Firstly, thank you to everyone who has been playing the Testing updates this week and reporting issues. It’s been super helpful and hopefully we’ve gradually improved the quality before we release an update for everyone on Live.
Timeline and plan:
Secondly, I wanted to inform everyone of our plan for updating the game in the short term.
Thursday 29th (today) and Friday 30th will also be Testing releases, containing bug fixes and a few small features:
a new HUD Compass to help you find Location Markers on the current world, and
a new Geo-Location New Player Home World Selection and Spawn System - phewie. This will allow players control over the geo-region they first spawn in. Once spawned on this world, they’ll need to play the game to migrate to other worlds and throughout the Boundless universe. After the world is selected, there is a new Spawn Location Selector that uses data exported from the Generator to find a good spawn location. (Hopefully no more spawning up trees!)
we’re working hard to try and isolate the intermittent high latency issues that are hitting players. This is our highest priority to find and resolve.
At the start of next week (commencing Monday 3rd November October), we will promote the Testing version of Boundless to Live on Steam for all players. This release will re-introduce 4 server geo-locations: US-East, US-West, EU-Central, and Australia.
Testing is for testing:
To test the new player spawn logic we need to reset the Testing servers today and tomorrow. This will allow the community to test the new spawning logic. We realise that everyone is playing on the Testing release, but we must keep the Testing servers for testing development. The Testing servers will continue to be wiped without any warning in the future. When the Live update happens we will then take the Testing servers offline until there is something new to test.
Live is for playing:
When Live is updated we will attempt to maintain these worlds without wipes at a minimum until the end of the year (and hopefully longer).
So from what this sounds like to me, we have one shot at testing this new feature? Upon our first spawn? Is there a way to reset the account so we can spawn multiple times to help with testing?
Will beacons and plots be returned to players after these wipes? I know that a few players including myself are facing issues where we have lost our beacons do to world resets, and require assistance. Could there be a way of granting players their beacons and plots back after a world wipe, that way that can at the very least start again?
I’ll assume first that we only get one opportunity to test this feature, then take detailed notes about my spawn point and location relative to what I expect. Future wipes will also be an opportunity to test this feature, I assume so Take notes every time there is a wipe as well. Our combined data should prove invaluable.
At the moment yes - you’ll only have 1 chance to test it - until we do another reset. You’ll soon get bored of it! But what you can’t do is trigger the action again yourself. This will not be possible until we allow players to run multiple character or reset their character.
In the future we’ll only do full-resets of Testing. Any time we’ve attempted partial resets, we expose the game to a non-standard configuration - that only leads to problems.
So yes - after a reset you’ll need to start from scratch.
Yyou should maybe think about giving players on test servers machines and other items hard to achieve in their inventory right from the start. Because if you update frequently here, noone or just a few people will be able to access lategame progress, because it takes to long to achieve. Also many will just play the live servers since they want to keep their builds as long as possible.
Ignoring this I am fully with your concept of live and test servers.
while I agree, I also disagree to an extent. Granting players late game things while testing makes it impossible to test the speed of progression and balance early recipes.
I agree if you are testing progression as part of that release, but do you think there may be cases where devs want us to test late game features fairly quickly without having to wait for us to spend a week progressing to that point? It all depends on what you are testing I think.
I think I figured out the connection issue, a friend just pointed out that if you turn down your graphic settings you wont get lag, which was so amazingly true, it doesnt seem to matter how well your PC can run it just gets stuck behind rendering things when the server is on a completely different level already.
My issue earlier in the week ended up just being crappy ISP, for the record. Intermittent high pings on occasion since then, but nothing I can recall that might be a common denominator.
Umm, should I already have been able now to choose my location? I logged in now 11 pm (german time).
I was just set somewhere in a desert region on testUS1 without me choosing anything.
As I understood the spawning logic with choosing location should be implemented now?
Actually I am confused now… I spawned on same server like before. All the builts are still there. But I spawned in completely different location then I stopped playing last time. I thought there was a reset?
I’ve found out that i can “ommit” this problem. if i change from full-screen to windowed and back again. Every time i change my resolution the high pings just disappear … they come back a few minutes later and than i do the same again.
It’s not really linked to graphics issues, but it does appear to be connected to frame rate. (And yes, frame rate is a result of graphics performance.) The issue we discovered last week was (roughly speaking) when we query the socket for messages from the server it regularly didn’t deliver all the available data and the logic we had surround this wasn’t enough to extract everything. At a lower frame rather this sometimes meant that the client “got left behind” as an outstanding communicate queue built up. Where as faster clients didn’t hit this.
We need to investigate more next week and put more robust fixes into the client.
yes we get our EU Server back