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Razorblade

Wurm Online Has 11,000 Wishlists on Steam

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"During Friday last week (17/07/2020), the company launched a new trailer by Wurm Online. This trailer currently has over 22,000 views. The video trailer can be viewed at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Q7BinTnUU .

Since the trailer was launched, we have received a very good response from new and old players and seen a strong increase in interest in Wurm Online.

I can thus announce that we have about 11,000 users who have added Wurm Online to their wish lists on the Steam platform.

//

Robin Bäcklund
Managing Director
Game Chest Group AB (Publ)"

 

Source: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://news.cision.com/se/gamechest/r/lagesuppdatering-gallande-lansering-av-wurm-online,c3157266&usg=ALkJrhhiNd4hJYQFMM3sn9iG7XLjW55zug

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Heavens Landing will be a lot of fun tomorrow! I've seen a post about a clean up of the spawning area, since it's full of carts and corpses. I hope they did that

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10 minutes ago, Argurios said:

Very cool. What's max server capacity again?

Based on the current server statuses, it's 1500 on each of the two new servers, and 800 on all of the old servers. So that is a maximum of 12,600 players (at one time), unless they decide to reopen Golden Valley.

 

http://wurmonline.com/status/

Edited by Razorblade

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Sounds like the servers should be able to handle that, as long as those 11k spread out over the existing servers as well and don't all try to go to the new server. Most MMOs usually have capacity issues the first few days, I look forward to seeing how it goes for Wurm this weekend.

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This pleases me

 

But how many of these were wishlists from  before?

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Xanadu has been laggy enough the last week or two... curious what a surge of players might do...

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4 hours ago, Wilczan said:

700-800?

 

 

I am sure it is actually higher. Indy used to have 1200 online regularly back in late 2011.  It's also possible that the devs lowered the number from the original numbers (1600? 2000?2400?) because "13/1600 online" is a lot more embarrassing. Xanadu is in a category of its own, due mostly to its huge size. devs said even moving it to the new hosts and hardware was unlikely to really "fix" the issue there. Probably why the new server isn't Xanadu sized, and why we likely will never again get a Xanadu sized server.  It's part of the reason I am sure they put Haven's Landing on Indy -- it's handled big populations before without a lot of issues (though weird coding and bad hosting  has at times mangled it up over the years).  

 

I haven't followed the WO lag issues over the recent years but I don't think they were ever caused purely by population size.

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________ 

 

Edit:

I did find this from 2014, apparently shortly before Xanadu went live.

Indy is still over 1000 but now "diluted" by the addition of almost a dozen new servers. The smaller pve servers though are giving Indy a run for its money.

Epic cluster had about 1310 total PVPers in this snapshot -- hopefully a very good sign for upcoming Defiance!!

eVL1ss0.png

 

 

This is from around the Xanadu launch, from one of BDew's scripts, and indicates Xanadu alone had 2000+ players ingame at any one time

 

k5b8m4g.png

 

(Yes Xanadu had lag back then too, as said lag seems to only have a TRIVIAL relation to player population).

 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors

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13 minutes ago, Derp said:

This pleases me

But how many of these were wishlists from  before?

 

Not sure what you mean by "before".

Steam launch was announced last fall, steam page went up in March and the page has been slowly gathering wishlist numbers, but whether they were "before" or "after" (what? the trailer?) they still represent people showing interest in joining the July 24 launch.

 

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Ah, I assumed the page was up there far longer. I misinterpreted 12 Dec 2012 as the time it went up on steam.


I bring this up because I've had many games on my wishlist for years but never bought


But good news regardless

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I would assume if they ever decided to make a WURM 2.0 and place it on a new platform instead of JAVA, we would see the lag monster go away. Its just a matter of I would think of well WURM does and if they Game Chest Folks think spending a year or two to re-code and move onto a new game engine like Unity or Unreal.

 

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Just now, ArthurHawkwing said:

I would assume if they ever decided to make a WURM 2.0 and place it on a new platform instead of JAVA, we would see the lag monster go away. Its just a matter of I would think of well WURM does and if they Game Chest Folks think spending a year or two to re-code and move onto a new game engine like Unity or Unreal.

 

Unity or Unreal would not be able to handle what wurm does, nor would it work/function better. 

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yeah those are all from March

5 minutes ago, ArthurHawkwing said:

I would assume if they ever decided to make a WURM 2.0 and place it on a new platform instead of JAVA, we would see the lag monster go away. Its just a matter of I would think of well WURM does and if they Game Chest Folks think spending a year or two to re-code and move onto a new game engine like Unity or Unreal.

 

 

 

Other multiplayer games on modern engines that have had survival/crafting, but no terraforming, have told their players they cannot add Wurm-style terraforming because the lag would grind everything to a halt.

 

 

 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors
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The game world is the biggest load on the server (one of the devs talked about it). Player actions are a small percentage compared to tracking every mob on the entire map, decay on all items on map, etc. 

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59 minutes ago, xReesex said:

Xanadu has been laggy enough the last week or two... curious what a surge of players might do...

Xanadu has always been laggy since its release in 2014

It's not the players or the servers, it's the Xanadu map itself that lags due to its sheer size. 

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I hope the game is flooded with new players.

Maybe then they would open a new Freedom server (smaller = less laggy than Xana) and there would be a reason to move and build a new deed for the eleventybillionth time. 😄

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1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

Unity or Unreal would not be able to handle what wurm does, nor would it work/function better. 

FWIW this isn't true. I love Wurm, but game programming isn't magic. 

Yes your average "throw a game together with assets" Unity/Unreal user couldn't, but an actual developer could reproduce what Wurm does easily enough. Likely it would take more time to add features/items/etc. than it would to reproduce the core systems like teraforming and massive landscapes. 
Such a thing could run better than java Wurm just due to shear lack of bloat (nothing against the Wurm devs here, any 15 year old game gets bloated to some degree).

There's nothing truly stopping a Unity/Unreal version of Wurm to be built that runs 5-10X better. Except of course resources($$$) It's a niche within a niche.

Hope this doesn't come off as a slight against Wurm, just trying to clear up some information. 

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7 minutes ago, Red said:

FWIW this isn't true. I love Wurm, but game programming isn't magic. 

 

You make it sound like magic though. I doubt the Unity or Unreal game engines support the kind of terraforming that Wurm has.

Even if they did support it, it would take more than actual developer to reproduce what Wurm does easily enough, if it was so easy someone would have done it already...

A big development team with lots of resources, including a team to create their own game engine, could maybe make Wurm 2.0, but that would be more like the Sims for the first many years, where you get a core game where you can maybe dig and create a mine, and then would have to pay for an obscene amount of DLC's to get the other features over the years, in an attempt to earn back the money it would take to achieve it.

Edited by Wulfgar

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Massive voxel based terrain (actual caves, not hacky 2.5D caves) is a pretty standard plugin for Unity/Unreal these days.  So yes, that part is more than doable, and it would have more fidelity from the get go than Wurm's system does. (though I actually like Wurm's height system vs. voxels, which is an even easier system to implement btw)

Again the points you bring up have nothing to do with the game engine used. Those are based on the maturity of the game itself, and the market. 
If magically someone (say Notch) poured a few million dollars into a dev team, they could reproduce Wurm in a couple years, feature for feature.
Would the game make money? probably not. But claiming it can't be done because of stuff like a personal disdain for DLC's and other modern day practices is a bit silly.

I'll mention again I love Wurm, been around since it's start. Just wanted to clear up the facts about what's possible.

We all know it isn't going to happen.

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9 minutes ago, Red said:

FWIW this isn't true. I love Wurm, but game programming isn't magic. 

Yes your average "throw a game together with assets" Unity/Unreal user couldn't, but an actual developer could reproduce what Wurm does easily enough. Likely it would take more time to add features/items/etc. than it would to reproduce the core systems like teraforming and massive landscapes. 
Such a thing could run better than java Wurm just due to shear lack of bloat (nothing against the Wurm devs here, any 15 year old game gets bloated to some degree).

There's nothing truly stopping a Unity/Unreal version of Wurm to be built that runs 5-10X better. Except of course resources($$$) It's a niche within a niche.

Hope this doesn't come off as a slight against Wurm, just trying to clear up some information. 

Unreal and Unity are great for making games when a developer does not have the time or money to develop an engine itself, but they suffer from a lack of specialization. All of Wurm's features could be reproduced in those engines, sure, but optimization is the name of the game with a sandbox MMO. Wurm runs so well because the Wurm engine was built to do Wurm and nothing else. By changing to a general purpose engine, you introduce unnecessary bloat, and limit your ability to optimize.

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1 hour ago, ArthurHawkwing said:

I would assume if they ever decided to make a WURM 2.0 and place it on a new platform instead of JAVA, we would see the lag monster go away. Its just a matter of I would think of well WURM does and if they Game Chest Folks think spending a year or two to re-code and move onto a new game engine like Unity or Unreal.

 

 

So to step in here as a developer, and one with Unity experience at that...

 

The "lag monster" would require a server rewrite, not a client rewrite. Granted, we're aware of the stuttering that happens in the client, but that's not where the majority complaints of lag come from - especially on Xanadu.

 

1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

Unity or Unreal would not be able to handle what wurm does, nor would it work/function better. 

 

What he's meaning here is that the Wurm client relies heavily on server communication. Unity isn't very strong in that area, but that doesn't make it impossible to do. I've not had the (dis)pleasure of handling Unity's built-in networking classes, but from other developers I've worked with - it's a beast. It would likely require us to write a lot of custom code just to handle the server communication as-is, which would make it a non-trivial task.

 

10 minutes ago, Red said:

FWIW this isn't true. I love Wurm, but game programming isn't magic. 

Yes your average "throw a game together with assets" Unity/Unreal user couldn't, but an actual developer could reproduce what Wurm does easily enough. Likely it would take more time to add features/items/etc. than it would to reproduce the core systems like teraforming and massive landscapes. 
Such a thing could run better than java Wurm just due to shear lack of bloat (nothing against the Wurm devs here, any 15 year old game gets bloated to some degree).

There's nothing truly stopping a Unity/Unreal version of Wurm to be built that runs 5-10X better. Except of course resources($$$) It's a niche within a niche.

Hope this doesn't come off as a slight against Wurm, just trying to clear up some information. 

 

As I said above, it's a non-trivial task, which you've basically mentioned here. It's definitely a resource consideration given our small team and the demands by the player base to keep content fresh and bug fixes coming when we can (and when we make new ones!). The main disagreement I have here is that it'll be 5-10X better. Wurm's client is really performant for being a Java-based 3D application. Yes, Unity would likely be a bit more performant, but not by the degree you're stating here. It would also be at the cost of a major endeavor that I'm not sure Wurm would survive - it would require us to divert all developer time on a new client for quite some time. Likely a year or more. That's not including major fixes that arise from major bugs discovered during that time. Also consider that the majority of our developers are Java developers, not C# developers. So that year can easily turn into far more with just the learning curve of the Unity API and the new language.

 

I've joked about doing the Wurm client in Unity many times, and I've thought seriously about it more than a  few as well. What stops me is knowing the time sink it would become in just recreating our Client/Server API alone. It's a tricky thing to get right to begin with.

 

I hope that helps to put this notion to rest, at least for now. :) Maybe when Unity developers volunteer their time freely in the dozens, we can revisit the idea!

 

OwO notices your reply...

5 minutes ago, Red said:

Massive voxel based terrain (actual caves, not hacky 2.5D caves) is a pretty standard plugin for Unity/Unreal these days.  So yes, that part is more than doable, and it would have more fidelity from the get go than Wurm's system does. (though I actually like Wurm's height system vs. voxels, which is an even easier system to implement btw)

Again the points you bring up have nothing to do with the game engine used. Those are based on the maturity of the game itself, and the market. 
If magically someone (say Notch) poured a few million dollars into a dev team, they could reproduce Wurm in a couple years, feature for feature.
Would the game make money? probably not. But claiming it can't be done because of stuff like a personal disdain for DLC's and other modern day practices is a bit silly.

I'll mention again I love Wurm, been around since it's start. Just wanted to clear up the facts about what's possible.

We all know it isn't going to happen.

 

Going to a voxel-based system would definitely be a complete client and server rewrite. Not just something easily hacked up in Unity. Our entire world is far too entrenched in a tile-based map to support voxels.

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Perhaps the (hopefully) upcoming money from the Steam release could be used to finally get rid of the "we are a small dev team" excuse that i keep hearing going on for 14 years? 

Edited by atazs

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