We’ve been following the feedback on framerate issues and temporary client freezes while playing the game, and have come up with a much-needed fix to make the gameplay smoother. Here’s the story behind the improvements and what’s next for the team on this front, so you are up to date with our latest work.
When a studio gives its devs the best rigs around in order to improve their productivity while creating a game, it also risks causing a serious side-effect: routinely the team packs more graphical demands into the title than they should, unaware they’re breeding performance issues for most players later down the line who don’t run on such top-end machines.
You would be forgiven to think this is the case with Worlds Adrift, given its hardware requirements. But that’s not the entire story…
When we started development on the game, the decision was made to use ‘texture atlases’, which are large 4K texture files that contains textures for several different objects – so instead of the client having to load tons of small textures, it uses a few shared large ones, intended to save on graphics memory by being referenced multiple times by different objects.
The problem is, due to the nature of how the game packs and streams its content from the server to the client, the opposite happened: large 4K textures were duplicated in the client for every object in the scene. This resulted in humongous graphics memory usage, generating lower framerates and, at times, client freezes that spoiled the game experience.
We’ve been hard at work fixing this issue, which happened to be more complex than its nature suggests, and interlinked all over the place with the way the game communicates with the server. There was (and still remains) some code detangling to do, but we’ve already achieved significant savings and improvements to memory usage, which should now be reflected as better FPS and less severe freezes in the last game update.
We’ll continue to improve this on the next updates, doubling-down on optimising the game on other fronts to improve rendering on current machines, and adding graphical settings to make it compatible with a wider range of GPUs and CPUs. The goal is to make the game very easy to run on lower-end machines (with settings turned down), and lightning-fast on high-end setups without compromising its visuals.
Lastly, there’s an incoming round of VFX optimisations aimed at making most visual effects more striking and beautiful, while also improving their performance. We’ll share these in another update shortly so you can see what it’s coming… the work to make Worlds Adrift better all the time continues!
Henrique
Gamer-in-Chief