Greetings Sleepers.
The ability to experience Dune: Awakening in single-player has been one of the most requested features we’ve seen since the game launched last year in June, and many of you have been eager to hear more about how we are adapting the game to this dedicated single-player experience. Transforming a persistent, server-authoritative, open-world survival game with multiple maps into a smooth local experience is no small feat, and today, we want to talk about the technical work our team has done to enable solo survival on Arrakis.
Databases and Authority
Our game was designed to leverage PostgreSQL, a server-grade database capable of handling high data transfer rates and large data sizes. The actions players take, their interactions with each other, the items they have or place in the persistent world, and their entire game progression need to perform at a massive scale. However, for a single-player game, we had to change this assumption and convert the database to a simpler solution, such as SQLite. This essentially trades the scalability required for hosting a multiplayer game with a lightweight, serverless option that works better in a single-player mode.
Expanding to consoles not only meant that we had to be even more mindful of memory usage, but by adding a single-player mode, we also had to shift Dune: Awakening from a server- to a client-governed game while maintaining performance. Transferring the complex persistence and validation logic so that it behaves the same way when the client acts as its own authority was quite a lengthy process! This significant paradigm shift required us to revisit all of the game’s systems and logic, all while ensuring that the multiplayer mode continues to function as players expect.
Redistributing the Heavy Lifting
The multiplayer infrastructure is designed to manage multiple servers and track thousands of player interactions simultaneously. Since a single-player mode only involves one player loading one map at a time, we were able to strip away much of the overarching server logic and focus solely on seamless map-to-map loading.
However, granting local authority means your machine must handle the heavy lifting. Systems such as combat logic and vehicle simulation, which were previously validated on the server side, are now handled entirely by the client. Intense optimization is required to ensure the client doesn’t get bogged down doing double the work while rendering the game.
In Dune: Awakening, there are many maps of different sizes, with the Deep Desert region being the largest. While a dedicated server can keep the entire map loaded and active, a local machine cannot. We rewrote how the game handles the physics scene so that the client no longer loads all the physics and content simultaneously. This ensures that the game will still function as expected, even when the entire map isn’t actively loaded into your system’s memory.
Translating Multiplayer Features
Even if most of the gameplay features in the game already work well when playing alone, a major question we’ve seen is how we are translating our larger multiplayer and social systems into single-player experience:
- The Landsraad: Instead of relying on a server database, the Landsraad now runs locally on the client. We simulate the progress of the Minor Houses in the background to authentically emulate the ongoing competition between the factions to give players a feel of being a part of a large political conflict.
- Arrakeen and Harkonnen Social Hubs: You will still be able to visit these locations as normal to experience the atmosphere of Arrakis. However, we have removed the Exchange from these areas, as a player-to-player market simply doesn’t serve a purpose in a solo journey.
Your Desert. Your Arrakis. Your Dune.
In Dune: Awakening single-player mode, you can customize every aspect of your in-game experience. You can either select one of the pre-determined difficulty settings or dive deeper into several categories: harvesting, combat, survival, and persistence, each with knobs that you can adjust to your liking. These settings can be changed at any time, so don’t worry about getting everything right at the beginning of the game. Experimenting is part of the fun!
Additionally, all these extra settings will also be available to players on private and self-hosted servers, giving the players more agency in creating tailored experiences. Here are some of the settings that will be available in September:
- Resource harvesting rate
- Crafting and building costs
- Loot and resource respawn speed
- Damage dealt, enemy health, and enemy respawn speed
- Item durability settings
- Experience gains from various sources
- Dehydration, sun exposure, and heat buildup
- Toggle to enable or disable sandstorms and sandworms.
- Items dropped upon death, including what is lost when killed by a sandworm
- Area building restrictions, building stability, and sub-fief expansion limits
Adding a single-player mode to Dune: Awakening is about giving more people the chance to play the game the way they want to play it. Multiplayer isn’t for everyone, and we’ve seen from both player feedback and in-game telemetry that a lot of people enjoy playing the game by themselves. We know Dune: Awakening can be a great experience solo and knowing from experience that the share of solo players can be significantly higher on console, this felt like a great time to add a proper, fully realized way to play solo.
The improvements we’ve made as part of adding single-player mode, including performance optimizations and UI/UX enhancements, will also benefit that part of the game. Multiplayer is still core to the Dune: Awakening experience and it remains a clear focus to us going forward.
Thank you,
The Funcom Team
