Aleš Ulm

Hey there, fellow ylanders! Today is the first Dev Diary dedicated to update 0.14, and we’re starting with something pleasing to the eye. If you’ve been with us for a longer time you may have noticed how the avatars' visuals changed over the course of time – especially their heads. They’ve become more detailed and we added a lot of new ones. While we are happy with the results, this created too big of a contrast between smoother-looking heads and still very low-poly bodies. In 0.14 we’re changing the bodies as well, so that they fit with the heads. Also, we wanted the characters to stand out a bit more, to become somewhat more distinct within their environment. This is done by the combination of the avatar being slightly more detailed than their surroundings and also by a specific new shader applied to them. Original avatar / new avatar with the new shader applied / new avatars with shader and new clothes As you can see in the picture, the new character looks much more consistent. Also, in the right section of the image you can see the character wearing modern clothes. This is also something worth mentioning. While this won’t be present in 0.14, we do plan on adding a lot of modern-looking assets before update 1.0. This will give you even more creative freedom. That’s it for now. Have a great week and until we talk again – stay classy!

There's no reason to "hide" it The shift from more low-poly to higher-poly (but still quite low when compared to other games) character models was made because of feedback we got from various groups of players. We are making Ylands as a platform in the first place and as such it needs to attract large number of players to be able to compete with Roblox and similar titles. We need the game to be popular among kids and casual players to make sure Ylands creators (which is mostly folk like yourself) will have an access to as large player pool as possible - both to make sure that your creation get enjoyed by as many people as possible and also to make it worthwhile to ones of you who will decide to monetize their creations. For the "ecosystem" to work we need players and adjusting the character visuals makes it easier to attract them. On the other hand we don't plan to do any other larger adjustments to game visuals or features so don't worry that this is a start of some trend. The upcoming update 0.14 will bring a ton of new stuff and then we'll do 100% polishing and fixing for a few months before we the fun begins

Every fix needs to be properly tested before it's made public and it's Friday afternoon We are planning to provide creators with "a preview" branch in the future, but it will always be available only some time before the actual update, not the whole time.

We have found and fixed the issues. Some testing is still needed, but I think a hotfix will be released early next week. Thanks again for the feedback!

Thanks for your feedback, we'll look into it right away and keep you posted in this thread.

Hey there, fellow ylanders. Today I would like to discuss what we’re planning to do about the first person camera, that we removed some time ago. Since we won’t be able to bring it back for quite some time (definitely not before 1.0) - as this would require both programmers and animators to focus on that during the time when we need to fix critical issues - we would like to at least make things easier for you (and just to note: we are still improving the building mode and the 3D person camera a lot, so even those aspects will see an improvement). Let me tell you what we would like to put into the game and how we think this might help: There are situations where switching to first person camera made things much easier, like when you’re trying to build something, move through tight corridors or interiors, etc. Then there are situations where no matter how good the 3rd person camera can become - it still won't be good enough. Controlling some devices (for example firing cannons through hatches) or simply interacting with some elements in the level (imagine a machine with small buttons) are examples that come to mind. Specifically because of this, we would like to add something we are internally calling the “Interaction view”. In essence, we would like you to be able to switch to something similar as the first person view. However, its purpose would be to perform interactions such as operating devices, interactions with levers, buttons, picking objects and some other actions. We are positive this feature will help to alleviate a lot of the problems you are experiencing right now. Of course, as this is something different from the original 1st person camera (which as you might recall, had to be removed because of some issues with fighting animations, interactions, etc.), let me tell you how we imagine it would work: in this new camera mode, you'd see the world in 1st person but won't be able to move around or fight - only interact with objects around you. We want to give you back as much of the first person camera functionality as possible, available through a key press and not just an unsupported console command. This is our idea as the first step on the road to a proper first person camera support, please do let us know what you think about this! We don't have cool raytracing reflections... but some players always find a way! (Raytracing reflections courtesy of @Bob Salvador) Since this has been quite a long Dev Diary already, let me pick just a couple of questions to answer: Are you considering adding quests to your game with rewards for completing the quest? It seems to be lacking once you have discovered all the islands and caves. No exactly “quests”, but we’re already giving the game some sort of “story” where you will be rewarded as you go through it. When are horses going to be "fun"? Good question. We’ve had new animations ready for some time now, and we know how to make horses more fun, but because many more important things that need fixing came up, this was put on hold. It is, however, in the 2019 roadmap. We will talk about that soon. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

@Indian Chief You're welcome The patch has already been released - can you please confirm if it fixed the problem on your side? Thanks!

We have been able to localize the issue, are working on the fix right now and will be deploying a patch as soon as it's fixed. We're sorry for the incovenience.

Thanks for letting us know! We're already looking into it. In the meantime can you please tell us if the issue still persists?

Hey there fellow ylanders, We're almost there with the update (actually we've managed to sneak in some more goodies as you will see quite soon in the changelog) - in the meantime we can discuss another very important feature of the upcoming update 0.12 “Smooth Sailing” - the camera. We have implemented a brand new system (yes, we’ve implemented a completely new system, all the original code was removed), and as a result, a lot of issues have been fixed and many features now work much better - from the overall "feeling", to solving various situations where the camera behaved in a less than ideal way. There are tons of small improvements, which you may not notice right away, but we're sure that after playing for a bit you'll realize that you don't have to "fight" the camera anymore. Moving your character around now feels much more smooth due to better camera dynamics, and you should no longer experience camera stuttering while quickly moving (usually falling) the avatar. Also, the camera now doesn’t clip through terrain and objects. We have also done improvements to vehicle cameras, so controlling ships and (especially) cars now feels better. We have some plans to improve the ship camera even further, but it will have to wait at least till 0.13. Standing in the corner while looking into the room in 0.11 (left) and 0.12 (right) One of the biggest problems with the 3rd person camera is moving around in tight spaces, where your character can obstruct what you see, especially when standing close to walls with your back. You'll see that this has been improved substantially. There are obviously many things where the first person camera works better, and we’ve promised you a special mode that would help you in situations where you used to rely on the said first person camera (that we removed temporarily). Well, you will find this mode present in the update 0.12. We call it "Interaction Camera Mode". You can turn it on and off at any point by pressing the Camera mode change (default C). This mode will stay active as long as you don’t move around (turning around is obviously fine) or start attacking. You will see everything from the first person perspective and have a cursor visible in the middle of the screen, which lets you easily interact with even tiny objects in the scene. You can also activate this mode even during building or while driving a car or sailing a ship, which is very handy. While we understand that this can’t fully replace the first person camera mode, our tests have shown this mode to be very useful - and we believe you will see it the same way. And now for your questions: Any new clothing items coming? Not before 1.0. A lot of new clothing will be released in post 1.0 along with certain updates. How about the scale widget in the editor? Are you considering the ability to scale different objects? Being able to scale (at least non-animated objects) is among one of the most wanted features. We are already discussing all possible options. I would like to suggest if we could have a voting contest on future costumes? That is a very good point, we can surely do that. Or, if you have any idea about what you'd like to see in the game, just let us know right away (be aware, though, that we have to respect existing IPs ) That’s it for now. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and stay classy!

Hey there fellow ylanders, just like the last time, today we pick a specific topic that we'll cover in-depth. This time we'll talk about all the improvements related to ships and sea in general that you will notice in update 0.12. Pretty much ever since we added ships in the game there have been some related, annoying issues present. Firstly, let's talk about multiplayer issues. Let me quote Filip "Buckey" Krijt, our programmer who worked on the fixes and improvements: "Ships are a major part of Ylands, and sailing from yland to yland has always felt pretty cool in SP, but was tainted with the unpredictable danger of becoming shark food in MP. Basically, character movement on ships was not properly synchronized, so over time, the client would see their character in a totally different position than where he actually was on the server, and would eventually fall overboard. This was done because ships can only be correctly simulated and moved on the server, so the client’s character movement calculation would and the clialways be wrong,ent character would constantly be moved to new positions by the server – the lack of complete synchronization here, while annoying, was perceived as the lesser of two evils. To solve this, we have integrated the notion of being attached to a ship into our network synchronization system, with an attached object now using position relative to that of the ship – effectively enabling the server to accurately tell the client where on the ship (instead of in the world) it currently is, and the client being able to simulate reasonably from there. Overall, we think this is a solid improvement and hope that, together with the ship physics and wave simulation movement improvements, it will make sailing in MP much, much more enjoyable for you!" Yland Belle ship by Weezle (workshop) Another problem was that ships were getting capsized by small objects, things were getting teleported away, and lot of other interesting situations. With the upcoming update the ships have been re-calibrated, and so these situations should not happen anymore. The improvements we made have brought some other positive aspects as well, which never hurts, does it (smile). You should be able to unstuck your ship by moving backwards with more ease . While moving cars on ships still remains to be implemented, you can now transport horses. Having ships consisting of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of custom blocks had a massive impact on game performance, regardless of whether the ships were moving or not, whether it was in a single or multiplayer. In 0.12 this problem has been resolved. The way ships (and cars, for that matter) are constructed has slightly changed. When you drop a ship hull in the scene, the ship is, by default, in what we call a "construction mode". It is absolutely static, can't be moved around, and so on. You can't leave the construction mode unless you have at least the bare minimum of what your ship needs in order to start moving around. Once you leave the construction mode, all the blocks you put on your ship get optimized so that don't affect the game's performance. This optimization process can take up to several seconds if your ship consists of a large number of blocks. If you'll want to edit your ship later, you can always enter the construction mode again, perform all your changes, and exit it again. Ship of the Line by Georgecrushington (workshop) But wait, there's more! * There are larger waves at the sea now, so sailing is much more fun - we're sure you're going to like it. * We have fixed the very ugly glitch where it was possible to look below the water surface without seeing the underwater, visual effect * We have eliminated the effect the wind direction had on ships' speed, because the wind direction wasn't indicated clear enough, and until we found a way to do so, it was confusing for many players. The ships now feel much more responsive than before. Also let's take a bit of tie to answer some of your questions: The UI looks nice. But taking up the whole screen can be problematic, especially the inventory, if you are currently being attacked by something while you are in there. It has been requested in the past to make the outside bits less opaque so you can still see a bit. Is this in the plans? We understand that this is an issue. Ylands is complex game that requires quite a complex UI - but we agree that it's important that you shouldn't completely lose awareness about what's going on around you so we want to make UI transparent enough so that you still have some idea what's going on around your character. Will the new UI finally stop disabling me from seeing advanced items when I join a multiplayer map? We are not entirely sure what you mean by this? Is this related to crafting some way? Are you able to see things you believe you shouldn't have access to? I'd love to see a detailed list of what is coming out for the 0.12 update -- I find all the little sneak peaks a bit hard to tie together. (maybe next week DD, could be a collected list of 0.12 "resources"?) That is a good point. We'll discuss how to handle this in the best way. Maybe we could have a sticky forum post where all the features would appear as they are announced. That's all for now. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and stay classy!

Thanks for all the questions, guys, keep them coming - we will answer all of those those in Friday's DD and will reply to any follow--up questions below the post.

Hi guys! Thanks for the feedback (questions not directly related to this DD we will answer as a part of this Friday's DD - that way more people will see the answers since not everyone follows the discussion below the post) Recipes getting reset: I see now, thanks a lot! We'll definitely look into this Wind removal: this isn't permanent, but the flags showing the wind direction weren't enough and less experienced players were getting confused by ships suddenly coming to a stop etc. (yes, the way the wind changed was one of the issues). When we have some nice visual indication of the wind and there's better logic behind the wind change, we will put it back in the game. Also can we optimize boats made in the editor or in the main game in the past? Yes, you just need to enter the construction mode and exit it once for the ship to get optimized.

Hey there, fellow ylanders. Today I would like to tell you the about the direction we’re planning to take after 1.0 when it comes to Ylands as a platform - namely, features that Creators will benefit from the most, features that will allow them to keep coming up with more and more custom games. Many of these features won’t come as a surprise, but it’s important for you to understand that what you see now is just the beginning of the journey. We are aware that currently a lot of the quite basic features are either missing or not working as they should, so we will definitely fix those - with many of those fixes happening before 1.0. Our ultimate goal has always been to provide creators with the means necessary to make games across any genre. To allow that, we will be introducing the following features to the Editor (with many more to come): * A more flexible camera system that allows the creation of static game cameras, the ability to animate them or even to attach dynamic cameras to objects other than the player * The ability to evaluate players' input * Have access to / ability to modify more things about game entities * Have control over the game's music * Adding features that will make the process of creating games even easier and less prone to errors (versioning system, etc.). We understand that these features are crucial and players and creators used to other platforms (like Roblox for example) expect no less from us. Yet another view of the amazing job done by the P1 team - Castle Hunt. There’s one more thing I would like to talk about in this Dev Diary. With us finalizing and polishing the game, we have more and more work to do and due to this, I haven’t been able to talk to you as much as I used to. I feel, however, that this special relationship we have is very important (for both to you guys and to us), so I will be delegating some work to others, so I have more time to discuss things more in-depth with you. From your side, one of the things that will change will be the fact that some of the Dev Diaries - in addition to the ones I write - will be written by our Marketing Guy (tm) “Marci” Marton and some by our beloved Community Manager Ane. Also, we will be looking more into specific things, providing you with interesting photos, sneak peeks, spoilers and such, instead of trying to superficially cover a lot at once. We are positive that you’re going to like it . That’s it for now and we will see you in a week. Have a great time and stay classy, ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders. In the last Dev Diary (and the one before that) we talked about our plans for the period before we leave Early Access. Starting today we will discuss with you what we’re planning to add to Ylands after the release (version 1.0), still in 2019. So buckle up, because I think these Dev Diaries will be to your liking! This may obviously raise the question “When are you going to release Ylands 1.0”? The (usually very unpopular ) reply is “when it’s ready.” It will definitely take a few more months and a few updates to make sure we are ready to present it to the general public. I can promise, however, that we will tell you more as soon as we can. Let me tell you about the directions where we want to go beyond 1.0. One of the first things we would like to do beyond 1.0 is focus on how much fun you can have at your existing yland. In general we want you to have much more fun farming and fishing. To give you things you will like to return to and watch them grow. Things that will reward you for your hard work and will make your settlement more unique. (Stardew Valley anyone?) We have also mentioned many times that we will be adding a whole new world for you to explore and tame. We’ve already put quite a lot of effort into it, but it was put on hold in favor of fixing and polishing the game before 1.0. This means that this new environment will come sometime after the release. But to give you a little teaser, I can tell you already that it will have new biomes, weapons, armors, monsters, recipes and much more! Can things get prettier? Hardly (Amazing Castle Hunt courtesy of The P1 team) In the Q&A sections you asked a lot about flying vehicles and carts. We try to meet your needs and wishes, and so we will do our best to give you those to play with. On a more general note, in the future we would like to add much much more machinery and give you options to create ylandium factories, automation, and infrastructure (Factorio anyone?). There are also plans for some very unique features in 2019 that we would rather not present too early, because they haven’t been done before (as far as we know) - so first we need to do some testing, making sure we can pull them off. But if we can (and personally, I’m more than confident about that), they will add countless of hours of fun to the Explore mode. Finally (for now), we are also planning on expanding some existing aspects of the game (protective barriers anyone?) and improve areas that we believe should be much more interesting (the underwater life, for instance). Oh, and we want to work on features that we temporarily disabled, like the first person camera and the water simulation. We will, of course, provide you with more details in the upcoming months. That’s it for today, ylanders. Have a great weekend and, as always, stay classy!

Hey there, fellow ylanders. Today we’ll talk about what tools and improvements we’re planning to provide Creators with before Ylands 1.0 gets released. If you're not interested in creating your games, you can skip this Dev Diary, but if you do, we think you will find the following very interesting. As a sidenote - this week we were presented with some of the games the P1 guys are working on, and some of the things we saw were just breathtaking. Kudos to everyone involved! Update 0.12 Inside the Editor you will be able to create maps like the ones that we generate for the Explore mode. Another cool feature is that it will be possible to add multiple objects to labels via multi-editing (this probably sounds like dark magic to those who are not familiar with labels, but those who do will love it (wink)) We’ve added a brand new Game Logic and made large improvements to existing ones, so you will be able to place impassable barriers to prevent players from getting to (or out of) specific places. Speaking of zone game logics - we made them dynamic, so it is now possible to change their position, rotation and size on the go. And last but not least, the Event Listener has been MASSIVELY improved, so we have added many new event types and it's now even possible to set multiple events for one listener. Visual scripting will be much more fun with a support for "For loops", "Break" and "Continue" instructions. You will have control over energy linking and you'll be able to dynamically change player roles and teams. Process custom player console commands. Perform string and math operations with flexible number of operands. All this and usability improvements as a cherry on top. New Visual Scripting instructions make the scripting much more powerful. 0.12+ The absolute majority of improvements coming with 0.12 are based on your direct feedback, and we will keep providing you with things you need to make great games before 1.0 is released. Because future changes and updates are interconnected with your feedback, it’s difficult to predict what the exact changes will be - however, there are two larger features we know we would like to implement before 1.0. Right now, moving (or rotating) objects around dynamically via script is very painful. It requires a lot of effort, and as every operation is performed every frame, it takes some toll on the performance (and this has to be done for each of the objects you want to move). So to combat this, we would like to implement what we are calling Dynamic groups. This will let you organize objects into hierarchies and link them together - so that in order to move a lot of objects at once you will only need to move their parent object. At the same time, instead of animating the movement yourself, we want you to be able to just say “move this there in X seconds.” We have seen a lot of your creations where we think this feature alone will save you countless of hours of scripting. The second thing we would like to add is a GUI editor. Right now you can script a very primitive GUI for your games, but it’s not very intuitive and it's very limited. We want to give you something where you will be able to see the GUI right as you’re designing it. We will give you ways of evaluating events like buttons being pressed from the script, so you will be able to create your own panels with custom functionality. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

Hey there, fellow ylanders. It’s time to start talking about what 2019 holds for Ylands. Let me start with what to expect before we get to Ylands 1.0. Once we cover this, we’ll move on to what comes after 1.0. Today we start with features that Players may find interesting - later we’ll discuss what Creators can look forward to. Update 0.12 Based on your feedback, we have made many changes to the Main menu (and some minor improvements are still planned). Along with this, we are reworking the ingame UI, taking into account both the feedback from new players (“I’m not sure how to do this / where to find this”) as well as those familiar with the game (making some actions easier or more accessible, adding features like auto-arrange etc.). Also, since the UI has been completely rewritten, this will get rid of some of the remaining ugly issues. The new Main menu is not only about updated visuals, but many actions are now more intuitive and easier to find. Several months ago we mentioned Costumes, which will also be added into the game. You can think of those as a way of completely changing the visual of your character to something cute or quirky (or both). You will be able to obtain them from the Store and as special rewards. Additionally, the new 3rd person camera system we’re working on will make quite a difference, both when it comes to the general feel and handling problematic situations. What goes without saying is that there will be further fixing and polishing. 0.12 will fix a lot of issues related to using ships and performance issues they caused, along with tons of other fixes and cool improvements. 0.12+ As we've hinted before, the team is already working on things that are planned to be added after 0.12. We will be doing improvements to the Explore Mode, which are possible because of the improved AI and, especially, pathfinding. While we’re still experimenting a lot with the AI (and combat to some extent), the current results from the updated pathfinding look very promising, and even though it still needs a bit more testing and won’t be present in 0.12, we are positive that it will make the survival element much more fun. Caves present on ylands will become much more interesting (and dangerous) places with great rewards, and it will pay to seek them out on all of the ylands. We plan to add “mini-bosses” - somewhat stronger, visually different enemies, that guard some places of interest - especially those found in the caves. Many enjoy the game when playing with friends. To make this easier for those, we are working on a Friends list that will let you manage your buddies, have instant information about what game they’re playing, and join them or ask them to join you. Eventually, this would be linked to various game features (such as the protection barrier). Plus to be able to communicate with your friends better, we will be introducing a much more powerful chat system. These are some of the major improvements we’re planning to add. Please note that I'm using the words “some” because these are not all of the improvements planned, but some are not yet ready to be announced. And “major” because, along with every update, come dozens of small to medium improvements which are too many to be mentioned here. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

Hey there, fellow ylanders. Last week we answered some of your questions regarding the game, and in the same thread there were some further (very valid) questions raised. Initially, I had some other topics in mind, but I feel that answering those is more important, so let’s do this today and move what was initially planned to the next Dev Diary. Let’s go over the things you've suggested or asked (and how we are planning to tackle them): Remove the HUGE number of options for new users joining servers -- too many options and people feel overwhelmed We agree with you that it should be very easy to get into a MP game (or start a new one). Not only we’ve already made some changes to the Main menu, which you will get to see in 0.12, but we're also planning on removing or hiding some additional options that we believe no one actually uses or which are too confusing. Have only 3-4 official servers where people start, one in each region Again - we agree that it’s more important to have fewer interesting online places where people can hang out with each other instead of half-empty (at best) unsupervised servers. We are actually already working on something that we believe will help this a lot - something we now are internally calling Playground and which we hope to present with our other plans soon. I think the emphasis on Gold Rush was a mistake Gold Rush was a lesson we had to learn. For reasons that are not important here, it had to be created in a much shorter time than orignally expected. There is no proper introduction to the game, many features can feel confusing... that being said, I still believe that the game holds promise, but it needs more time to become intuitive and fun. However, I believe that it succeeded completely as a proof that we can create a Multiplayer game for a larger number of players just with the help of Visual Scripting - as everything, from the actual gameplay to the MP lobby, was created using the Editor. So for all intents and purposes, as a technical test, it was a success. Ylands gameplay decisions are made in a room that looks almost like this one! (Executive Board Room courtesy of @Deadeye_Rob) Start people on different islands to reduce chaos This would be a problem. There are several plans that we have for Explore, and one of them is to make the ylands themselves more distinct - both when it comes to the resources they hold and with the enemies themselves (the further you go from your initial yland, the tougher and more rewarding will get). Actually tell new users to seek out private servers that are a bit more well-moderated in loadings screens as a tip There’s no denying that the community support makes or breaks a game, so having a community moderated servers is definitely a good approach and we have big plans to make sure this kind of cooperation between us is nurtured and highlighted. The rest are nice suggestions, mostly to make sure that the players have easier access to quality Ylands content, and there’s really nothing that can be said against that. We’ll definitely discuss that in the future as well. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

Hey there, fellow ylanders. Some of you have asked when we’ll discuss what we have planned for the rest of 2019. We are still fine-tuning some of our plans, but we’ll be able to present you with some information really soon. Let’s start with some good news. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve made some very nice progress with fixing the ships (and even improving how they sail) and you'll be able to see the results in the 0.12 update. We are now testing the first version of the rewritten pathfinding which, when we’re done with it, will enable us to make the Explore mode much more interesting. As you can see, debugging a pathfinding system is a ton of fun We have made a long list of features and issues which the new Ylands players find confusing or difficult to understand, and which made many leave the game without even realizing that there’s more to it than picking up stuff and crafting very primitive objects. We will be going through various actions that are not intuitive and making them more user-friendly. Also, we are making sure the radial menu becomes much more useful than it currently is. We are further tweaking the combat based on the feedback received, so that it is faster and snappier in 0.12 while retaining some tactical elements. More and more things are becoming accessible via Visual Scripting in the Editor, so Creators will have much more creative freedom in the upcoming update than ever before. We also understand that GUI still needs a lot of love as well, and very soon we will be able to show you some images which we hope you’ll like. And that isn't everything by far. Now let's spend some time over your questions: Are farming activities and animals planned? Chickens, cows and such. Yes. Not before 1.0, but this is actually one of the first things we plan to add after the game is released. Are procedural terrain brushes planned? We are definitely not happy with the current terraforming options. The brushes we currently have don't allow the creation of natural looking terrain. Also, the newly painted terrain doesn't allow a good enough blending with the existing terrain. These things are already in our 2019 roadmap. Any plans to make the power barriers cooperative? Can we lock them and give keys to friends for example? Even though this is a topic for another time, I think it's quite obvious that what Ylands heavily lacks and needs before 1.0 is a better way for friends to play and communicate among themselves. Since nothing like that has ever been done in any game, let's call it - I don't know - a "friends list" (wink). We will be adding this to the game, and once we have this, various in-game features will be linked to this. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

@RedEagle_P1. Why would this make me angry? If anything I salute you for taking your time and creating this analysis that has many good, valid points.Unfortunately I don't have that much time to go into details now, but I would love to address those more thoroughly. In case I'm not able to do it earlier, you have my word I will at least dedicate this Friday's Dev Diary to discussing these. (spoiler alert: we see many things the same way you do). Getting a feedback like this is extremely important, so thanks again!

Hi guys. I'm sorry that I didn't get to reply sooner. @bb cakes_P1 Sure thing. I can definitely see us doing something about those sails Actually these things are something that are solvable without having first person camera (Assassins Creed Origins - just from the top of my head) @TheSparkPlug I'm pretty sure that improvements we're working on won't make things worse - those are pretty much standard features used in in many modern games. @RedEagle_P1. We definitely have some more plans for the barriers. I don't have any ETA for that but, more we're already working on giving creators more control over ylands creation.

That's, unfortunately, not an option - having a message visible the whole time doesn't solve anything as long as the mode is accessible in the very same way as other, finished features. A fully published game is something completely different than EA version. I honestly don't remember ever seeing a full release of a game where an important feature (we do know that this is an important feature, no question about it) would be half-baked with a "unsupported" note. Fully published means all present features finalized. If we can't pull off something in time, it shouldn't be there. Also imagine this - we do this, a lot of creators start working on games requiring fps camera (we know some of you already have) and then, we we come out with the final implementation of the first person camera it might work in a slightly different way to the old one. Maybe in a tiny way, but big enough to break some specific games. That's something that must not happen once we release the game. Bear in mind that the current state isn't in any way final - the new camera (to be released in the next update) should make moving around in tight spaces better, the feature I mentioned in this DD will make a lot of things easier as well. There's always some space for improvement, but there's one thing that we won't do and that is put something that is not good enough into Ylands 1.0. To put it very bluntly - releasing Ylands 1.0 without 1st person camera is not such a big issue, because it's not that important in Explore (and will be even less with the improvements I mentioned), creators can create games that that don't depend on it (while maybe putting the rest on hold if they really can't be played even after the changes we mentioned) and things can get only better later, when the camera is re-introduced. It's not ideal, but it's no tragedy either. Asking players to pay the full price for a full release of a game that has unsupported, broken features present... is. I understand that you may see the situation in a different way, you would plan/do things differently and we respect that, but this is how we see it. That being said, it surely isn't a reason for considering this topic closed - I just feel the discussion will be more relevant if we have it once 0.12 is released and the planned improvements are released. (and regardless of how you feel about this topic - have a great weekend! )

Hey there, fellow ylanders. I hope that the beginning of the new year has found you well and you are ready and willing for new adventures. This is the year when we will be releasing Ylands 1.0 - and later this month we would like to tell you more about what you can expect, and what updates and features we would like to release in the following 12 months. In the next Dev Diary, we will address once again some of the specific issues and features, while today we’ll concentrate on the questions you sent us over our social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram) as well as the questions you asked on game / Steam Ylands forums. Here’s what's keeping you awake at nights: OS X release for Christmas please? While we understand that there’s a significant number of players who wants to play Ylands on Macs, the truth is that the number isn’t large enough for us to implement this version at this moment. Before we consider having the OSX version of Ylands, the game needs to be polished and become somewhat more “established”. Any plans to add railways and carts? Let’s just say that you shouldn’t miss some of our upcoming Dev Diaries where we'll be discussing this (among with a lot of other cool things). Will it be possible to have better tools to navigate because it's a pain to find new ylands. And some kind of visible barrier so one knows when to stop looking for the islands. Definitely. In 0.11 we’ve introduced a new feature where nearby ylands can be seen on the compass. This however, is more of a temporary solution. We are working on improvements that would eventually allow us to show ylands at large distances and improved maps. The fact that there is no clear indication when you're leaving the area where the ylands are located (you should at least get a warning right now, but it’s neither intuitive nor very elegant solution) is something we indeed need to fix. There are so many stories around us - like the one about Philip and his Happy Pets store (Happy Pets courtesy of @Spyler.X) When will you release the offline mode? Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any progress regarding this topic - we still don’t plan to work on this before we release Ylands 1.0 (long story short: while this is an important feature to many players, our priority remains to deliver Ylands in the best possible shape in 2019, and any non-critical complicated tasks will have to wait for that). Is there (or will there be) abilities to freeze freely placed items? Yes. We understand that often it’s quite annoying how easy it is to unintentionally pick up something carefully placed and positioned. Few months back we internally discussed a way of being able to “glue” such objects so that they can’t be (or at least not easily) removed, but it was put on hold in favor of other features. We definitely plan to return to this. Will the first person mode be supported again? The first person view as you know it from other games won’t be added before Ylands 1.0. However, in the next week’s DD we will present you with something that you will very likely find handy in most of the situations where first person camera was (or still is) helpful or even required. We do understand that such situations still exist and don't consider this matter closed in the least. Will you be fixing the lag on ships? This is the biggest issue with the game. I would say fix this before you add anything new. We’re already working on this and we believe the next update 0.12 will fix this. Any chance we will see musical instruments with or without an ABC notation system? We would definitely love to have this (I still remember very fondly how much fun I had with this in Lord of The Rings Online ). But there's one more thing that we would like to share with you in this week's Dev Diary - some time ago we have started working on the Ylands Wiki. At first we have focused on Visual Scripting, so there's not that much else in there yet, but that will definitely change during this year. Very soon we will be posting a document about how you can help us with that - in the meantime go and check it out yourself at https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Ylands. That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

an estimate of when 0.12 will be released- we learned the hard way not to give any estimates, but at the same time I don't want you to expect this update to be released any time soon. Since 0.12 will be a very large update (note that that they get larger and larger) once again with more fixes and improvements than ever before, it will take some more time, especially since we will be doing a lot of additional MP testing etc. Because of that I think it would be reasonable to expect it around late February. Will there be a better way to aim cannons? Yes, that's one of the situations we would like to fix (I will tell you more this Friday) an official wiki. Hopefully I can help with the creation of it We do hope that in future this wiki will be mostly edited by the community, with us providing all the support. We just want to create few topics (templates) for every major section, so that the editors have something to work with while making sure the formatting stays consistent etc. We will create a specific FAQ covering this later this week. consider also players who wants the game to be a bit more challenging The challenges Ylands presents you with at this point are pretty poor. The game was always meant to be more difficult (with few options that you can set it to make it easier). We won't be making it into a hardcore survival sim, where you have to spend most of your time looking for food or fixing your wounds - this part we're quite happy with. What will change before 1.0, though, is the level of danger you're in at certain times. Nights will be much more dangerous. Venturing into caves even more so (but also more rewarding). There will be enough incentives for players to travel more among the ylands and explore. Which gets me to the second part of you question - the ylands showing in the compass area is only a temporary solution. We added that because we realize that lot of players either could find many of the ylands or, unfortunately, haven't realized there were more than one yland in the game. This is really just a quick fix, which I believe will be removed once we're ready to give players more realistic and engaging means of finding another ylands. That being said there's definitely no harm in looking into it and check if even this temporary solution can't be made a bit more challenging.

Hi there, fellow ylanders! Well, what do you know - Christmas time is once again upon us. If you‘re among those who celebrate it, let us all wish that you spend this special time with your close ones (if you manage to survive the regular shopping Armageddon), eat, rest, eat some more, and play some games! Since the team will take some much-needed rest from this weekend till the end of the year, you may find that your requests and questions on forums stay unanswered for a longer time - but we will still check it and will be ready to help you if something critical comes up. But until the Ylands factory engines stop for maintenance, they‘re still going strong. One of the things we‘re working on these days is the long promised fix that should remedy the issues with ships. Saying this is a "fix“ is a little bit like saying that a nuclear plant is a slightly more sophisticated steam engine. A lot of things had to be changed, improved, or rewritten so that this issue (or group of issues) would be eliminated. Let me tell you a bit more about what‘s causing this, what we‘re doing about it and how it‘s going to affect the gameplay. Basically what happens is that whenever you build on a ship‘s hull, we want the objects to have colliders so that your avatar can‘t walk through your cabin walls, tables and more. The problem is that Unity isn‘t such a big friend of the idea of hundreds of blocks, each with its own collider, placed on a moving platform. As you might have guessed, the same goes for cars, but there the situation is quite better because you usually don‘t create your cars out of hundreds of blocks. The solution is to combine the colliders into few larger ones so that the general shape of the ship (or, more specifically, the part placed over the hull) would remain the same. That is not a trivial operation (especially when you need the number of resulting colliders to be as low as possible). But this is something that is a problem that programmers have been working on and have made a really nice progress so far. The second problem is that you don‘t want your ship to stay this way forever, because at some point you may want to remove a block here and there, replace it with something else etc. At that point the combined colliders need to be broken down back again into the original state. And on top of that, this operation takes some time, it‘s not instant. Have a classy Winter Break, everyone! So what we‘re going to do about this is that we will provide you with a (single-click) way to "optimize“ your ship whenever you're done building it. Within the next few seconds, all the colliders will be optimized and you will be good to go and sail the sea with almost no impact to performance (which is currently easily dozens of fps). When you feel like building some more or changing what you built so far, you will be able to "de-optimize“ the ship, perform any changes necessary, and bake it again. This "optimization“, however, won‘t be important only for ships and cars. The Unity engine has a limit as to how many colliders can be active in the scene, and it‘s 250 000. That may seem like a lot, but if you imagine a large city and think how many bricks (=colliders) one small wall has, you‘ll see that this limit can be reached pretty fast. So we will let you (in the Editor - unlike with ships and cars where you will be able to do this in Explore as well) optimize whole buildings, which will effectively fix this issue. That however isn’t the only thing we’re fixing about ships – as you are well aware, ships have had their share of MP problems in the past, most notably the disagreements between the client and the server on where exactly a character should be. This would cause teleportation and, more often than not, unfortunate man overboard accidents. Starting with the next update, it should be smooth sailing from here on out, with the disagreements happening much less frequently, if at all. And finally, we’re making overall sailing improvements across the board – better ocean wave simulation, smooth wind intensity transitions between ylands, and different weather presets… There’s definitely a lot to look forward to! And that‘s it for today! Have a classy Winter Break!