Dec 18, 2018

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

(📸: techgamerboy)
It's been a busy year for everyone in the community! In game and outside of it. Here is a little round up of the most memorable creative moments - be it Ships, Screens, Musics or ARTS...

Screenshots:📸

Scenic moments or game hilarity, here are some of the showstoppers!
Like when Negan first laid eyes on Old Alexandria... what a moment...

Or Demon's festive #squadgoals

When Harmswahy made an classic air-plane.

Or the less classic - Fauzty's Ring of Fire... speediest ship of the races!

And what about Cora's Balloon!?

Remember gitlitwitit's for their absolutely horrific creation, The Dolphin?

Spitfyres painted Christmassy HULK Ship...

Degus parked well...

Art:🎨

When it comes to Art, Loryenne has been the famed creative of the community from the start, recognisable by her dreamy, painterly style!

And in the recent months we've had an expansion of creatives in our midst! Kaigsly started by doodling Worlds Adrift art on a napkin, then shared this sketche, and later colourised it.

Oh, Naomi, that's too cute! If it weren't for the cannon you'd have almost felt safe...

Oh, and Kittco's Skygoats?! :D

We have Desdymona's glorious graphic works inspired by WA islands, making for some delightful phone backgrounds and album covers...

We have some FANTASTIC clothing designs by Cheapshot for

Kain is experimenting with a... heavier medium for art. Metal statues inspired by the floating islands of Foundation!

Korgothy made exquisite Eagle Eye coins and the WA Team ended up commissioning a few. The craft is incredible.

Music:🎵

Can someone please make a Worlds Adrift GMV out of this track by Jonny? 😭

https://soundcloud.com/bootclub/entry-to-the-badlands

Murdersauce murdered on pretty much a monthly basis. This was posted with a humble "trying to break out of my comfort zone, going without drums"

https://soundcloud.com/murd3rsauc3/always-above-the-understorm

You can check the whole playlist out for yourself, it's a fantastic collection of trip hop/electronic goodness, and makes a great background track to some chill farming!

And Bigsby... Remenants inspired music.... ON POINT.
https://soundcloud.com/mr-hartje/tier-3

We are so grateful to have such a passionate, caring, creative community! Got any honourable mentions you want to see on here? Let us know in the comments below! <3

Love,
Julia & WA Team xxx

Dec 14, 2018

⛵Captain's Lag⛵ - Updated and Knowledgeable

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Greetings Travellers,

Ready for some weekly news?

Updated!

We are happy to celebrate the arrival of Update 29, and we are happy with all the brilliant feedback (positive and negative, but always constructive!) we’ve been receiving about the new features!

There’s more to come, of course, as work on Update 30 and 31 is already underway. But for now, behold the gigantic full list of features below, jump into the game and experience it by yourself.

Read Patch Notes Here!

In addition to these massive additions to the game, the significant FPS improvement, we have reset the knowledge nodes (data banks) today so you can keep gaining knowledge without losing any items or progress. Use it wisely for your new ciphers slots and updating your cannon and engine schematics to adapt to overheat.

Ship-building Challenge

Now that we have ship painting, how about making a Christmas Tree Ship?!

Rules: MAKE IT COLOURFUL and submit links to Steam screenshots in the comments below!

Deadline: Thursday, 20th of December, 2018

Reward: 2 x drums of paint!

What have the devs been up to this week?

Releasing Update 29!
Design future features, sails and saving entire ships, rather than just the frames.
Tutorial/survival data design
Design for an in-game camera for capturing footage
Wrote a tool to analyse our world snapshots so we can what entities are causing the most data
Ship stability changes have gone into QA, but Mantas are being jerks, so looking into stopping them from being so jerky...
Investigating customisation bug (old clothing not showing colour correctly, have a fix and merge request already)
Making the broken analytics event work again!
Working on automated maintenance.
Working on step of placing parts issues
Fixing inventory not opening in develop
New schematics icons
General bug fixing/investigating
Looking into Update 30 tasks
Cannon balancing and tweaking
Spectator cam design
Investigating Proximity Voice Chat reported issues
This... finally occurred:

Have a lovely weekend, and as always...

See you in the skies,

Julia & WA Team

Dec 12, 2018

What Update 29 Means to You

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

Building on the hugely ambitious groundwork laid out by New Foundations, Update 29 - Will of the Council - continues to address the amazing feedback we’ve received from the community during Early Access, and is another momentous milestone for the ongoing journey that is Worlds Adrift.

That said, we thought we’d speak to a few key members of Foundation about what Update 29 truly means to them, and how it continues to enhance their exploration of the skies...

Performance:

“PERFORMANCE IS 100% BETTER.” - Ali

“In one update they were able to fix so much performance!” - Dragonbone

Overheat/Material Rebalance:

"This is still the best game out there, in my opinion. I was starting to get bored, now everyone is talking again and trying to figure things out. I, for one, like the changes the update brought! It gives new challenges!" - Anne

Ciphers & Schems:

“I really love how the devs are listening to the community (especially since this update seems focused on that). Firstly, a new approach to schematics is a great improvement, in the [in-game, community-ran trade shop], there is a ton of unsold and “bad” schematics, ciphers will greatly benefit us!” - DJmouton

"Overall I like the graphical and performance upgrade, ciphers will surely come in handy and we can't wait to dive into it more." - Schiraz

Voice Chat:

"As for VOIP, I think it's just another thing that gives the game some realism and makes the game a even better MMO." - Villager_Mines

“Voice chat is great! There's a lot of meeting around the [in-game, community-ran trade shop], we've seen some greatly talented guitarists (even drunk ones) and overhauls are always great fun, I think voice chat will add a conviviality to the party, and better interaction between players (easier to trade also)” - DJmouton

QoL:

“I wanted to thank [designer] for the small things that really affect the quality of life. Specifically the stats updating when you place materials in the slots now. Such a small thing improves our quality of life so much.” - Computgun

Painting/Creative:

“I think being a player for over a year, more customization of the ship just makes the game even better” - Villager Mines

“...Painting has just always been on the back of my mind. I often value aesthetics over efficiency (style matters) and it's always hard to have matching panels/engines etc... I'm expecting a lot of creativity from the community, probably flags on bigger ships (maybe before alliance flags or some kind come to the game), I know that we're all gonna have a ton of fun with that!” - DJmouton

"Oh, I forgot the best update: I now have a new headpiece for my outfit to look as stupid as humanly possible, so that's good. (This is not a veiled complaint, I genuinely like this)" -Atreties

Dec 11, 2018

Will of the Council: Update 29 Patch Notes

Worlds Adrift - Bossa Julia

The ‘Will of the Council’ is one of Worlds Adrift’s largest updates ever, second only to Update 27 aka ‘Foundations’. It brings many big features such as positional voice chat throughout the world, huge performance improvements that should see FPS going up considerably for everyone, customisation options to allow colouring and tweaking ship parts, plus a host of other improvements and expansions.

‘Will of the Council’ is the result of priorities elected by the Community Cloud Council (aka CCC -- a council made of Worlds Adrift players) in concert with the development team, who pulled no stops to implement such large changes to the game in record time in a bid to elevate the quality of Worlds to new heights. It’s a testimony of how much more we can achieve together, with the help of the players, in our goal of making Worlds Adrift the game we all dream of during its Early Access cycle.

There’s more to come, of course, as work on Update 30 and 31 is already underway. But for now, behold the gigantic full list of features below, jump into the game and experience it by yourself.

See you in the skies!

NEW FEATURES AND CONTENT

Proximity voice chat is now in the game! The volume will attenuate based on the distance between the speaker’s and listener’s characters. The /mute command will now also mute someone’s voice chat. Typing “/mute USERNAME voice” will only mute their voice channel, leaving their text chat visible.
Painting ship parts is now possible! Oh em gee! Customize the color of your ship part by putting paint in the new cosmetic component slots connected to the “standard” crafting components. Dyeing clothing has now been reworked to use the same system, which will cut out the middle step of crafting dyed cloth.
Ciphers have been implemented. These are devices players can slot into their schematics to raise certain stats at the cost of other stats. They are acquired by salvaging unwanted procedural engine, wing, cannon, and swivel gun schematics, and apply to the same type of ship part they were salvaged from. Players acquire the ability to slot more ciphers into their schematics by progressing down the Knowledge tree and unlocking the cipher nodes.
Engine Overheat has been implemented, and cannon and swivel gun overheat has been reworked to use similar formulas to engines. A new Cooling Factor statistic will show just under the weight in the crafting UI.
To coincide with the reimplementation of overheat, all metal stats have been rebalanced.
To fill in some niches currently underserved by the existing materials, three new metals have been added to the world: epilar, orthite, and eternium.
When crafting a procedural ship part, slotting in materials will preview the final stats if crafted with those materials. This looks similar to the UI when scanning a fully crafted ship part. This should make it easier for the vast majority of players to make the best choices when building their ships!
New cosmetics for the Christmas holiday season are lootable for a limited time! Some of these are Stash items.
Stash items are now linked to your Steam Inventory! In the future, most Stash items will be listable on the Steam Community Market, for players to buy and sell from each other.
When travelling to another zone, zone transition text will now appear on screen, announcing the biome and its PVE/PVP status.
Crafting clothing has also been moved from gauntlet crafting to the loom, a new ship part. This should function just like stove crafting. This does mean that crafting clothing requires a bit more of an investment.
All Rare clothing items can now be crafted from schematics found in the world.
Many new cooking recipes and ingredients have been added.
Additional Marauder lore pieces have been added.
You can now, finally, split stacks of inventory items without needing a workaround!
We’ve now implemented additional tutorial steps after Haven, when newly arrived in the Wilderness. Most of these center around shipbuilding and getting off your first island. Some tweaks to the Haven tutorials have been included.
Worlds Adrift is now integrated with Discord’s Rich Presence feature. By default, you’ll display your server, crew/solo status, and alliance name on Discord now.

PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATIONS

Occlusion culling is now working in the game. This feature skips the rendering of some objects that are behind other objects.
Rendering distant islands now involves an optimisation to render an impostor - a 2D texture - instead of the full 3D island every frame. This impostor is updated if the angle changes too much, or every 5 seconds, whichever comes first. In the future we may make this threshold customisable in the Settings menu.
The terrain shader has been optimised.
Added server optimisations for ships with many engines and/or wings.
Added server optimisations for creature habitat upkeep.
Load balancing when loading an island now takes into account scrap deposits, databanks, and trees.
Performed various bandwidth optimisations.
Optimised ship docking searches. Ships may take up to 3 seconds to start docking now.
Optimised how often object position data is sent, to reduce server load and lower bandwidth usage. Please let us know if this creates a noticeable drop in smoothness!
Fixed a bug that prevented stacks of physical objects resting on each other from reducing their server cost.

NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES

Learning additional schematic slots in the Knowledge tree will add slots to your Cooking and Clothing categories.
Resilience will now show properly when scanning a crafted object.
Procedural ship part schematics will now properly take their Resilience into account when generating names and models.
Fixed an exploit that allowed players to craft any food item with the material requirements of another.
When moving ship parts around a docked ship, the placement preview itself will no longer physically push your character.
Players can no longer place timed explosives or atlas lifters on ungrappleable surfaces.
Inventory items now show their rarity with a background color.
Schematics of different rarities have distinct icons now.
Sails and other tall objects can no longer be placed clipping through the ceiling deck.
Fixed the weirdly shaped decks, and included a prospective fix for the flickering decks.
Cannon shells’ splash damage radius against players has been reduced.
Cannon shells’ splash damage now has the correct falloff range again.
The Random Revival Chamber option in the respawn menu will never pick one on the closest island.
Fixed a bug where alliance leaders editing their own Officer Notes section would cause an infinite loop.
Fixed an issue where all alliance members could edit Officer Notes.
More improvements to the reliability of the crew beacon.
The crew beacon cooldown will no longer be triggered when attempting to beacon into the Badlands.
Character damage from physical impacts has been reworked again. We’ve built a new system to calculate damage. This first iteration of the new system may be a bit rough - please let us know your thoughts on its fairness and believability!
The Rhegus greaves now have updated art, which includes a visual indicator for their remaining durability.
Metal wings should no longer have wooden ailerons.
Metal engines should no longer have wooden propellers.
Objects with long names will no longer truncate on the scanning UI. They will now wrap onto a second line.
Mounting a ship part no longer spins the camera rapidly; the camera will now snap instantly, reducing motion sickness issues.
Cannons no longer hitch every few degrees when the ship is rotating.
Fixed certain invisible clothing items.
Chests will only open their UI after their opening animation completes playing.
Thuntomites no longer sometimes have one huge eyeball and one small eyeball.
VFX improvements to Marauder compasses and chests.
The Capulca Mk.2 engine now produces exhaust VFX again.
Improved rain visuals inside storms and in general.
The visual transitions between sandstorms and stormwalls have been improved.
Improved cloud colouring and tweaked brightness and eye adaptation settings.
SFX improvements to the personal reviver.
Fixes to some icons.
Minor improvement to responsiveness of creatures to changes in their environment.

Disclaimer: Although some of the features were directly requested by the CCC, their implementations were studio-driven. The Council was largely consulted with on their experiences on many of the QoL issues.