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!)