zarwil

It's difficult to be concise without using some industry jargon hahah ?

For people who don't know much about these things, it is impossible to build software in a sustainable manner without explicitly testing every function and module extensively throughout development, however that's probably not what this post is referring to specifically. I think what this actually means is that BI is adopting a continuous integration pipeline with automated unit tests, as is industry standard (at least in general software development). Basically, individual developers can't run tests that cover the entire code-base every time they make a tiny change, so they are mostly constrained to testing smaller subsets of the code during day-to-day work. After that you hope and pray that the tests are comprehensive enough to cover unexpected interactions with the rest of the code-base. With automated tests in a continuous integration pipeline, you have a dedicated server specifically tasked with running tests for the entire code-base (or perhaps subsets of it). At the end of the day, for instance, any developer can deploy their modified code to the CI-server and be notified with a detailed report whenever the tests are complete. If you don't have a system like this in place, integrating different parts of the software can be an absolute nightmare.

@Mello1223 It's kinda pointless for us to speculate about what's going on here, since we have so little information, but I'm confident in what I wrote. Ideally when designing a distributed system (like a game server with many connected clients), you would only like to transmit the data that is dynamic. From what I figure, all data related to ships (that are moving, not in construction mode) is static, except for the position of the ship. A client only needs to receive the static data once in order to generate and display the ship. The only thing it needs from that point onward is the position of the ship hull, since, again, everything else about the ship is known and can be constructed from static data. This is most likely not how it works in Ylands. In software development, it's critical to think about the time and space complexity of a function or module. Those two terms describe how much slower a function runs as the size of its input grows. In the case with ships in Ylands multiplayer, some computation related to the individual items composing a ship is exploding with input size and tanking the server-client communication. It's baffling to me how this data is even transmitted in the first place, since, like I said, it should be static. The reason(s) why this is happening in Ylands could be anything really. Maybe it's by design to alleviate client computation requirements for slower devices (like, idk, phones), or maybe it's just a case of development complications due to poor code quality (which is often the case in game development, ..or any software development for that matter lol). Edit: To elaborate on this: "Maybe it's by design to alleviate client computation requirements for slower devices (like, idk, phones)", it's entirely possible that this is actually going on, since perhaps the devs wanted to guarantee a certain level of performance for people with poor systems. If this is the case, I hope they reconsider due to the obvious, disastrous, consequences it has had. Instead of guaranteeing less computation for clients, it basically bricks everyone playing on a server if there's one complex ship.

Sure, but graphical processing is done client-side, so that doesn't explain the lag at all IMO. If that were the case, these huge ships would lag in single-player too (which they dont). Everything about the ship (except the position of the core ship part) can be processed client-side. If a client has access to all the data regarding the weld and whatever other components that may be attached to the ship (i.e. relative positions of items etc, which only needs to be sent to a client once), the only thing that needs to be sent over the network is the position of the ship hull. The reason all of this is so weird is that the lag grows with the size of the ship weld, which means something related to that is also being transmitted over the network. I just can't figure out why that would be.

Yeah something is definitely wrong with how ships work in multiplayer. Pretty much the entire ship is composed of a weld right? In other words a ship only consists of a few components that the game needs to keep track of. If the "weld" of a ship is loaded into the memory of each client, there should be barely any data needed to update the position of a ship's entities for each client, right... right? Instead it seems like, right now, data is processed and sent around for every item that comprises the ship (i.e. potentially thousands). I can't think of any other reason why ship lag would increase with the size of the ship weld. There's no reason it should.

Woah I didn't even know about this! I guess that part of my complaint isn't really valid then.

Didn't know how to word it. You know when you have to hold left click and watch a loading bar fill up for each piece of coal you're charging the engine with?

Regarding ships, I have a problem with the steam engines. They simply run dry waaayy too quickly. With the new map size, I'm not even sure if you can traverse the diagonal of a single map without running empty on coal. If you want to keep the game balance the same, keep the same fuel burn, but increase the fuel capacity of the engines (something like 30 coal instead of 7). I also think there should be a quality of life improvement when refueling the engines. Right now, with 4 engines, you need 28 clicks (with a charging bar) as well as having to leave your helm to reach the engines. It's just a drag to travel with steam ships at the moment.

I think the devs are well aware that the game isn't very challenging. Hopefully they get somewhere with enemy ranged attacks.

Should be noted that this thread was posted after working hours on friday, so the devs literally haven't been working since then. I'm sure this bug will be fixed within the next working week. I've also seen an island like this. Literally the only "new" world I've visited since the update had a huge island which stretched beyond the borders of t2he map2. @Nikki Severin Has this bug been acknowledged by the team yet?

I've been designing some structures for my exploration island recently and the current piece is getting worryingly large (I can't break it up into smaller components unfortunately). I reckon there's a risk it will simply brick my game when I try to load it. With that being said, how big have you managed to make your blueprints? The biggest blueprint I've used so far required about 12000 stone+sandstone+logs, and it took about 5 minutes to load into my world if I remember right. I'm curious if anyone of you have made something significantly larger? Edit: Just did a test with the current structure as it is; 15000+ stone, ~4000 sandstone, ~1500 logs. Took about 5 minutes to capture. When I tried to use the blueprint the game instantly crashed. Bummer.

@spiritchaser28 Can you see if a similar blueprint still works now or if it crashes the game? I think blueprints work differently now compared to a few updates ago.

Speaking of which, can we get some more Q&A streams in the future? During the few months we had them the game improved more than any other period imo. I'd like to see a Q&A stream every two months or so for us to check off what's been spoken about before. During the lifetime of this game, promises have been forgotten and the direction of development has been pretty erratic. Things have been pretty good this year, but we should strive towards keeping this level indefinitely. Accountability with your player base is only a good thing imo.

This is so cool! As an idea, could you alter this to work as a placement tool for walls? Love it!

On the topic of myster ylands, would it be possible to add more exciting rewards? Anything other than exploration points would be nice. I'd love to see unique weapons or tools as rewards, or perhaps treasures.

@spiritchaser28 Yesss, please for the love of god add these blocks to explore!

Something I'd like to add is the unbearable lag you get when a large blueprint you're trying to place intersects with some other building. It makes it impossible to decompose creations into modular units that are meant to snap together.

Strange, reminds me of this.

Since the devs plan to improve ships and sailing in a future update (1.9 I believe they said?) I should mention something that has bugged me for ages. The problem: The sails in Ylands are tiny in proportion to the ships in the game. The worst offender being the catamaran sail... Look at this image of a real catamaran boat here: ...and a catamaran with its sail in ylands here: The sail looks laughably small, and that's with an unmodified hull part. If you start adding a structure and make the ship more massive, it's much worse. With the largest sails in ylands, this is still a problem. For a sguare-rigged ship, it's normal for the sails to be significantly wider than the hull. Let's say 1.5-2x the width of the hull. The largest sail in ylands is barely wider than the wooden hulls, and if you make a larger hull by yourself, you have no hope of making the sails look reasonably wide and proportional. As a reference for sail width: Then there is the issue of lack of variety. There are no jib-sails in Ylands. Those are the triangular sails placed at the front of the boat/ship, or in-between masts. (I understand the issue with adding this type of sail, and I haven't figured out a great way of solving those issues, so I can forgive this one...) ...And there are no gaff sails (the type of squared off sails attached to the masts in the ship above, and the boat below. Gaff sails would be a great addition to the game, as they are used with ships and boats of all types and sizes. My suggestions: In general there is a great lack of variety, both in terms of size and type, but I think you could help the situation greatly by adding two types of sails to the game. 1. Introduce a new viking longboat ship type, with a really wide square sail, as seen below. This sail could then be stacked several times when building ships, in order to construct larger square rigged masts. 2. Introduce a gaff sail, as discussed above. Make it slightly larger than the sail area of the junk ship sail, and you're golden With these two additions, you can keep to the cartoonish style of the game, while still allowing for some decent freedom when it comes to more advanced builds.

@ocnoglittle @spiritchaser28 I'm thinking in technical terms here, at some level in the engine/code the water physics have to be "triggered" to apply to the character, so at some level it should be possible to change when a player is affected by water. It's not at all certain that this is something that can be "hacked" in the way I suggested, but it's worth a shot to ask.

That's what I meant by disabling water effects

@spiritchaser28 @ocnoglittle That's why we build custom hulls Regarding having space inside the ship hulls @Nikki Severin, is it possible for the devs to disable water effects for a player during a game? If they can, why not have hollow hulls which you can enter from a "hatch", and once the player has entered through the hatch, the game makes water invisible and disables its effects? The player is technically still in the water, but he doesn't know it. As long as there are no windows in the hull, this would work fine.

Since jib sails hang off of lines, rather than being directly connected to a spar, you have a problem of deciding where those lines should be connected. Should you have a new part with a fixed mast and bowsprit, with a jib sail connected between the two? That wouldn't be very flexible for creators. If you stray away from a fixed part, you pretty much have to introduce a whole new system for connecting rope and placing the sail between two arbritrary points, and that's not something we can reasonably expect imo. One thing that could work for advanced creators is to have a part like the one described above, but have a checkmark in the part properties in the editor where you can disable the mast and bowsprit from being visible. The devs already have tools to change the hitbox of a certain part (sails for instance already change their hitbox when the sail is activated), but this option would have to be hidden in the editor. This would be a pretty big workaround for a niche audience in the editor, so again, you can't expect a solution like this.

I'm a bit confused here, what does this mean exactly? Are "assets" gonna be paid content packs or what?

Speaking of torches, you really need to work on overall lighting in this game. Light sources stack on top of each other and pretty much blind you if you have a few workstations lit during the night. Torches and lanterns also barely light up your path in a cave, so you can't see anything. There is no light source to my knowledge which works in the water, which means it's impossible at times to see under water when you're exploring a random encounter. Those are the most annoying parts anyways.