NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES
Worlds Adrift
Worlds Adrift - Update 29.5 - Hotfix Patch Notes
NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES
OMG! Open Shop!
Dear Travellers,
Starting today when you gather your Crew and ready up for a trek across the skies, the eagle-eyed among you will notice a brand new option in the main game menu - the Worlds Adrift Item Store!
The Item Store comes alongside a bunch of other fixes (please see the usual tasty patch notes for more on those), but we felt there may be people out there who wanted more info on the whys and wherefores. If that’s you - read on!
First up, it’s important to reiterate that the Item Store is now and will forever be for cosmetic items only - no pay-to-win here, thank you very much.
Our Founder community will remember an early post where we discussed the business model for the game (read here) in which we made that commitment - no changes there. Beyond cosmetics items themselves, any account services / quality of life items (we hear you on those extra character slots!) will only be added based on your feedback and if it sticks to the no pay-to-win rule. We’ll need your insight on that one when the time comes!
So why now? Firstly - because many of you asked! We’ve been incredibly humbled by the requests from the community to help support Worlds Adrift and its future. It continues to be an amazing, challenging ride and it’s fantastic to see many of you as captivated by it as we are - that’s real ‘roll outta bed fighting’ stuff right there!
On a more technical level - if you cast your memories waaaay back to 2018 (not that far - to the holiday season) you may remember the unique Tarrery Lamp and Kahi outfit you got nicely gift wrapped in-game. The development work we did on those uses Steam’s Inventory Service - the very same tech the Item Store runs on. In short - it was pretty straightforward development and QA wise to spin up. A ‘quick win’ you could say in an ocean (sky?) of technical challenges we love to face and move forward on every day ;)
In practical, ‘who does what’ terms - this means this update was no different for the dev team in continuing to focus on bugs, fixes, and stability. The art team, however, have been real busy, which leads us nicely onto…
In the Item Store today you’ll see a small selection of mainly Clothing items. There’s a single Ship part in there too and don’t forget - you’re buying the actual Schematic for the part so remember to craft some extras for your friends!
So what’s next? The Art team already have some cool ideas for future items - and we’re going to start by adding more Ship items. Remember - the store must not distract our dev team from the more important task of improving the game itself. This means if a new item type needs too much work / new systems (Gliders ftw!) - they’ll be coming further down the road.
We’d really love your feedback on everything Item Store related - items, prices, qualities, and yes any bugs - so please get in touch and let us know! You can find the out of game store HERE[
See you in the skies!
Ricardo (Ric)
Tech Tuesday - What's Hot
Hi Sylvain here,
Last Tech Tuesday we covered the Hotfixes and the technical challenges, decisions and processes we had to put in place to allow ourselves to release hotfixes faster to the community.
First I wanted to make it clear that together with committing to more focused updates, we have actually pledged to react faster after updates and deliver hotfixes on critical issues where we can.
Deciding if something is critical is obviously a subjective call especially in a game that is still under development and will receive significant improvements in the coming months.
I will try and explain the decision making process here but clearly this is not always an exact science.
The first question is about whether the issue was introduced or exaggerated by the last update, this is really important - if an issue has been around for a while, player behaviours and the game ecosystem might have adapted and the longer an issue has been in the game the more likely a fix will have side effects. Improving on this issue might require a more thorough thought process, additional design, a longer phase on the PTS, etc.. This explains why some issue have stayed in the game longer than wanted and did not get resolved in a hotfix but rather a full update. Using a hotfix to address an issue is of course more critical when the issue is new as to avoid the damage to propagate. This is why we reacted and adjusted the Overheating values right after the update to avoid too many players changing their designs according to broken values.
The second question is how deep is the impact of that issue. As Murillo explained in the last post, one of the toughest part of delivering fast hotfixes is to decide what does not make it in a hotfix. As each additional fix could delay the release, increase the test time and create more issues. So for this we are using a few rules for what's HOT :
To summarise, hotfixes usually address issues with the last update or recently discovered issues that would significantly affect the enjoyment of the game. A big part of the decision is whether the issue is fast to diagnose and fix though.
There is an additional case where we would create a hotfix (update 29.4 was actually one of these) : if we have a significant fix to a long lasting issue that received significant improvement and the next update is too far away, we would try and deliver a minor update. Basically we really did not want to wait to improve the ship smooth sailing behaviour until the next full release.
To put in focus how this affects the game you play, I want to point at an example where the process upgrades, the faster decision making and also thanks to players reporting the issues so diligently, we have in the best case managed to fully release a hotfix for a duping issue in less than 24 hours from reporting to actual hotfix reaching the players.
As always, see you in the skies,
Sylvain
🎉Happy New Lunar Year!🎉
Don't have a Founder friend to share a key? No worries.
Worlds Adrift is now ON SALE - 25% OFF!
🎉Happy New Lunar Year!🎉
新年快乐🐷🎉🏮
⛵Captain's Log⛵ - Keys to Success
Hey Travellers,
Don't believe the news, the snow in UK is a fine dusting.
We've got some exciting things lined up for next week. Keep your eyes peeled!
The Keys to Our Success
Dear Founders, if you haven't already seen it, read this! Thank you for your fantastic support, we wouldn't be where we are without you.
We are about to stream!
For the first time ever, thanks to Oli and Ryan, the Worlds live prompt goes up on the Captain's Log! Come hang out with Luke and the crew, listen to all the behind-the-scenes anecdotes of Worlds Adrift development as the devs explore Driss.
www.twitch.tv/bossastudios
Our Hero
You may have seen the video floating about by now, but if you haven't it's the funniest thing we've seen in a while.
This player has become a hero to all of us at the studio when he stood up to Join or Die and how he handled the encounter.
[WARNING: VERY STRONG LANGUAGE]
https://www.youtube.com/embed/K5MXz6hGPyw
What have the devs been working on this week?
As always, see you in the skies!
Love,
Julia + WA Team
The Key to our Success
We make no bones about it; Worlds Adrift would never have taken flight without our revered band of Founders, let alone soared to its current heights. These 45,000 brave souls heeded the call of the skies, and have since made the clouds their home.
They’ve rallied crews.
Embarked upon adventures.
Banded together to form (and quash!) renowned alliances.
And fought for what is theirs by “right”!
Perhaps it was a Founder that found you. Perhaps you’re reading this with a sly smile, knowing you’re one of whom we speak.
Either way, we salute you, comrade.
In fact, we’ve decided that a humble salute doesn’t quite cut it…
As a thank you for helping Worlds Adrift become the place it is today, we want to help you with your ongoing mission to charter the dangers of Foundation, which is why we’ve decided to give away a Free Key for every Founder (awaiting them in their Steam inventory).
Bequeath it to whom you will, so that you may continue rallying crews, embarking upon adventures, forming alliances, and fighting for what is your’s by “right”!
See you in the skies!
Community Spotlight: Do these look familiar?
You may have heard of these Travellers before, you’ve seen them lurking in game and on the forums.
Anne/Spitfyre (previously written about in this post. In this post she mentioned she was heading for retire on a different server after starting trade on the previous most popular server. That retirement lasted about a week - the insatiable entrepreneur built a business of trading rare clothes on the European server that she moved to, since the merge Anne’s store is back and on Kubo!
Anne is without a doubt one of the best known travellers of Foundation, and knows most of the active players across the board, so she asked these kind folks to tell her of themselves and their ships.
Lord Zod
Amaterasu is Lord Zod's ship - a galleon of the sun spreading light throughout the broken world bringing wealth and knowledge to all that gaze upon her. I fly around helping new people any way I can and trade goods with experienced players using the mats to build ships for people in need. The Amaterasu is a 5 deck tall galleon used to spread hope and music to all.
Captain Sweet Briana & Lt. Cmdr Kyllarie
Captain Sweet Briana & Lt. Cmdr Kyllarie's ship, the A.C.S. (Atlas Core Ship) Gemini is a multi-role Corvette, and flag ship of The Minutemen Southern Fleet. We patrol Roke & Kunlun and maintain a main dock in the Kunlun Expanse & Wilderness where we assist any who approach with building, search & rescue, transport, and the endless acquisition of knowledge. The Gemini is an example of what anyone new or old can accomplish in this world through non-violence and fun
FearfullJake
FearfullJake (which is more of an old joke - he's most definitely fearless - so call him Jake), has a long time history in the game. He is mainly a PVE player, but does not mind a bit of PVP. As a pilot in the last big map, the end race, he came in third place with Adeym and Yarns on his ship, which ended in a great fight with Stormageddon. Because he wanted to have a map and Jerodar was nowhere to be found, he put in his time to build a new interactive map that was better then the previous one. Together with Machine Maker and many members of the Cardinal Guild he rebuilt the map with metal reporting to include previous ones not discovered.
Fauzty and Zevo
Renowned farmers and builders since well before version 1.5, Fauzty and Zevo have teamed to been build ships as part of the Beaver Dam. The Harrier, the Fighter and the Explorer (Fighter is in between the Harrier, left and Explorer right) have been the key ships in their stable made in each of the top materials to include Titanium, Aluminum, Iron, and Nickle. Look for some of these ships in the latest of Material configurations coming soon to an island near you.
Zevo’s main account has 2000 hours and second account has 1400.
Fauzty is similar.
Tell us about yourselves and your ships - how long have you been around for? Do you have a screenshot of your favourite ship?
⛵Captains Log⛵ - Hot Drifters
Happy Friday Travellers,
We hope you're about to celebrate like Glayce and co. right here!
We just emerged from our Friday stream so if you missed some of the HOT LUKE LEAKS you can catch up with the VOD below:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369572014
You can catch us next Friday, same place, same time (5.00pm GMT, 6.00pm CET, 12.00pm EST, 9.00AM PST) <3
Return of the Tech Tuesday
Tech Tuesday has made a comeback this week with a delightful piece from Murillo, on the WA's relationship journey with hotfixes.
You may have (or have not) noticed we’ve released a couple chunky hotfixes recently instead of the extended times between updates, and there’s another fix on the horizon... To find out more, read on.
What have the devs been up to this week?
...and more!
With that, have a lovely weekend, stay awesome and keep fighting the good fight.
See you in the skies,
Julia + W.A. Team
Tech Tuesday: Hotter Hotfixes
Julia: We’re back with new Tech Tuesdays! WOOO!
To start off, you may have (or have not) noticed we’ve released a couple chunky hotfixes recently instead of the extended times between updates, and there’s another fix on the horizon. Hotfixes are normally reserved for absolutely game breaking issues, but... A pledge to make the game smoother is a pledge, you see, so across two of the following Tech Tuesdays we will explain why we have decided to speed up the development process with hotfixes between standard updates.
Hi, I’m Murillo and I’m the lead developer on Worlds Adrift.
A big part of running an early access game is responding to things going wrong as quickly as possible. There is still room for improvement, but I'm going to outline some of the challenges we face when delivering hotfixes and some of the actions we took to minimize the time our players are affected by issues. How to Hotfix Hotter!
The best way to not have players affected by issues is, of course, to catch them before they make it live! However, on a project of the magnitude of Worlds Adrift, that is not an easy feat to achieve. Having many interconnected moving parts means every change you make can potentially have far reaching and hard to predict implications which cause bugs or exploits to show up in areas you wouldn't expect. Thuntomite Effect, if you will.
Since testing all parts of the game takes is intensely time consuming, we have to be smart about what we target and how we go about it. At the end of the day, though, there are way more players than testers, so statistically, you folks will find a lot of stuff we just didn't have the time to. So, something made it past our net for one reason or another, and it turns out to be a very bothersome/important enough issue that we need to hotfix. What do?
The first step is figuring out what's causing it. This is highly dependent on the issue; being able to reproduce it ourselves is the most important factor for how quickly we identify where it's coming from, but in a lot of cases all we have to go on is information provided by players. (Report your issues and give us your output logs!)
In either case, a lot of sleuthing ensues - a process which by itself is more than enough for its own blog post.
Once we figure out and fix the issue, we have to go through another round of testing the game to make sure no undesirable collateral effects were introduced by the fix. This round of testing has a bit of malleability on how thorough it needs to be compared to a full release, which ultimately comes down to how dangerous we feel the fix is and how urgent a solution to the problem feels; we're trying to improve the players' experience, but it's a hard balancing game of how much we want to make sure things are still solid and how much of a hurry the problem puts us in. Finally, once we validate everything to the level we decided we need to, the fix goes live. If another bug becomes the biggest grievance in the community, and if it's bad enough that we think it can't wait, we rinse and repeat the whole process. It’s a constant between all those steps is that the time they take is not really in our control (well, if you give us a pass and consider that introducing bugs is not our fault in the first place... :D).
Some issues are easier to diagnose than others, others take so long that we can't figure them out in time for a hotfix and it becomes better to lump them in with a full update; many fixes are so small that it takes longer to read their description than to fix them, a few end up sprawling into multiple systems getting touched; and some require us to just check we can still log into the game, while others require us to test the game as thoroughly as with any normal release. So, if those factors are not in our control, what else can we do to make sure the patches come out as fast as possible? Well, there are many small factors that affect this, but I'll focus on two that had the highest impact for us specifically.
First, when you are dealing with an MMO, build times can quickly balloon, and suddenly you realize you lose a lot of time between making a change to the game code and having a build in your hands that you can test your changes on. Because of that, we modified our systems and processes to minimize this time; selectively building only the parts of the game we're changing (e.g. if we're only making changes to the game logic servers, there's no reason to build the physics servers), caching artifacts that we are not touching (the islands, for example, were a time hog for a long time due to their sheer numbers, until we separated them as much as possible from the rest of the project), and just generally optimizing things so that less time is wasted (saving even a few seconds of build time compounds really fast when you have several people doing several builds a day). None of these changes were made with the sole intention of allowing for faster hotfixes, but the benefit of it came nonetheless.
Finally (and this is more tangential to the process of fixing bugs), another thing that made us able to hotfix faster was being more disciplined about what we wanted to fix. It's easy to be tempted to bundle in all the fixes your developers have made in parallel along with the one or two bugs that are actually urgent. After all, the more things you fix, the better, right?
However, this often would lead to delay after delay of the patch: it took longer to test the build, because you had more things that need to be validated; one of the fixes might have introduced a new issue which needed to be fixed in the hotfix, which took more time and meant it needed to be re-tested, which then tempted us to add the other few bugfixes that got completed in the meanwhile, and... Well, this could quickly snowball into days and weeks of delay, and in the meanwhile the urgent issues were still being a problem for players.
By isolating only the fixes that are crucial, all of these problems are mitigated, and we end up being able to reevaluate later if the other bugfixes are important enough to warrant a hotfix or if they can wait until the next big update, which makes things more efficient.
As mentioned before, there is room for improvement; but as part of our commitment to become as quick as we can when responding to problems that are affecting the enjoyment players get out of the game, we are constantly looking for more areas where we can make changes that further allow us to move faster when hotfixing. So keep sending Kirk reports and logs.
As always, see you in the skies,
Murillo
⛵Captain's Log⛵ - Writing Competition Winner is....
Greetings Travellers,
We bring you our weekly roundup of things that you may have missed.
Hotfixing
We released the Hotfix this Monday which means voice chat is working swell and sailing should be SMOOTHER.
You can read the patch notes and see it for yourself! As usual, we are looking forward to your feedback, so let us know what you think of the improvements.
Stream
In case you literally JUST MISSED IT, here's the recap of our rum-infused stream!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365872747
Writing Competition
We announced a writing competition on 7th of January, and couldn’t begin to imagine the amount of fantastic, rich submissions we’d get.
It was not a joke when I said these submissions were incredibly difficult to judge - we had about 15 runners up. You’re all such strong writers, it’s been an absolute pleasure and very inspiring reading through the submissions.
But... We’ve made you wait long enough, my lovelies!
.
.
.
.
Writing Competition Winner is... KaussKauss with “Letter from Mother to Son”
A mother writes an emotional letter to her son, inspiring him to 'take helm' and endure through times of adversity. Short and powerful story that tells so much about the mentality of a true explorer!
Congratulations!!! Email me on community@bossastudios.com so we can sort your prize out!
The following are just SOME of our favourites:
Eroe - Untitled Journal Entry
Negan - Waking Day
Rubus - Untitled (BUT ILLUSTRATED!)
Airship Captain - Lives Adrift
Childish Rambino - Found on the battered remains of a ship once flown
Booooooooo - Untitled
JGrace - In Search of What She Lost
I highly recommend going back to read some of these fantastic pieces. It gives insight on how your fellow travellers see and experience the world(s) around them, you will most certainly recognise the motions we all go through.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/322780/discussions/1/1744482417434558687/
What have the devs been up to this week?
Have a lovely weekend, and we will see you in the skies!
Julia + WA Team x