Aleš Ulm

Hey there, fellow ylanders! We have entered the last stage before the release of 0.7 (which we plan to release later next week), and there’s a lot to be done, so this Sneak Peek will be rather short. In the end, 0.7 will bring you over 100 medium-to-major bug fixes, countless smaller fixes, tweaks and improvements (and tons of new features as well). "Host unreachable" issue One of the improvements is related to the critical “Host unreachable” issue, and that’s where we’re going to need your help. We’ve done some optimizations on our side, and it is possible that this by itself will improve the situation for many... but we won’t be sure until we receive your feedback after 0.7 is released. We’ve also made some changes to make it more obvious what’s going on when there is a connectivity problem - firstly, you should never see this generic message but something more specific. There are two main points where an error can occur when connecting to a game. 1/ When attempting to establish a connection to a host Due to whatever reasons (network configuration mostly), clients' packets may fail to reach host or vice versa. They are unable to communicate and connection cannot be established. This is indicated by the UNABLE TO ESTABLISH CONNECTION ERROR message. 2/ During an established connection In step 1/ connection was successfully established but is later aborted for some reason. One cause is a timeout - i.e. peer does not respond for some specified period of time - this is indicated by the CONNECTION TIMED OUT error message. The other causes are various errors that can occur in the network communication layer implemented in the game. These are denoted by NETWORK LAYER ERROR (#), where # stands for a numeric error code. If you experience any of those, we would be grateful if you could post them in the bug section of our forum along with the game log. Hmm, is it Ylands or Stardew Valley? (Nice garden courtesy of @MegaChristalle ) Game performance The second thing that I would like to mention is game performance. As you may know, we are optimizing the game to make it run better, and we’ve already made some important steps that will help us achieve a better and steadier frame rate. The performance problem has two main causes - firstly the fps drops/overall low fps can be caused, quite obviously, due to what’s going on in the game world - too many visible entities, new chunks of terrain getting loaded etc. The second thing, one which may cause the game to literally freeze every couple minutes for a second or two (or even more when the game world is large / has been changed a lot), is related to the game getting saved in regular intervals (autosave). The latter is much easier to fix and we hope to have it rather soon (I will keep you updated on our progress). In the meantime, we’ve noticed that some of the players have tried to eliminate this lag by raising the autosave intervals in the ylands.ini file to very large values. It is true that this does help (if the lag is caused by the saving process), but before you do this bear in mind that it’s still Early Access, there are still more than enough bugs and if your game crashes with the autosaves basically disabled you can lose a lot of progress. Alright, no more talking and back to testing. I hope to see you the next week in our second video Dev Diary. Until then, ylanders, have a great time and stay classy!

I don't really expect too many people to visit this particular post since most have seen the video dev diary through FB/Twitter or on Steam forums . Barrier: To be perfectly honest designing the barrier to work on ships and cars that wouldn't lead to potential exploits and/or have negative effect on other gameplay elements (such as naval battles) has proven to be more difficult than originally expected. We know that many players have chosen to use ships as their homes so having this feature is still very relevant but it will probably take some more time. Actually the next Friday I'm planning to discuss some of our plans in details and I'll be touching this subject as well. Thanks guys a have nice weekend as well!

Yes, that's right. If, for some reason, this would still happen to you even in 0.7, please let us know so that we can investigate. Thanks!

Actually to be as clear as possible - putting things in an active Explore game through the Editor is something that we plan to disable when we move out of Early Access (again - active Explore games only, not active games in general). It makes sense for now because there are still quite enough bugs and some features are missing / don't work as expected. All this should be fixed before we leave Early Access and new features (one very important is actually coming in 0.9) will make this unnecessary. We want the Explore mode to be challenging (especially when we add boss characters and new worlds) and being able to simply edit your saved game at any point goes against that :). That being said it might be possible in future to place compositions into non-Explore active games, but it's not and easy task and just as my colleague said, it's very low on our list of things to do.

Thanks. Once we release the hotfix this shouldn't be a problem anymore - those who try to place it in their active Explore games will be notified that there some game logics were removed from it and for others it will work as intended. This is just a quick fix - we obviously need to handle this in some better way. Thanks for your understanding

I'm not sure what exactly your japanese house contains If it's just game objects then it's definitely fine. If, however, it contains game logic objects (things like listeners, trigger zones etc.) then it could up until now result in some undefined states, leading potentially to corruption of the saved game. It is possible we'll support even this in future but for now with the upcoming hotfix we will be removing all the game logic objects found inside Compositions whenever anyone tries to place them in an active game (using those in the scenario you're creating for you or others to play is safe).

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! There are two larger issues we're aware of: * the vendor we uploaded to Workshop could damage your Explore games in some cases (this isn't a new bug, it just revealed an older one that happens when anyone tries to place composition containing game logics into existing game). The vendor has been removed until this is resolved * we became aware that it still can be possible to paint things in other players' barriers in some situations. We know the reason and are working on the fix. Both of these issues should be fixed with a hotfix we plan to release today or tomorrow.

Hey there, fellow ylanders! If everything goes right, there will be just one more Dev Diary / Sneak Peek (apart from this one) before the “Cheerful Characters” update is released, filled with cool features and numerous fixes, so let’s talk about some of the things you can expect that we haven’t covered before. Addition of Weapons & Armor Information In the past, we've already mentioned that our artists are working on a new world, with new biomes, building blocks, animals, monsters, recipes and, last but not least, weapons and armors. That is very important because in this world the monsters will present, in general, a bigger challenge than what you are experiencing right now, so you will need some new weaponry and some fine protective gear as well. Even though your current weapons won’t turn into a worthless garbage when you arrive at the new world (I can imagine you will be using them a lot even there), there will be situations when the new weapons will be much more efficient. Because it matters what weapon you use against which opponent and which armor against which kind of damage (some are better against melee weapons, others are good against energy-based attacks etc.) starting with 0.7 you will see how strong every weapon is, what kind of damage it deals and which armors are good or weak in certain ways. Right now it shows as a simple text info when you hover over the given item, but eventually, some better visual representation will be added. Sleeping in MP Just as we have a list of most pressing issues we have a list of what features you request the most. One of the top three spots is occupied by the possibility of sleeping even in an MP game. From your feedback we see that it is really important to you so you will get it with 0.7. When there’s more than one player in the current world, the game is considered MP and in that case all active players have to go to sleep for the time shift to commence. Whenever anyone wants to sleep, all they have to do is lie down on a bed or a bedroll and select when they want to wake up (morning, noon, evening, midnight). Once the wake-up time is set, all the players in the world get notified in the console that someone has initiated MP sleep. At the same time, an unobtrusive icon is displayed for those who might have missed the notification. What the other players need to do is just lie down on a bed or a bedroll as well. With each player who has done so, the updated information shows how many are ready. As soon as everyone is lying down, the sleeping commences. Please note that for this to happen the players can be anywhere in the world. To make the communication easier at some later update we are going to introduce a general chat channel, where players will be able to talk to each other all over the game world (but, for obvious reasons, it will be very easy to disable this channel). Sure, they are cute... for now! But if they get angry, you better have a scripted automated turret or two! New Editor and Scripting Features With the introduction of NPCs we have added a lot of functionality to scripting and Editor in general. Although it isn’t as user-friendly as we would like it to be (this will be changed in a few months, where the scripting will get a complete overhaul), it is already possible to use it to do a lot of cool things. Just to name some of the new features: * You can set entities indestructible. Nobody will be able to destroy them, not even with an Annihilator * There are new options in "Perform action with an entity" called "Rotate part to" and "Fire". This lets you create things like automated turrets made of cannons that aim at various targets and fire with whatever you load them with (via action called "Put into container") * Go to command available in the Editor toolbar that lets you quickly move around the world / various ylands * Waypoints are a new type of game logic that can be used to setup movement behaviors of both NPCs and animals * Actions sequencer lets you create a list of actions which you can later execute from various game logic elements * Dialogue is a type of action that lets you ... well... setup a dialogue. Fun fact: you can script dialog even with / among animals * You can now edit characters in saved games - access their inventory, equipment and even change their appearance * Creation of more complex conditions by chaining them * ... and there's actually more That’s it for this week, and I’ll see you again next Friday. Until then you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!

Just a quick update - yesterday I had a discussion with our programmers about changes not getting saved in the editor and there's at least one issue fixed that could have caused this. There could be some other potential causes as well but to avoid what we found from happening please always give it few more seconds before leaving the editor after saving your game (there's something going on in the background). Obviously this will be fixed in 0.7 so please consider this just a temporary workaround.

I'm told that our IT guys are doing some final tuning. They say it's possible that some of that dreaded code 500 can still happen here and there but even that should be fixed very soon. Thanks again for your patience!

It should be fixed now. Sorry guys - yesterday something burnt out in our data center - we managed to fix it, but only provisionally. Hopefully now things will be ok. Please let me know if any of you still experience any issues!

@Whane The Whip I discussed it with Ane and I'm also not aware that we mentioned this date for 0.7 in the past. Not only we have a policy of not giving exact dates unless we've pretty much started the final stage of testing, but I don't think February 2nd was ever considered as a release date even internally. It's true though that originally we planned to release the update a bit sooner (around 7-10th). Another policy we have is to avoid releasing updates on Fridays (for obvious reasons) - it did happen in the past but we try to avoid it as much as possible so intentionally planning for a Friday release doesn't sound like us . But even if we did mention February 2nd as a release date and missed that date, we wouldn't remove or edit the post - to be honest with large updates being released in rather short time intervals and us trying to squeeze in as many fixes as possible we've missed our share of expected releases in the past and never made a big deal out of it and always discussed it with our players - these posts can still be found on the forum (e.g. the much delayed pre-Steam cars update). Maybe we said something in a way which made it sound as if 2nd was the release date - we're not native English speakers so even that is a possibility I don't want you to feel like you're being "deceived" or anything - PM me if you wish and we can try figure out which exact post was at root of this.

Hey there, fellow ylanders! With 0.7 getting closer, I’d like to use this opportunity and tell you more about what is planned beyond that update. But first, as usual, let us discuss some of the issues you’ve reported. Issues You might have noticed that a couple of days ago we released a patch containing a fix for the game freezing/crashing when constructing an energy grid in a specific way, an issue that sometimes prevented players from placing objects on ships and a really nasty one that could result in the game not getting saved (and players losing some of their progress because of it). We’ve already fixed other issues as well, but those were not considered critical enough to require an immediate patch. Speaking of patching - you’ve probably also noticed that when we release a patch, our dedicated servers get reset. We understand that this is quite unfortunate (especially if the patches are released more often) and so we’re working on a system that, once finished, will let us deploy patches while retaining the current progress on DS. Also, we have concluded our analysis of "Host unreachable", one of the high-profile critical issues. Even though there can be many causes behind this that we don't have control over, we indeed found a situation where players can get this message and be unable to connect to an MP game. Good news is that it is something that is fixable, but it may take some time. What is going to happen now is this: in 0.7, if this situation happens, you will see a specific error message. If you see it, you'll know that we're to blame and that it's something that you would be getting no matter what port you have opened etc. It's quite obvious, though, that you're more interested in getting a fix than just an indication. We have already started working on it and chances are that in 0.7 you'll find yourself in this situation less often. The complete fix will be released as soon as possible and we'll keep you posted on the progress. This is a very high priority for us. Finally, some light has been shed into the dreaded "Host unreachable" issue (Lighthouse courtesy of @SyxtySyx) Features and changes planned in 0.8 or later We find the current combat system state unsatisfactory. Firstly, at this moment, it’s not much more than a mouse button mashing. Also, it’s quite imprecise - many times you hit anything but the thing you try to aim at. It’s not our intention to have a sophisticated combat you’re used to from action games, but we feel it should be at least a bit more rewarding for those who show some skill, and that you need to feel more in control when fighting. We hope that some of this you will be able to experience in the update 0.8. We are also doing major changes to how horse riding works. The controls are getting much better, and so are the animations and transitions. It will once again be possible to shoot while riding a horse like it had been before the character controller was introduced. With the new character controller and animations first, we focused mainly on third person camera view. It’s high time that the first person view received some love as well. The most important thing is that players need to see what they’re holding in their hands, getting proper visual feedback of what they do. The last thing I’m going to mention (there’s more than just these) is a whole new world we’re creating for you. It will take a few more months before you get your hands on that, but we believe it will be totally worth it, adding dozens of hours of interesting gameplay. We will be releasing more information as the release gets closer, but right now it’s important to let you know that the reason why we’re (mostly) not releasing new building blocks and items for the game is because we are putting them aside to be released along with that update. That’s it for this week. Next Friday we’ll return to the upcoming 0.7 and tell you more about some of its features. Until then you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!

@Velocifer You're right, when there's more in that array it becomes really difficult to work with. I'm not sure what exactly is that you have there but at least in some cases the newly introduced Actions sequencer may help with making that list easier by moving actions to an external object and executing it from your script. If that doesn't help, the new scripting visualization will - it will be faster and much easier to work with. @RedEagle_MGN I'm not familiar with this issue but I know that a lot has been fixed in the Editor. I will ask our programmers on Monday what can they tell me about this one and let you know on Monday (thanks for the additional info in PM ) @leo_chaos We'd love the Editor not to crash at all (if it happens to you, could you please - unless you've done so already - create a post about it in the bug section of this forum? It would help us a lot! ) but having some sort of smart autosave/backup feature makes sense. Thanks. @blfonsworth Sadly, no. The map requires more than a simple fix to make it work properly. I should be able to tell you in a week or two at most if the new map will make it into 0.8 (which we would like very much). @Energritz_ I'm not sure I quite follow - what do you mean by DS not lasting that long? For a MP game of this type 20MB is not a big save (you have to take into account that we have an editable terrain so information about any single voxel getting adjusted in any way needs to be saved just as the changes to any of tens of thousands of interactable/pickable/destroyable entities in the world - if we had a static map with static trees, grass etc. the save games could easily be just hundreds of kilobytes ). As for the errors in the console - could you please point me towards some post where this is reported so that I can check with the programmers what's the cause / status on that on Monday? Thanks! @bb cakes I'm sorry, but we won't be making any comments on the world... yet ETA for 0.7 is, indeed, around 14-16th but it's really nothing more than an estimate. It's true that originally we wanted to release it a few days earlier but some things we've included in 0.7 will require more extensive testing. It can be ready sooner but it can be even later. In general it's more important for us to release something that is not broken than to meet a certain date Have a great weekend everyone and if you have more questions, I'll get to answer those on Monday!

Hi guys, I just wanted you to know that someone is working on that. I‘m not sure it will be in 0.7 (I'm pushing so that it is) - if won't be long after that.

Hi, thanks for the report, we're looking into it.

I think there are actually several different things mixed up together in your post so let me go over those one by one * bones and skeletons, as we stated earlier, had indeed been removed because of specific cultural aspects of some countries but we are planning to return those once we implement system to handle game assets differently in game versions meant for various markets (unfortunately there's more to it than just disabling models under some circumstances). * paint kit became sort of obsolete with the introduction of painting system (it is true that it could be used to craft some painting which is not possible now, but that will very likely change) * drying rack was removed after we analyzed how many steps it took to craft some objects and as a result decided to remove some of the workstations that felt unnecessary and/or were used to craft single specific thing only. It is true that 5 year old toddlers won't be playing Ylands - but a lot of older kids already do (not only we're receiving a lot of feedback from parents but it has become apparent at conventions like Gamescom) and we're actually very excited about that. Ylands has always meant to be a family-friendly game (that's why we currently have a provisional PEGI 7+ rating), that is very important to us. So this really has nothing to do with being "politically correct". It has to do with a vision we have for "vanilla" Ylands - and where we think it doesn't fit this vision, we change it. We believe, though, that it can still be even dark and full of suspense (some parts of the upcoming new world will hopefully prove that) even without having to see animals die or being able to gut them That being said, our plans are to eventually introduce a parental lock which by default won't let kids access mods/games containing mods so once we introduce modding support modders will be able to come up even with things suited for more adult audience.

"fix the Servers before you bring us new items": I understand that what you're experiencing is frustrating but you should know that all the new features and items are made by artists and gameplay programmers who are not primarily working on DS/MP, which is handled by other guys (and, unfortunately, you can't just reassign programmers dynamically - not everyone has enough experience with that particular system to be able to contribute and it usually takes weeks before they become familiar enough with the code to start fixing/improving). We hired someone to help us with this at the end of 2017 (and keep hiring) so I'm positive that things will get better. If you feel like giving us a hand with this, please report your issues in the bug section of this forum. Even if you report something we are already aware of it helps us to see what are the most annoying/frequently occurring issues and assign priority to those based on your reports. You might also like to hear that once 0.7 is deployed our public DS servers progress should be reset less often. Questions related to DS that players are running: I would suggest discussing this in the DS forum section - people there (both our admin and other players) are more suited to answer those. However, as for your DS needing a reset - patches don't require you to reset your DS. The fact that we do it with ours has to do with the way we're deploying those patches (and that will change soon). Corpses: yeah, that's an interesting issue We'll discuss that - thanks! W7/W10: don't worry - we have no plans of making Ylands run on Windows 10 only

Hey there, fellow ylanders! Today we’ll talk about some of the features and changes that you can expect in the upcoming update 0.7 “Cheerful Characters” - but before we do, let me just quickly share with you information about some of the issues. Issues Yesterday we released a patch fixing an ugly issue where sometimes players whose character died in the game couldn’t respawn and continue playing. Also on Thursday, we were able to locate and fix another very annoying issue that has only recently made it to our “Most pressing unresolved issues” list - the one where creating energy circuits could, under some circumstances, lead to the game freezing. You, the community, made fixing this much easier by providing us with the saved game and repro steps (thanks, @spliff (DayZ)). We are currently testing the fix and hope to release it sometime next week. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to conclude our analysis of the remaining causes of “Host unreachable” issues, but we should be able to do so next week as well (I will keep you posted). Now let’s talk about some of those sweet, sweet 0.7 features. Trading First thing is the trading. Gone are the days when you had to drop objects to the ground for your friends to take. Now all you have to do is - with their character focused - initiate the trade via the Radial menu and a trading window opens. There you can place what you want to give them and when both sides are happy with the deal the exchange can be made. Since 0.7 introduces NPCs, it’s only logical that you can do this with them as well. NPCs ranging from lumberjacks or smiths to painting or curiosity vendors will have objects you might be interested in and will be able to buy items from you as well. When trading with other players and NPCs you’ll be performing a barter. However, for some reason - in both the game and in real life - people tend to be rather unhappy when, for a perfect steel sword, they get something like one hundred coconuts in return. They may want something that they won’t have problems selling to someone else at a later time. Some commodity that is widely recognized for its value. That commodity in Ylands is gold. When you trade with an NPC, next to items in the trade window there is a number. It tells you how many golden pebbles the vendor is willing to give for that item (if it’s yours) or how much they are willing to sell it for (if it’s one of theirs). If, for example, the total price of the items you're after is 150 golden pebbles, you can pay with exactly that amount of golden pebbles or any combination of other items to match that. Sailing to new ylands (just like @Whane The Whip in his catamaran) in 0.7 can result in meeting some rather interesting NPCs A golden pebble is a stackable item just like any other. It can be crafted from gold ore or golden objects. You can, obviously, decide to store your wealth even in gold ingots, statues, chalices (or coconuts or anything else, for that matter) but their high value makes them less than ideal to be traded for cheap items. The fact that golden pebbles are solid items that occupy inventory slots introduces an interesting gameplay element. When you die you drop the gold along with other items and may lose it that way if someone else is around... You will have to think about how much you carry with you, how much to leave at home locked away ... and possibly even how much to bury or hide somewhere just in case. Please note that it is the first iteration of this feature and we will be closely watching how it works and will be ready to make any changes necessary, so any feedback will be welcome. Also, this has nothing to do with Coyns. And what are some other things you can expect in 0.7 ? * Based on your feedback we’ve replaced the aggressive blinking activated when player received damage with some more eyes-friendly indicator * Improvements in the crafting panel: you can now see right away how many units of the selected item can be crafted with the ingredients available and how many you already possess. Clicking an ingredient shows you its own crafting recipe. You can see what recipes you have learned recently... and more! * Some of you complained that the energy streams are ruining their beautiful houses and ships. In 0.7 those will be, by default, less obvious and become more visible once you have the Energy linker in your hand. There’s actually much more we could talk about when it comes to 0.7 features, but let’s leave something for the next Sneak Peek. Until then you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!

Unfortunately, we live in times when people make really weird and extreme posts and mean every word they say in those so it can get sometimes difficult to tell what is real and what is intentionally absurd - especially when it comes out of nowhere, without smilies or any context. Even though in this case it's obviously meant as a joke I would strongly suggest not going in this direction. Bear in mind that in here there are people from various cultures, with various beliefs who might not share your sense of humor and I've seen a lot of post like this turn into heated arguments (fortunately not on our forums ). Thanks!

Hi, to be completely honest this was given a lower priority than it should have by mistake (my bad) and because of it was put aside in favor of some other fixes. I'll discuss this with our programmers and let you know in here (but most likely early next week).

Unfortunately, when playing Exploration game it really is overpowered at this moment when compared to the rest of the objects and it also creates a problem for us when expanding the gameplay so we'll have to fix that. However, when playing in the Create mode you'll still have infinite fuel. Camels: sure, that would be cool (...and I'm off to google what a bactrian is )

plans to add seasons: yes, we would like to have that. That being said it will be a lot of work and we first need to get Ylands to a better state so if this is added it won't very likely be this year. animal AI issues: we'll look into it, thanks! until you have hit your 10-12 then you need to start a new game: in a few months we'll be releasing a whole new world you'll be able to enter once you progress enough in the first one so you will have a lot more to explore. This is also an answer to the question if new animals are planned - yes, they are Hostile NPCs: in the upcoming 0.7 there will be only friendly NPCs (we are redesigning the combat system so hostile ones will appear sometime after that is finished). When they are added you will be able to find some at those random encounter places and if you kill those, they will be gone. We are planning to create things like occasional pirate raids so there will always be someone to fight @raurio I'm sorry to hear that Don't worry about finding the logs - we'll contact you over PM, tell you what to do and answer any questions you might have.

Editor and water: oh, I see. Thanks for the explanation, guys. I'll discuss it with our designers sometime this week. @Whane The Whip You're right, that makes sense we'll look into it as well. @arkaeldren No problem!

@~Chris~ I probably missed your suggestion thread - can you point me towards it or tell me what are you trying to do exactly (just one example) where the current water behavior becomes annoying or gets in the way so that we can take a look at it? thanks!