Private servers

[Zukaro Travon]

Why couldn't you guys just take the time to convert the thing to run on private servers. Do a crowdfunding campaign or something so you can spend the time getting the thing to run on private servers.

I'd like to still play the game, even if development stops on it it's still good enough as long as it'll run as well as it has for me in the past.

I get that it'd be a big undertaking but the game is unique enough. >_>

But I know Bossa won't do that, so I'm gonna be sure to avoid Bossa from now on if this is how they handle their games. Don't wanna get attached to another game Bossa is planning to chuck in the garbage.

[Nica]

Because theyre lazy. The whole reason they stoped the development is because they couldnt be asked to fix their code

[Legiaseth]

because their servers run on proprietary technology that is expensive and that you couldn't run yourself maybe? It's SpatialOS, so something that costs money to host and they can't just hand over to people

[Rig Nan Roach]

It has nothing to do with SpatialOS. The only argument they have that holds water is currently a "single shard" needs 100 servers minimum to run. The fix for this is obviously to shrink the size of a shard. Hell, make the install such that you can pick the size of the shard.

And I am sure there would be work involved. Of course there would be. But the point is not to release the code they developed. They want to market the code under the table.

That we paid for.

[Legiaseth]

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

Addressing a few of the questions and ideas here:

1. Sell it to a 3rd party
It's hard to see why someone would buy a non-profitable game. Worlds Adrift doesn't make its money back by a multiplier, not a small margin. We invested in it more than 3X what it made in sales and still didn't manage to make it the game it should have been. A 3rd party wouldn't do better enough to close this massive gap. Regardless, we tried and discussed it with a few potential partners.

2. Release the game as source code
This was addressed before but will reinforce. Worlds, like many games, is partly built with third party tools, plugins and code without which it does not compile nor functions. We are not allowed to distribute these. If we started it as an Open Source to begin with, that wouldn't be the case -- but that's not the case. While it's possible to go back and strip all of this out, it would be necessary to reimplement it all in some other form. The amount of work is huge and not something we can do ourselves.

3. Make the servers available for hosting
Worlds Adrift's network was built on a proprietary technology, SpatialOS, that only runs within its own cloud environment. One must be a SpatialOS developer to run code in its platform, it cannot be done in personal servers. Running these servers have costs associated with it, and these costs are not compatible with the amount of players currently playing Worlds Adrift -- one of the reasons why it's being sunset at the end of July.

As you see, things are usually more complex than people want you to believe. If there was an easy solution, we would have taken it -- we have absolutely no problem making the game Open Source or enable people to host their own servers if we could do so. We are devs, but also players, and would like nothing better than that.

Unfortunately this is not the situation we find ourselves in, and suggesting otherwise adds nothing to the discussion nor helps in any way. =/

As quoted from a member of the dev team in the official FAQ

[Rig Nan Roach]

3. Make the servers available for hosting
Worlds Adrift's network was built on a proprietary technology, SpatialOS, that only runs within its own cloud environment. One must be a SpatialOS developer to run code in its platform, it cannot be done in personal servers. Running these servers have costs associated with it, and these costs are not compatible with the amount of players currently playing Worlds Adrift -- one of the reasons why it's being sunset at the end of July.

In other words, more RANK corporate IP abuse. We paid for it, but we can't use it unless a developer runs it for us, and a developer won't run it for us unless we pay them substantially more than it costs to run........

Look at the costs on SpatialOS. Costs are supposed to run about half a penny per user hour. Get real. This game did not go broke on server costs, you dogs. It went broke on stupid, flighty faced people wasting time and energy on nonsense rather than keeping their eye on the original vision and providing the game promised.

This thing quickly devolved into a slime fest of in and out of game trolling. A competent dev team could fix this.

This game as a concept is the apex of what Minecraft taps into, and Minecraft hasn't even been killed off yet by Microsoft, who is busily trying to kill the community by splitting the game off into an entirely different codebase to make it harder on the modders.

[Legiaseth]

okay, I hoped for at least one intelligent conversation without yelling, insulting and aggression in this dumpster fire of a steam forum... guess I'll be unsubscribing from this discussion and waiting for the next game they'll release.

[Legiaseth]

don't forget bossa is a small dev team, with only a few devs who tried to work on a huge project, and spent far more money than they made from it trying to make it work as well as they wanted, we're not talking about CD Projekt Red and their basically limitless funding, we're talking about a small indie studio.

[Rig Nan Roach]

They're going to get a lot smaller.

Funny how you only noticed the "aggression" when it came from people who are just trying to defend themselves from being ripped off.

Go buy their next puzzle game...... pfft

And just to be very, very, VERY clear, the entire PURPOSE of tools like UNITY is to allow smaller teams to develop larger games. So get off it already with how small BOSSA supposedly is. It's pathetic hearing this trash all the time.

[Zukaro Travon]

Originally posted by Legiaseth:

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

Addressing a few of the questions and ideas here:

1. Sell it to a 3rd party
It's hard to see why someone would buy a non-profitable game. Worlds Adrift doesn't make its money back by a multiplier, not a small margin. We invested in it more than 3X what it made in sales and still didn't manage to make it the game it should have been. A 3rd party wouldn't do better enough to close this massive gap. Regardless, we tried and discussed it with a few potential partners.

2. Release the game as source code
This was addressed before but will reinforce. Worlds, like many games, is partly built with third party tools, plugins and code without which it does not compile nor functions. We are not allowed to distribute these. If we started it as an Open Source to begin with, that wouldn't be the case -- but that's not the case. While it's possible to go back and strip all of this out, it would be necessary to reimplement it all in some other form. The amount of work is huge and not something we can do ourselves.

3. Make the servers available for hosting
Worlds Adrift's network was built on a proprietary technology, SpatialOS, that only runs within its own cloud environment. One must be a SpatialOS developer to run code in its platform, it cannot be done in personal servers. Running these servers have costs associated with it, and these costs are not compatible with the amount of players currently playing Worlds Adrift -- one of the reasons why it's being sunset at the end of July.

As you see, things are usually more complex than people want you to believe. If there was an easy solution, we would have taken it -- we have absolutely no problem making the game Open Source or enable people to host their own servers if we could do so. We are devs, but also players, and would like nothing better than that.

Unfortunately this is not the situation we find ourselves in, and suggesting otherwise adds nothing to the discussion nor helps in any way. =/

As quoted from a member of the dev team in the official FAQ

Personally I think the best option for them would be to start a crowdfunding campaign to convert Worlds Adrift to a game which can be hosted locally (though I have a feeling asking for more money at this point wouldn't go over well; it shoulda been done before stating that the game is cancelled). Obviously I don't know the specifics of it all but the fact is that it would be a waste to throw away all the tech behind this game, and a lot of people have wanted a game like this for quite some time (basically all my friends love the game, but the fact of the matter is that we rarely get to play it due to the way crews work (we don't wanna put the ship at risk by playing solo and then lose everyones hard work)).

As for SpacialOS, looking into it it looks like you can run one game instance for free for prototyping and such. So if the community were allowed to host their own servers somehow, I'm sure the community could take advantage of that (and if they wanted to pay for SpacialOS, they could do that too); assuming none of that violates the ToS. I'm not talking about the same scale however, I'm saying let people run private servers on a small scale.

Of course I'm not familiar with SpacialOS so I don't know all the details but I don't see why it should be impossible to let the community run their own servers, even if it requires they go through SpacialOS to do it. There's certainly those who'd be willing to do (and pay for) such a thing. It'd just have to be set up in such a way that you can choose custom servers, and can whitelist/blacklist users and/or password protect those servers.

[Rig Nan Roach]

I think Improbable sort of lets a group of folks who do not want to get involved in dealing directly with parallel processing and non-relational databasing, and perhaps a bit of AI, to leverage these things by outsourcing, and I can even understand how it might take a bit of effort to disentagle the core Unity related code from the workers they have to create to interface with SpatialOS, but fundamentally I agree with RT to the extent I understand it all.

To break it down to a level any layman OUGHT to be able to understand, the fundamentals of SpatialOS CAN, and indeed almost always ARE, available to the developer on a single computer. This is to facilitate easy prototyping, and it is really not an option to just forbid developers from using it on a single computer when working on a concept.

If Improbable is making developers refuse to offer their software in stand alone form by contract, that is a different issue, and just one more reason to burn Improbable's reputation to the ground, which I think their attempt to strong arm Unity has already got some folks looking at them with a slightly more skeptical eye.

[1david25]

Originally posted by RT:

The fact Bossa is honestly trying to drag out the excuse a single instance (shard) of this game requires 400+ cores to run is the worst lie i've ever heard a dev spew.
Even if they bought the best of the best that's still 4 rack trays for a single server. And they're honestly trying to say with all that available power they couldn't get atleast one shard to run smoothly?
The only thing Spatial OS does is synchronize data across players, it's a freaking cloud storage/hosting feature and has NOTHING to do with why they won't release the game as a single player option. All of the games assets are client side so of you that still have the game installed already have most of the assets that Bossa does aside from the physical servers, dev kit, and some of the core spatial OS modules, which aren't needed for single player in the first place.

All of the games core features would run on any hosting service. Bossa can't figure out how because they bought Spatial as a module package and believed Improbable's BS about it being impossible to run the game without it. And now they've repeated the lie so many times that if they admit now that they had no idea what they were really doing this entire time they'd get eaten alive by the customer base. Would you be willing to trust them again if they finally admitted Spaital OS has nothing to do with the game being broken after all of the time they spent blaming it?

I agree with this 100%

[HazorZ]

Originally posted by Rig Nan Roach:

It has nothing to do with SpatialOS. The only argument they have that holds water is currently a "single shard" needs 100 servers minimum to run. The fix for this is obviously to shrink the size of a shard. Hell, make the install such that you can pick the size of the shard.

And I am sure there would be work involved. Of course there would be. But the point is not to release the code they developed. They want to market the code under the table.

That we paid for.

You clearly have no idea that you are talking about. SpatialOS has EVERYTHING to do with this. Its an agreement, and Unity( the engine WA is using) removed their partnership with SpatialOS.. so no updates, no support. Please read up abit before you talk ♥♥♥♥ like you do.

[Rig Nan Roach]

Originally posted by HazorZ:

Originally posted by Rig Nan Roach:

It has nothing to do with SpatialOS. The only argument they have that holds water is currently a "single shard" needs 100 servers minimum to run. The fix for this is obviously to shrink the size of a shard. Hell, make the install such that you can pick the size of the shard.

And I am sure there would be work involved. Of course there would be. But the point is not to release the code they developed. They want to market the code under the table.

That we paid for.

You clearly have no idea that you are talking about. SpatialOS has EVERYTHING to do with this. Its an agreement, and Unity( the engine WA is using) removed their partnership with SpatialOS.. so no updates, no support. Please read up abit before you talk ♥♥♥♥ like you do.

Read for comprehension and in context. The discussion at that time was price (Improbable charges roughly a half penny per player-hour) and an ongoing claim that using SpatialOS meant they could not have small or private servers. Small and/or private servers are part of prototyping and have been possible from the beginning.

Improbable also advertises the possibility of developing for games with small user bases per server but massive depth.

It has never been the case that there is no way to develop using SpatialOS for small or private servers. Period. The End.

Both cost and the impossibility of small servers are patently ridiculous excuses.

[Captain Howdy]

"Overnight, this is an action by Unity that has immediately done harm to projects across the industry, including those of extremely vulnerable or small-scale developers and damaged major projects in development over many years," Improbable says. "Games that have been funded based on the promise of SpatialOS to deliver next-generation multiplayer are now endangered due to their choice of game engine. Live games are now in legal limbo."

Improbable is promising to "do everything in our power to help developers using SpatialOS with Unity to finish, release, and operate their games," including using an emergency fund to help with developers' finances, releasing the Unity GDK as an open source project, and assisting in porting to new engines as a last resort.


Straight off improbable's forums. So give another lame excuse as to why bossa cant complete the game... Improbable is willing to offer help financially and code wise to make sure the games can be completed.

Unity adds that "game developers should never pay the price" for Improbable's "violation" of the Unity EULA, and as a result, "games currently in production and/or games that are live [with use of Improbable's tech] are unaffected."

Update 3, 10 pm ET: Unreal Engine maker Epic Games and Improbable have teamed up to announce a $25 million fund that they say will "assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced today... [to] transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems." The money for this fund will be drawn from "Unreal Dev Grants, Improbable developer assistance funds, and Epic Games store funding" among other sources, Epic said.

[Captain Howdy]

Unity Blog
Our response to Improbable’s blog post (and why you can keep working on your SpatialOS game)
Joachim Ante, January 10, 2019

Community
Improbable published a blog post regarding their relationship with Unity earlier today. Improbable’s blog is incorrect.

We terminated our relationship with Improbable due to a failed negotiation with them after they violated our Terms of Service.

We’ve made it clear that anyone using SpatialOS will not be affected.

Projects that are currently in production or live using SpatialOS are not affected by any actions we have taken with Improbable.

If a game developer runs a Unity-based game server on their own servers or generic cloud instances (like GCP, AWS or Azure), they are covered by our EULA.

We have never communicated to any game developer that they should stop operating a game that runs using Improbable as a service.

If you are using SpatialOS, please contact us directly at [e-mail] or visit support.unity3d.com so we can address your questions and resolve your problems.