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 sam...
Made the Blight screen overlay transparent when looking away from the centre of the storm to make it clearer which direction to travel in to get out.
If you can see particles you’re at risk of destruction (you’re near the destruction radius)
Destruction VFX will last longer. Now it will fade to black over 7.5s and ‘dissolve’ over 2.5s. Colliders should also be disabled halfway through the dissolving process.
New lightning VFX to make the Blight look more dangerous
Blight will now turn on if the server hits 75% time dilation for 30 seconds and disable when it gets to 85% time dilation for 30 seconds
Blight is now visible from 6km away
Initial Blight position is no longer based on weather cell positions but on a K-M...
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:
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.
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:
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 ...
OMG shopping! Steam shop is now available for purchasing exclusive clothing items and ship decor. So fetch. (This is just the beginning – read more about it here)
NOTABLE BUGFIXES AND CHANGES
Fixed one issue with the Blight so it should be occurring less.
Fixed a bug where players were not be able to collect knowledge from databanks.
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 ecos...
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 Hot...
First of all, a massive thank you for all the lovely messages of support, yesterday has been a roller-coaster for everyone involved, but as we stated last night we are sailing strong and you are our priority.
As you may have also heard, there was talk of a hotfix this week (or figured out from last week’s Captain’s Log, we were working on it), that was fortunately the only thing that got pushed back a little as our focus was momentarily taken away with working on keeping the game up. You will be getting the widely requested hotfix next week which includes improvements to sailing and voice chat. Small but mighty – stay tuned!
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