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Aleš Ulm

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Posts posted by Aleš Ulm

  8. Posted

    Making the streams little less obvious was a quick adjustment, so we did it right away :)  .

    Making them invisible unless you hold the linker is something that could potentially effect the gameplay in negative way. While it sounds like a reasonable solution for anyone who's building things like houses, ships etc. where only they live you have to bear in mind that there can be many scenarios where someone without energy linker comes to something energy based and they would have no way of seeing what is levers connected to / it would be difficult to create energy-based puzzles etc.

    On the other hand being able to decide if a newly placed energy stream should be visible when creating it is something that sounds reasonable. We'll discuss that and let you know. Thanks for the idea! :)   

     

  9. Posted

    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! :)

  11. Posted

    Hey there, fellow ylanders!

    This Dev Diary will be rather short because, as you may know, this week we've released the 0.7 "Cheerful Characters" update along with a video Dev Diary summarizing the most important features. In case you missed it you can watch it here:

     


     

    There's actually MUCH more in 0.7 than what we mention in the video (other new features, 120+ issues fixed), so you may want to check the full changelog.

    At this moment there are just a few things I'd like you to know about the upcoming update 0.8 "Meaningful Music". 

    There will be more than just the music, but it is true that 0.8 won't be as feature-rich as 0.7 was. It's because some of the features we're working on are rather complex and need more time than what we have before 0.8 is released, and so they will be released along with 0.9 (just to make sure this doesn't start the hype train, I'll say that these features we'll introduce in 0.9 have nothing to do with the new world expansion, which is planned for a later date :)  ).

    As always, there will be a lot of fixes. The two issues that we hope to fix in 0.8 that we feel deserve to be named above the others are the MP map issue and severe lag/game getting frozen every few minutes because of the autosave.

     

    That's it for now. There will once again be a usual Dev Diary posted next Friday, so until then, as always, have a great time ylanders, and stay classy!

     

    WW_screen15.png


    P.S.  In case you haven't played the updated Wild West game available through our Workshop, give it a try. Not only will you see what is now possible to do with the NPCs but, more importantly, Jasper is always happy to meet someone he can talk to :) 


     

    • Like 2

  12. Posted

    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.

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    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 :) 

  14. Posted

    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).

  15. Posted

    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.

     

  16. Posted

    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.
     

    StarDewValley.jpg
    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! 

    • Like 2
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    • Upvote 1

  17. Posted

    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.

    • Like 2

  20. Posted

    @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.

  21. Posted

    @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!

  22. Posted

    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).

     

    penguins.png
    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!

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 11

  25. Posted

    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.

    • Like 1
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