Aleš Ulm

Adrie, you're welcome! As for protecting your creations - I'm sorry but we'd really rather discuss this inside a separate thread in near future as we feel (and the quick reaction shows ) that there's already enough to process and discuss. Let me just say the concerns you've raised we've taken into account and that we really understand that for the system to work properly protection of rights needs to work. "Especially in freeplace mode certain blocks can be useful to create nice montages, so certain colors can impact what you can design and build a lot" This may be a slight misunderstanding - we want players to be creative and create great things ... without having to pay anything extra . At this very moment, we're working on a new system, that will let player recolor a great number of items so if for example, you were lacking blocks of certain colors, it would be super easy for you to get them. The same goes for additional shapes of building blocks that are in the works. We want to you to be able to customize things yourself - we'll be massively improving the painting workstation. We want the players to have every single mean to express their creativity and if we find that they are missing some objects or tools we will add them as soon as possible - for free, obviously, . The monetization system isn't in any way about asking money for "basic" things, things that make Ylands what it is. And you can trust me when I say that amount of "free" content that will come to the game in the next 12 months will be enormous.

Hi Adrie, thanks for your feedback and questions! As I said in the post - we posted this early enough so that when the system will appear in the game you will have all your questions answered (and we might learn a thing or two from discussing these issues with you as well) so please ask every question you have... Myrik has already addressed the servers, let me elaborate on other topics: The first thing to say is that we fully understand that when we let players sell their creations we need to make sure they will be protected enough from people who would try to make money off something they didn't create. We have thought this through well enough and we will have means of making sure your rights will be respected - I won't go into details in here, it will be a topic of yet another Dev Diary post but know that we believe that some protection of the creator is an imperative prerequisite for this system to work (actually some features that will help with that, although not visible from the outside, have been already implemented in the game). I'm not really familiar enough with Black Desert monetization system and at this moment I can't tell you any specific numbers but just from what you wrote, I believe our model will be different. Just as stated in the post, many objects will be simply visual upgrades to existing items. Sure, once this system is online and there are enough upgrades, you could count the price of every single upgrade being sold there and probably end up with quite a high number. The question here is, though, in order to enjoy the game do you really need access to every single visual upgrade of every item that has one? Unless you're using Cube to get your items you need to take into account that you can use/enjoy only upgrades for items that you found in the game. If you, for example, never acquire a certain sword there is no point for you to buy an upgrade for it or regret you don't have it... And as for decorations - those are planned to sell cheap so the question is, again, if, hypothetically, 12 months from now there are 50 different paintings sold as decorations (in addition to many "free" ones that we'll add over the time as well) do you have to buy all of them? What I am trying to say is that we feel player won't really have no need to have every single object that is being sold. The way I see it - if you're building a house and want to have one or two paintings there, you will be able to pick from many free ones available in the game (and you can bet that those will be pretty as well ). You will be able to pick some that other players may offer for free at the Workshop. And if you really won't like any of those only then you'll probably buy two paintings for some small fee. At no point, there will be any need for you to invest large sums of money into the game to enjoy it. Also, it should be said that Ylands is no ordinary game - eventually there will be MANY games created by us or by other players where having upgrades and decorations will make nt sense or won't even be allowed (if the creator decides so). Younger players: Ylands is first and foremost a family-friendly game. We have already planned some sort of parental controls that will let parents limit what can their kids do in the game.

Nice!!

Hi, thanks for your kind words! As for the military stuff: on one hand, we want to Ylands to be kids-safe and family-friendly, but on the other one we want to give players the means to create pretty much any game they like and (modern) warfare is definitely an important part of mankind's history. We are planning on adding parental controls that will let parents filter out some content from the game - after taking this step it will be possible for us to add wider selections of objects into the game.

Hey there, fellow ylanders! The 0.5 Rainy Roads is still a few weeks away (we're aiming for end of July) even though originally we planned to release it one of these days. So what‘s the deal, you may ask? The weather system is in place; we drive cars in the game, you can build on them... If the only place you‘d ever drive those were nice flat roads (just like the one in the trailer), we would be able to release the update way sooner, but if you take a look at how a common yland looks like, you‘ll see they don‘t look anywhere near this. The problem with making anything driven by a physical simulation is that it‘s quite difficult to make it right. There‘s also another reason behind the delay. The team has been growing rather fast lately - no, that‘s not the word - it‘s been growing incredibly fast. Just to give you the rough idea of what‘s going on, two new designers will be joining our team just this month. New animators are coming onboard, new programmers as well... everywhere the headcount will (at least) double. We thought we would be able to put all our effort into releasing Rainy Roads and that only then we would fully focus on all the time-consuming things that rapid team growth invariably brings. But the changes gained momentum incredibly fast, and so now we‘re bringing new people to the project, adjusting plans and shifting priorities while we‘re getting 0.5 ready at the same time. Just to be clear - we're not complaining, quite on the contrary! It‘s astonishing to see all the new skilled people come in; one can only try to imagine what we will be able to achieve with so much manpower! With the pieces we're adding your car can look like this... but just like with ships you can use almost anything to build the vehicle of your dreams I‘d also like to use this opportunity to tell you more a bit about our updated plans for the Steam release. Our current plan is to enter Steam Early Access sometime in November (you can tell it's serious with us giving you the exact month ). As you might have read in one of the previous Diaries, those who already own the game will get their Steam key before that. Before Steam there will be two updates: 0.5 Rainy Roads and 0.6 Uknown Update. It is too early to talk about the latter - let‘s just say that it will introduce a new great feature that especially our designers have been looking forward to for a long time ;). A lot of effort will go into both polishing and bringing you small but important features that you‘ve been asking for (for more information about those look here). And that‘s it for now - in the next week‘s Sneak Peek we‘ll look at what engines will be available in the next update and how much fun you‘ll have with them. Until then, my fellow ylanders, stay classy and have a great time!

Oh boy, that is some impressive work! I can't wait what will you guys come up with once we enhance some more the scripting in the Editor!

Sure thing - unless it's fixed really close to 0.5 (I hope it will be fixed way sooner though, we do feel it's a priority) Official whitelisted serve running by a third party: sorry, not at this time (I'm not saying it can't happen in future though )

You're welcome! There are still some stability issues with the dedicated servers in general (that affect even the ones that players are running) - we're trying to fix these issues first before we run our own as it would be rather unfortunate for the official server to be accessible only at certain times

There should be at least one official server up and running very soon (hopefully couple of days )

Hi, modding is definitely something we will have at some point - there's actually even a very subtle hint on our Workshop website We're more than ready to implement it - we know exactly how we're going to do it and were ready to start working on it but in the end, the modding support was delayed in favor of general game polishing we need before we get to Steam. Once we let users import their own assets into the game we will have to support it and keep enhancing the tools for a long time and we don't feel we would have enough time to do it now (not with the user-friendly tools we want to have). Also, we want to have related things ready when it comes out - a website space dedicated to content creation with at least basic tutorials and hints. Long story short - my guess is we may add full modding support sometime in Q1 2018.

Hi, thank you for your report. We will look into the memory consumption. As for the sharks - I believe those will be fixed in the upcoming update.

Thanks! NPCs are definitely planned and although I can't promise you will be able to do this with their first iteration, this is definitely something we want to have - the ability to use NPCs to create stories and interactive adventures (actually we are extremely excited about this - just to think how many unique games will the players be able to do with this...).

Thanks for the suggestion! Normally when you're placing building blocks, they "harden" after a short while and can't be picked up after that. Doesn't waiting for a bit for them to harden before interacting with objects over them help to (at least partially) resolve your issue?

Yes, it's just like Myrik said What you're seeing now is just small bit of what our plans are for the Exploration - we'll be discussing our plans with this further in one of the upcoming Dev Diaries...

Thanks, I'll tell it to the composer, he'll definitely want to hear this

Hi, unfortunately, it's now impossible (at least in an easy way) to set the secondary key binding to "nothing" - we'll take a look at that so that it can be done in one of the future updates. Maybe you could try setting one of the unused keys as a secondary binding for all the hotbar slots and assign the keypad keys as the primary or secondary movement bindings?

Hey there, fellow ylanders! Today I want to talk a bit about the feedback we‘re receiving from you, how we are processing it, what is that you complain about the most... and what we are going to do about it. So, what happens if you post something on our forums? Many people from our team keep checking the forum on a semi-regular basis, but it‘s our Community Manager‘s (Ane) duty to make sure no post goes unnoticed. Under normal circumstances (if we‘re not attending something big like E3) you should be able to see some reaction from our side pretty soon - although in general if the issue is not critical and you are asking about simple things, we sometimes wait to give the community the chance to step in. Players helping each other is something that we encourage, that is the community we want to see formed. The suggestions you make are discussed during our daily "design talks." All the issues you report are put in our internal system - even if you don‘t get an update about the state of the issue you‘ve reported after some time, it didn‘t disappear. We still know about it, and if it‘s not fixed in the upcoming update, it can be because of several reasons. Even though more people are coming to our team, there are still hundreds of bugs and design issues to take care of, and that takes time. Also, some of your bugs can be related to systems that we know we‘re going to rework soon(TM), in which case we don‘t fix them - we just wait before the new system is in place and then test if the issue is still there. And, unfortunately, sometimes our QA/programmers are unable to reproduce the issue you reported (even after we ask for logs, etc.) - in that case we just leave it in our system and wait if someone else doesn‘t report it as well, hopefully with some additional information. Issues, questions, suggestions ... we're always listening to what you have to say! So what are the issues that trouble you the most these days? dedicated servers stability - we‘re on it. With MP becoming a big thing for Ylands we take all issues like this very seriously various MP-related issues - the same as above. We‘re putting a lot of effort into fixing MP already, and with new programmers coming to our team in the near future you can expect things to go even faster game allocating a lot of resources even when it has lost focus / pausing your game when you enter the in-game menu (as long as there are no other players active there) - these will be fixed in one of the upcoming updates performance issues - there is still a lot of optimizing to be done. First, we will get rid of the rather sudden big fps drops happening when traveling in some regions of ylands, then we'll move over to optimizing the terrain, water simulation, loading times... you keep asking for features that would make exploration easier and more fun - before we hit Steam, we want you to be able to see the ylands even on the horizon. The map will be improved, and we will give you a compass. Eventually, we want you to have more objects active at once, so when the compass comes, you will be able to use it even while holding a torch, etc. the way the character is controlled (on foot and while riding a horse) isn‘t really good enough and will be improved ...there are obviously more things you‘d like us to change or add (there are dozens of them) but don‘t worry - everything is in our lists, and we‘ll get there. That‘s it for this week‘s Dev Diary so before we meet again - you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!

Actually, I'm really glad you brought up those issues - it's always good to see we are focusing on what players find annoying or broken. Also, you are right that this needs to be taken care of before we go to Steam. And as for the ships - we are far from considering this feature finished

Thanks for all those kind words! @Ylanders UK Dedicated You, sir, are a topic stealer! Exploitation, abusing and griefing is actually something I wanted to be the topic of one of the future Dev Diaries! But since you brought it up already let me just tell you that we are aware of these issues (we see that things like these are already happening here and there and some actions need to be taken). Actually, we already have some ideas how to address most of these problems (some of the changes/improvements will be present in 0.6, the update that is coming after "Rainy Roads" 0.5 ). As for bodies remaining in the game even after players log off - we will be adding an option for whoever starts the new game world to decide if the characters should stay in the game or disappear as soon as the players controlling them exit the game. Those who will want to have the game a bit more "realistic" will still have to make sure they are leaving their characters in a safe place, while the others will be able to log off right away knowing nothing bad can happen while they're gone.

Hi, we are going to be adding more music in the upcoming months - we discussed this topic and believe it will be possible to release the soundtrack at some point. We will do it at a later date when there are more songs in the game.

Hey there, fellow ylanders! With E3 behind us, we are once again putting all our efforts into the next update 0.5 named "Rainy Roads." Our testers have been driving the cars through various ylands for some time but what remains to be finalized and polished are the motors (currently the cars are propelled with something generic that doesn't consume any fuel :)). If nothing unforeseen happens before the launch of the next update, we'd like to have two types of engines ready to be placed on your cars (yes, car customization works similar to the one for ships - you build a chassis and then you place objects on top of it - if you want it to look like a car, fine - and if not, fine as well). Those will be ylandium and steam engines. The former will be powered by (here comes the surprise) ylandium, while the latter with coal. The good news is that you will be able to put those even on ships, so whenever the treacherous wind changes the direction, you will simply start the engine, lower the sails and here you go, full speed against the wind. It's getting dark and the rain has just put out your torch. One has got to love all the new features, right? Also, with the weather being implemented, we're making sure that rain puts out campfires (stronger rains put out even torches). Also, for things to become more real, even burning objects that you try to "hide" in your inventory won't be spared :). At the same time, in 0.5, after you go swimming, your torch won't be lit automatically after you leave the water, so you better make sure you have some flint with you all the time! So these are just some of the things we're working on right now, and since there's still a lot of new stuff in "Rainy Roads" to be discussed, we'll continue the next week. Until then - you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!

Hi, you're right that having an option to color blocks would be really helpful :). We'll look into it and will definitely add something to the editor (either we'll add more colored blocks or find some way to make some of the blocks paintable). Doing this outside the editor would, indeed, be tricky, since the painting process would require some ingredients and it's very unlikely that players would be able to find enough of those for every color they would need at their location. Anyway - nice feedback, keep them coming

Actually, those are things that we're testing right now - we'll let you know as soon as we're sure how is the finalized feature going to work.

@Miguel Preguisa Well, you've been with us for a long time now, so it seems you know what to expect!

@WijkagentAdrie Gosh, you're right! I guess a whole day spent moving to a new office and making sure everything worked again has taken some toll on my mental abilities It's fixed now - thanks!