Adam Snellgrove

Hey there Ylanders! This week we have a very special contest for you ? This week won't be about screenshotting, but about building! Every one of you can send in one screenshot of your creation. And what creation you might ask? Well we would like you to make a nice decoration for Playlands ? Nothing huge, max size a statue of a normal-sized man. It can be anything. A small cat, an interesting art piece, statue, creature etc. And the first three? Well, they'll get a lot of Coyns (1st 6600, 2nd 4400 and 3rd 2200 Coyns) and their creations will be put permanently into Playlands with a little plaque commemorating their contribution for all eternity ? The deadline will be on Friday next week (27.09) at 10am CET. So in short: building contest to be featured in Playlands. Small (Ylander sized). Anything you can come up with. Everyone can submit one creation. Deadline 27.09. And that's it! We are really looking forward to your creations and hope you'll really let your imagination fly ? So good luck and stay classy Ylanders.

Sure stuff, that would be great! But now we'll go back to doing screenshots for a while and keep this as another "big" contest ?

That's really pretty ?

That is so awesome!!!

Thank you all for your great builds and now it falls upon us to pick the best one (and other two)! Expect the results on Tuesday ?

Amazing stuff and something the Major General will surely appreciate. There's a French aristocrat at the club that keeps giving him the stink eye!

Thank you for the report. If it happens again, could you please send us over the output_logs? So we can see what sets it off or when precisely it happens. But this is a big help also.

Hey there Ylanders! I have to say, preparations for 1.0 are ramping up and everybody here is looking forward to the next few months of hard, but exciting work. And with that, I thought I’d share with you a few updates on future features and what is the situation with certain aspects of the game. So as I promised last week, let’s talk about the water. As you know, water isn’t what it used to be for some time now. The trouble is, that water right now is hardcoded to be at level zero and once it’s put somewhere else, it starts breaking other things in the game. But our team is working on an improved simulation for water, but it won’t get into the game until after the release of 1.0. But that will be one of our top priorities post 1.0. On the other hand, Explore is the talk of the day, since that will be getting the greatest of facelifts. As I mentioned before, there will be fewer Islands in a map, but that doesn’t mean there will be less to find. We are doing this because we want to make every Island unique and fun to explore rather than finding a third Taiga Island and floating away in disgust and boredom ? In this “improved” Explore every Island will be worth discovering. That is another thing coming to Explore: DANGER. You won’t be able to go to sleep at night safe in knowing, that all the animals are also going to sleep. No. Mutated bears and wolves will be coming out of their caves to hunt! And you are the prey ? Now you’ll be able to get rid of this danger on every Island, but you’ll have to ‘conquer’ the cave responsible for the beasts. And the lair will always be guarded by an alpha-monster protecting its home. But if you defeat this powerful enemy, you’ll be able to stop the spawning of dangerous animals on that Island ? The Major General suddenly regrets flushing that puppy down the toilet In other news for Explore, while there won’t be regenerating resources (yet), we are working on it. In the meantime though there will be more resources on the map as a whole and you might even be able to look to the sea to provide ? And some resources should be on every Island, so you’re not hampered early game by having bad luck and not having a specific resource at hand. And for those worried about the smaller number of Islands, do not fret, because we are also working on the concept of ‘Connected Worlds’. We have talked about this in the past, but in short, this should give you the possibility to jump to another game through a portal and keep playing, giving creators countless possibilities ? We are doing our best to bring this feature to you as soon as possible. And that’s it for now, so have fun and stay classy Ylanders! P.S. I’ll be on holiday ?‍♂️ next week, so expect less of my presence on the forums and also less content throughout the week (no Ynterview for example). But I will be preparing a Dev Diary (albeit probably not as ‘meaty’) so there’s that to look forward to ?

So this is apparently a problem with Unity in general. We will try and mitigate this with further optimizations, but it'll probably never disappear completely ?

So the answer is a resounding Yes, but not prior to 1.0 (later we would like to add various "ranks").

This is absolutely amazing!!! ? Great job and...wow. I'm speachless ?

Thank you for the videos. I'll get the team on it. If it happens again, could you pop the output_logs here too? Would help a bunch.

Thank you, this will help a lot. We couldn't reproduce it, so this is great!

We're not even sure there will be a 'proper' 0.15 update, more like a series of hotfixes before 1.0 ?

We will take this all into consideration ? I'll let you know, when the beta starts and we'll figure something out.

They're keeping their cards close to their chests ?

Hope you guys are also working on the building contest ? We already have some places picked out in Playlands for the winners, so I can't wait what you're going to come up with ?

We have found the problem and hopefully it'll be fixed with with the next hotfix. Thank you for the feedback. It helped a lot in finding the underlying problem.

So @Indian Chief I have some answers for you ? 1. The ocean will definitely be operational on release and there will be a way to repair your ships too (though not sure about an actual water bucket ?) 6. First person camera: unfortunately, fully working first person camera available in Explore won't be present in Explore before 1.0 (but should be by 1.0 ?) 7. Can you be more specific about what you want us to improve about blueprints? 8. We are working on further optimizations in MP, raising the limit for specific games. We still want to bring these servers back but first we need to fix some issues (which players are experiencing on their servers as well - such as game crashing or becoming too slow after playing it for a long time). 10. working on it ? 13. We need more info on this - is the main issue the fact that their avatar is left behind once they log out? 14. There are plans for the horse to carry a container of sorts. 15. Actually this topic is a bit more complex. I think we may discus it in one of the Dev Diaries when I get back next week. 16. We may be adding Steam achievements at a later date, but we will be adding something similar - but more immersive - before that.

Bug reported originally by Bobbi: I have tried to upload editor explore maps and it is impossible for me. I create the map, then /exportlocal. So I can open it locally. I can even host it. What I can't do is make it into any kind of .ylandgame that I can upload to our private servers. I have tried uploading it to the workshop, but all that did was put my map out there for random people to download and play. It did not result in a map that I can put on our private server, nor could I ever get back into the game I downloaded and started. As it stands now, I can't use these maps. Thus they can not be used on P1 gaming servers. I will stand down and wait for either an explanation of how to make them work for private servers or a fix. My players are leaving, and I'm not far behind them. Bobbi aka bbcakes

Hey there Ylanders! We had a very busy few weeks with update 0.14 but now it’s out and we’re happy, that you’re enjoying the new Editor improvements, Playlands and the new Animals. But you have also been asking about Explore and what the future holds for Ylands. And that is going to be the topic of today’s Dev Diary. In the past few updates, we have heavily focused on the Editor. This is because we wanted to create a tool, that will give Creators nearly unlimited options to build games, maps and worlds. We want Ylands to be a creative space for as many people as possible, where every day you’ll be able to find something new and original. In this regard, we feel Ylands has great potential. But now after we have added most of the features into the Editor we wanted, we’re going to focus on another aspect of Ylands, that is very dear to us: Explore. It is the game, that has made Ylands in the first place and the entry point for most players. That is why we want to make it even better and more fun to play. Even the Major General is ready for a bit of Exploring Explore is an integral part of Ylands and one we have always planned to support. In fact, every change and feature we made or added has always been tested first in Explore. We have already started working on several improvements. In the future, we’re planning on making the Explore map slightly smaller with a smaller number of Ylands, but while now the Ylands are a bit generic, we want to make every Yland you find unique and worth exploring. We want to give players the motivation to visit them and to travel more. We are also working on ways to prolong the gameplay of an Explore server. Give players more things to do and more challenges to overcome. Part of this are the new animals. With their new AI, they are more challenging to encounter and in the future, their difficulty will be scalable. While at the beginning you might be fending off a few angry Honey Badgers (because they are cuddly and harmless, right? At least the Major General told me so and is getting me one for Christmas apparently...), toward the end you might be fighting off an angry pack of Tigers. Also with the uniqueness of the Ylands, there will be more secrets to uncover. As for changes in gameplay, we want to make a lot of features more user-friendly and intuitive. Such as crafting and using the workshop will get an overhaul, so even new players can quickly get a feel for the game and find out, what they’re supposed to be doing. Another feature, that will get remade is the durability system. Right now we feel it isn’t very well implemented and because players can progress through the tech tree rather fast, there isn’t really a need to fix old items. So in the next update, we’ll remove durability from items, so we can figure out a new way of dealing with this aspect of the game. This will be the last feature to get axed before 1.0, everything else is a fixed part of Ylands moving forward. And to outweigh the loss of durability, we'll be adding one feature back in ? But in other news, we’re also coming up with ways to make repairing ships and cars possible, so that is another feature to look forward to before the release of 1.0 ☺️ And that’s it for now. But if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to ask us and we’ll be more than happy to answer you (or I’ll find the answer here somewhere, someone always knows ?) So have fun and stay classy Ylanders! P.S. Tune in next week, when we’ll be talking about the future of water and other updates from the world of Ylands.

So did this work?

Hopefully ?? But the plan with water isn't yet completely finalized as we are now concentrating on 1.0 and also trying to figure out, how to implement water, so it's as flexible as possible and able to do all kinds of cool stuff.

Yep, that's the plan...eventually Good suggestion. I'll ask the guys, if anyone is working on this or planning to on Monday. But definitely something for down the line, once we have water itself figured out ? Not right now I don't think and probably not a fix around we'll be implementing. We'll probably be using those man-hours to do some work on the actual water ? But it would've been nice ?

Wowza @Indian Chief ? What a list! But thanks for taking the time to write it all up ? There are some really great points and suggestions made. Only thing I'd ask is if for bugs you could make a separate topic for each bug in the bug department, but otherwise, I'll take the suggestions and start carving them up to the relevant authorities on Monday (I didn't have a book to read on the plane anyway ?) and try and get you some answers soon (though there are some really difficult and meaty questions, that we might even know the answer to yet ?) But again thanks for the effort you put into this and know we'll get around answering as many as we can as soon as we can ?