004497

Keep in mind that while these guides are detailed, they are not official so may or may not be correct or up-to-date! That is quite a lot of hard work and love put into these guides. If you used the guides and they helped you, don't hesitate to reach out to the guys to say thanks or leave a comment here below :)

Now you should be well-armed to become a Founder from this week and explore the skies!

Greetings travellers,

We recently announced the new update, and we are super excited to share that it's now live and available to all players! Since we launched the Closed Beta, the team has been entirely focused on squishing bugs and working on performance improvements so that our Founders can have as an enjoyable experience as possible. For the first time, with update 0.1.4.1, we will introduce new features into the game. Rest assured that we are well aware there are still many bugs to be crushed and that we WILL keep working on client / server side performance, which is why the patch notes below contains quite a (long) list of bug fixes on top of the new features!

We are really looking forward to see how players will make use of the new Atlas Pulse against boarding parties and how you will use the rotating ship part to improve your ship design customisation. Enough with the words, have a look at this short video showing off the new features we have added:

https://youtu.be/PQmgGh0rcjA

NEW FEATURES

• Atlas cores have gained an on-interact ability to send a pulse through the whole ship. The pulse will detach all grappling hooks and climbers, and prevent grappling or climbing for a brief period. This function has a cooldown and uses an atlas shard.
  
• Atlas cores and their upgrades now provide additional lift based on the materials used in their construction.
  
• Players can now find and craft more convenient light sources than the torch. These are equippable in your character’s gear slots, freeing her hands for other tools. Equipped gear items are toggled with T, Spacebar, and V, depending on the slot they fit in.
  
• Players can now freely rotate ship parts when placing them. Tapping Z will continue to rotate an object by 90 degrees, but holding Z allows the player to rotate them more precisely. Some ship parts are still restricted to certain orientations (e.g., engines and wings).
  
• With free-rotate implemented, the schematics for railings are finally being seeded into the world.
  
• Player names no longer display indiscriminately. Crewmates (and in the future, Alliance mates) will display their names when in range, but other characters will only display their names if moused over. In addition, all character names are blocked by line of sight.
  
• Foliage and grass now blow in the wind.
  
  
  NOTABLE BUGFIXES
  
  
• The distance calculation for nearby revival chamber now happens at death instead of respawn, and ignores vertical distance. Crewmates should rarely respawn at different islands now, much less different biomes.
  
• After players travelled some distance away from their registered shipyard and returned, they would sometimes enter a broken state where they couldn’t pick up ship parts with their shipbuilding tool. This has been fixed.
  
• Sometimes sunken, deteriorating ship frames would not be salvageable; this should be fixed now.
  
• Death bags should no longer smash into things and do damage.
  
• Ship docking should happen more smoothly and naturally again.
  
• Wings and engines are now mirrored instead of rotated 180 degrees when being placed on opposite sides of a hull, for the purposes of visual symmetry. Note: there is a bug where occasionally these do not display properly.
  
• Males now play the male vocalisations instead of the female ones.
  
• Pressing Esc when placing an item cancels the placement instead of opening the menu. Quite the technical feat, we know.
  
• Impassable storms at the edge of the world no longer show a fully black screen - even if it ended up being a very clear indicator to turn around, it was unintended!
  
• Every once in a while a strange black void would appear on islands, rendering everything inside the sphere black. This has been fixed.
  
• Various UI fixes.
  
• Various optimisations and load balancing to improve framerates and client performance have been performed.
  
  
  NOTABLE BALANCE CHANGES AND TWEAKS
  
  
• Stormwalls and sandstorms are more difficult to navigate through again, as they constantly turn ships off course now.
  
• The damage calculation formula from physics collisions has been revamped. The ultimate goal is to make ships less fragile, and to reduce the fear in your crewmates' eyes when a loose part slides around your ship interior. Chain reactions should happen less often now, but this is a work in progress, with a comprehensive damage system rehaul to come in future patches.
  
• The Badlands are much less habitable now. Very few players will want to - or be able to - stay there indefinitely, as there will no longer be any revival chambers or fuel(!) in the entire biome.
  
• Resources' stats have been rebalanced and some errors fixed. Farewell, golden combustion internals; your effectiveness was a spreadsheet error!
  
• Individual stats on schematics now have a minimum possible value that depends on the schematic's rarity.
  
• Characters now need to be standing or rappelling (i.e., have their feet on a surface) to equip or unequip clothing and gear - including gliders and the new lights. In a future patch, there will be a larger rework of the glider to make it both more useful over short distances and less exploitable for long-distance travel.
  
• Tweaks have been made to how ships turn. Large ships can now turn more easily when not flying at speed.
  
• Grappling to a shell shot out of a cannon will snap your rope now.
  
• The placeholder crow’s nest model has been remade.

Hey skyfarers,

Today we wanted to feature a video from Criken and the cheerful crew that joined for this adventure and fun ship design experiment! Tomato, MrLawlman and Kiwo were part of this journey.

It involves quite a few good laughs and the construction of a ship that is looking a lot of like one you might have seen in a very famous science-fiction franchise before! ;-)

https://youtu.be/xT66swaZS3k

The Crew:

Criken
Tomato - https://www.youtube.com/user/Tomatoan...
MrLawlman - https://www.twitch.tv/mrlawlman1
Kiwo - https://www.twitch.tv/kiwo
Edited by Shayne Hawke

Thank you guys for making and sharing such a fun video!

The text below comes from an article from the "Evening Standard" British newspaper that you can read online here: https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tech-gaming/worlds-adrift-is-an-ecofuturist-video-game-utopia-where-knowledge-is-power-a3609531.html. These cool folks visited us and totally embraced what Worlds Adrift is about.

Action and adventure video games are often fuelled by a sense of urgency: complete an objective before the time runs out, kill the enemy before they kill you, reach a checkpoint before you lose your progress.

Worlds Adrift, developed by Shoreditch-based Bossa Studios, is different. Like farming games and simulators, it’s designed to be played at your own pace — an eco-futurist MMO (massively multiplayer online) sandbox with utopian ideals, where adventurers with an ethos of co-operation and collaboration are more likely to succeed.

It was made with Bossa’s Farringdon neighbour Improbable’s revolutionary SpatialOS (the company was recently valued at $1 billion) running on multiple servers for a more vivid experience.

From its art style to its adventurous tone, it was inspired equally by classic Zelda game The Wind Waker and the films of Studio Ghibli. “Rather than have zombies and post-apocalypse, we were looking at stuff like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” explains game designer Luke Williams. “We felt like that kind of adventure style was better than the doom and gloom of everyone fighting to survive.”

[/img
Gamers can explore their starter island in their own time, mine resources and construct their own aircraft, then venture off to see what lies beyond the huge storms on the horizon.

It’s this lack of urgency that makes the game feel laid-back and open. “We wanted that chill-out time, when you’re flying between islands. You can sit back and enjoy the view,” Williams says. “In survival games you have that constant ticking — if you don’t eat you’ll die. That forces a lot of hostility from players.”

Rather than denying players the ability to kill each other, Worlds Adrift makes it more valuable to keep other players alive. “Knowledge is like a currency,” he explains. “Players can share and live off each other, you can chat and exchange resources. If you kill someone you don’t get access to what they’ve discovered. They might have something that you don’t have, so it’s far more beneficial to talk to them.”



Nothing demonstrates players’ dedication to working together better than the Cardinal Guild — a group of volunteers who have taken it upon themselves to draw up their own game map.

“We don’t offer a mini-map, so players have to make one for themselves. We’ve even had professional cartographers saying it’s their favourite game because they get to create maps,” says Williams. “They use the compass to map out where they are, fly to a new island and track the speedometer, figure out how long it took to get there, see their compass direction and use triangulation to get exact measurements.”

Making this kind of relative physics possible in such a large-scale shared digital environment is SpatialOS. Every item in Worlds Adrift has weight and momentum, meaning adventurers have to play smartly and try not to crush themselves under trees they chop down.

“We’ve had players say, ‘Can you make it so that if I build an engine it doesn’t roll down a hill?’ And our response is, ‘Don’t put it on a hill then!’” laughs Williams.

Items that players create remain in the game world even when they’re discarded or broken, leaving other users to come and pick them up and use them for something new. “Everyone shares the world, and that player history builds up over time,” says Williams. “Every object has a past, it’s something that someone at some point made.”



Worlds Adrift players have a stake in the world because they helped create it in the first place. Before the beta version of the main game was released, Bossa unveiled the Worlds Adrift Island Creator, and players’ designs are populating the game.

“We have a community member, Synovus, and his islands are just absolutely incredible, from haunted houses to crazy pubs,” enthuses Bossa’s chief marketing officer Tracey McGarrigan.

https://youtu.be/yUrudZjifgk

“People seem to be having fun with the tools we’re giving them — it means you’ve created something that does genuinely offer player freedom. Our community are our second developers. The stuff they’re coming up with is frightening in a way — the level of detail, the number of hours they spend, the creativity they show, the personalities that come out.”

Best of all, while Worlds Adrift is a game where you can spend a lot of time, it doesn’t demand it like more structured RPGs.

“Players who don’t usually play MMOs because they’re so time-consuming won’t have to dedicate a second life to Worlds Adrift,” McGarrigan assures me. Load it up, start exploring and relax.

Follow Ben Travis on Twitter: @BenSTravis

Worlds Adrift is available now in Steam Early Access on PC, from £26.99"

Founder's Packs are available this Thursday & Friday, you can join the Closed Beta and become a Founder right now!

Hi folks! Iain here. I’m the artist responsible for the creation of a lot of the procedural ship parts (cannons, engines, wings) and I’m here to show you the process behind an upcoming new procedural ship part, the swivel gun!

Swivel guns are a different type of ship cannon designed specifically for targeting players instead of ships. This feature is still a little ways off, but we’ve been wanting to add more ship parts that are defensive in nature, because players should be able to gear their ships specifically against attackers. Because the swivel gun would fire scattershot rounds, kind of like a mounted, oversized shotgun, it’ll only be effective in close range against soft targets, like hostile players, rather than wooden or metal targets, like ships.

Guns with a higher power stat will have a narrower spread and longer range, and those with a lower power stat will spread more. In addition to their anti-personnel capabilities, the swivel guns are also a lot smaller and more nimble than the regular cannons – they can rotate a full 360 degrees, allowing you to cover all angles against boarding parties.

To put emphasis on the more nimble movement of the gun, I wanted to keep the central pivot on the gun more upright, like that of a mounted blaster in Star Wars, rather than our standard ship cannon:


Worlds Adrift ship cannon compared to the more upright Star Wars blaster

After fiddling around with the player positioning a little more however, we decided that it looked cooler with the player more to the side of the gun:



This also offered the opportunity to have the camera position in a different place which would mean you’d get to see your character firing and reloading the weapon!



Everyone liked the idea of this new camera angle and the reloading animation too, so with that in mind I went back to Maya to start splitting up the swivel gun into its procedural parts.

As with the regular cannon, the swivel gun is split into four components:

• Mount
  
• Body
  
• Barrel
  
• Ammo Loader
  
  
  
  After each shot, the character will pull back on the lever to eject the empty shell and bring up a fresh one from the ammo loader.
  
  Now it was time to flesh out a prototype swivel gun and get it in game for real. Here it is next to one of the original cannons:
  
  

Hello skyfarers!

We’re been hard at work preparing to release a big update, version 0.1.4.1, to the Worlds Adrift Closed Beta! We’ve continued to focus on fixing the bigger bugs and making a lot of tweaks and balance changes, but also managed to get in a few cool new features. For a TLDR, we’ve got a short video for you:

https://youtu.be/SuGJY2cmGSk

Now here are the (provisional) patch notes in detail. The final patch notes will go live with the update itself next week:

NEW FEATURES

• Atlas cores have gained an on-interact ability to send a pulse through the whole ship. The pulse will detach all grappling hooks and climbers, and prevent grappling or climbing for a brief period. This function has a cooldown and uses an atlas shard.
  
• Atlas cores and their upgrades now provide additional lift based on the materials used in their construction.
  
• Players can now find and craft more convenient light sources than the torch. These are equippable in your character’s gear slots, freeing her hands for other tools. Equipped gear items are toggled with T, Spacebar, and V, depending on the slot they fit in.
  
• Players can now freely rotate ship parts when placing them. Tapping Z will continue to rotate an object by 90 degrees, but holding Z allows the player to rotate them more precisely. Some ship parts are still restricted to certain orientations (e.g., engines and wings).
  
• With free-rotate implemented, the schematics for railings are finally being seeded into the world.
  
• Player names no longer display indiscriminately. Crewmates (and in the future, Alliance mates) will display their names when in range, but other characters will only display their names if moused over. In addition, all character names are blocked by line of sight.
  
• Foliage and grass now blow in the wind.
  
  
  NOTABLE BUGFIXES
  
  
• The distance calculation for nearby revival chamber now happens at death instead of respawn, and ignores vertical distance. Crewmates should rarely respawn at different islands now, much less different biomes.
  
• After players travelled some distance away from their registered shipyard and returned, they would sometimes enter a broken state where they couldn’t pick up ship parts with their shipbuilding tool. This has been fixed.
  
• Sometimes sunken, deteriorating ship frames would not be salvageable; this should be fixed now.
  
• Death bags should no longer smash into things and do damage.
  
• Ship docking should happen more smoothly and naturally again.
  
• Wings and engines are now mirrored instead of rotated 180 degrees when being placed on opposite sides of a hull, for the purposes of visual symmetry.
  
• Males now play the male vocalisations instead of the female ones now.
  
• Pressing Esc when placing an item cancels the placement instead of opening the menu. Quite the technical feat, we know.
  
• Impassable storms at the edge of the world no longer show a fully black screen - even if it ended up being a very clear indicator to turn around, it was unintended!
  
• Every once in a while a strange black void would appear on islands, rendering everything inside the sphere black. This has been fixed.
  
• Various UI fixes.
  
• Various optimisations and load balancing to improve framerates and client performance have been performed.
  
  
  NOTABLE BALANCE CHANGES AND TWEAKS
  
  
• Stormwalls and sandstorms are more difficult to navigate through again, as they constantly turn ships off course now.
  
• The damage calculation formula from physics collisions has been revamped. The ultimate goal is to make ships less fragile, and to reduce the fear in your crewmates' eyes when a loose part slides around your ship interior. Chain reactions should happen less often now, but this is a work in progress, with a comprehensive damage system rehaul to come in future patches.
  
• The Badlands are much less habitable now. Very few players will want to - or be able to - stay there indefinitely, as there will no longer be any revival chambers or fuel(!) in the entire biome.
  
• Resources' stats have been rebalanced and some errors fixed. Farewell, golden combustion internals; your effectiveness was a spreadsheet error!
  
• Individual stats on schematics now have a minimum possible value that depends on the schematic's rarity.
  
• Characters now need to be standing or rappelling (i.e., have their feet on a surface) to equip or unequip clothing and gear - including gliders and the new lights. In a future patch, there will be a larger rework of the glider to make it both more useful over short distances and less exploitable for long-distance travel.
  
• Tweaks have been made to how ships turn. Large ships can now turn more easily when not flying at speed.
  
• Grappling to a shell shot out of a cannon will snap your rope now.
  
• The placeholder crow’s nest model has been remade.
  

Hey guys,

As we are getting closer to the next update, we wanted to show you something that will be part of it and we haven't shared yet. Exploring dark places, caves and building should be a little bit more convenient as we will introduce a new head torch! You can wear it even if you have a hat and you can switch it on / off at any time.

This was created by our artist Jack Good.