Worlds Adrift
The End of Worlds Adrift
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.
Update 30 Patch Notes
BLIGHT 2.0
KNOWLEDGE REVAMP
SHIP STORAGE REFACTOR
LOGOUT REVAMP
NOTABLE CONTENT AND FEATURES
NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES
Changes
Fixes
NOTABLE KNOWN ISSUES
(Credit to Neon Sirius from the Official Worlds Adrift Discord for the screenshot \m/)
Tech Tuesday: PTS/Login Revamp
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
PTS - Update 30 Patch Notes
BLIGHT 2.0
KNOWLEDGE REVAMP
SHIP STORAGE REFACTOR
LOGOUT REVAMP
NOTABLE CONTENT AND FEATURES
NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES
Changes
Fixes
NOTABLE KNOWN ISSUES
(Screenshot courtesy of гʌꬶѻπγгє on the official Worlds Adrift Discord (https://discord.gg/worldsadrift)
Tech Twednesday - Death to all Ships
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))
Tech Tuesday: Expand Your Knowledge
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!
Tech Tuesday: Saving the Ships
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!)
The Path Ahead
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
TECH TUESDAY: REVIVING THE REVIVERS
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)
⛵Captain's Log⛵ - Catch Up!
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.
News
We launched a hotfix! Patchnotes - HERE
The store WHY and HOW explained - HERE
Tech Tuesday: What's Hot? - HERE
What have the devs been working on this week?
As always, see you in the skies!
Love,
J + WA Team