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WijkagentAdrie

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Everything posted by WijkagentAdrie

  1. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #214 Update Lore

    This sounds like good news, I wish you guys the best of luck achieving your goals for the coming year!
  2. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #213 Feedback, please!

    I filled it out but I don't know why. There have been so many good suggestions from me, from others that have gone ignored. I feel that in general most features are lacking/incomplete, leading to a lack of possibilities. Crafting has been dumbed down multiple times to make things easier, which means there's less to do. Also creativity is something which happens mainly in the editor, whilst in exploration you lose 99% of the possibilities of placing items exactly where you want to make stunning things there. I think for this game to be worthwhile in the long term on larger servers the general game mechanics need to be easy to use but hard to master, like in Minecraft. The core game is easy to play and have fun whilst allowing advanced players to do amazing stuff with redstone, keeping the game challenging.
  3. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #202 New Beginnings

    I'll use this as my wish list for ships. I think the exact ship in the screenshot is my biggest issue with ships: 99% of ships in Ylands look like this. Currently ships don't allow for enough creativity. I've come up with solutions and ideas many times before, but I'm pretty sure that's been a few years ago, so I'll put it down again: Modular hulls, so we can have different length ships. Also different styles and different widths. They would have a bow, stern and (multiple) middle pieces. Different sail types, basically square vs fore-and-aft sails. They should have different sailing characteristics. Make the wind not change every 2 seconds. Currently wind doesn't achieve anything, there's no purpose on changing the heading of the ship to be more efficient as it will change again soon. There should also be some form of weather prediction. Make hulls displace water, i.e. make it so we can have useful interior space in hulls. Overall the idea is that it will allow us to be more creative. Also for more advanced players they can optimize both their ships and their sailing.
  4. WijkagentAdrie

    POSSIBLY Bigger and more varied sails

    I've pointed it out multiple times already that there are multiple other games which do this, even with completely custom/bespoke player built hulls. There's been loads of other suggestions about ships already anyways but nothing seems to ever come from it.
  5. WijkagentAdrie

    POSSIBLY Bigger and more varied sails

    I've written multiple posts/topics about what ships need as a fix to make them more fun. Please add the following: - Modular hulls, existing of multiple pieces, so you can make boats of varying lengths. - Hollow hulls: please make it possible to go inside the hulls. - Make wind/sailing actual fun. The wind (used to?) change every 2 seconds. Make it so that different sail types have different speeds on the wind direction and make the wind steadier. This way sailing actually becomes a skill. It would be nice to have some sort of craftingstation/encounter quite lategame which will let you predict the weather including the wind.
  6. WijkagentAdrie

    1.6: Trading Territories

    I love seeing my suggestions make it into the game - the building station really sounds awesome and like it will make building in survival worthwhile, I'll check it out ASAP. Does the building station also support dragging (and thus clipping) blocks? This would give people creative building power in survival games and thus being able to build really satisfying homes and other builds.
  7. WijkagentAdrie

    Aircraft suggestion topic

    Hello, After getting boats and with cars soon arriving, I thought let's look at what vehicle we can have next. The logical follow up would be aircraft I believe Aircraft can globally be divided into gliders, airships, helicopters and airplanes. Due to the great open seas connecting all relatively small islands, airships wouldn't make much sense (also due their massive size!) at the moment, and gliders and helicopters would have limited functionality as well. That's why I've decided to come up with some concepts on how to make airplanes work in Ylands. My core idea for airplanes is to be easy to learn and difficult to master. To do this there should be certain types of airplane parts, semi realistic physics to make building a basic plane easy, yet making an advanced (fast, big or efficient) more challenging to players. If your airplane looks like an airplane it should at least be flyable. 1) Physics Starting with the physics: Basic concepts of drag, lift, thrust and center of mass, lift and thrust should apply. To make flying more "approachable" the air density should be very high. This will increase drag and lift greatly, reducing the maximum speed of aircraft and reducing the speed at which they take off and stall at. The air should become thinner when going higher to allow higher speeds up in the sky where there's nothing to crash into Engine power and lift should also decrease with altitude to create a ceiling which is still fairly low to prevent flying very high. Different engines should have different power output, different ideal RPM's and different fuel consumption. For propellers there should be fixed pitch and variable pitch. Mixing the right engines and props to an airplane should make it more efficient/perform better. For example 2 engines running at ideal RPM should be more efficient than 1 bigger engine running at too high RPM. Using instruments such as fuel flow meters (see mechanics) should make it easy to learn this mechanic More advanced effects such as propeller wash, wake turbulence etc. should be ignored to make aircraft more predictable. I'm not sure if engine cooling/temperature should be a part, it might be an interesting mechanic to mix in. Having an aircraft that is fast, efficient but can only be used for short periods? 2) Mechanics It would be nice to have a GUI which is expandable by adding certain parts such as air speed indicators, altitude meters, fuel flow meters and some basic navigation devices, either just a compass+map or maybe a beacon system. Adding those parts would make the instruments appear on your GUI so you can learn and understand your airplane better! Controls should be WASD/arrows like in most Battlefield series games: W/S for throttle, A/D for rudder, left/right for bank and up/down for elevation. Holding W should increase the speed, not the throttle setting, S should decrease speed in the same way. Releasing W/S should make the aircraft try to maintain it's speed by either throttling up when climbing or throttling back when descending. 3) Parts The parts needed for aircraft should be "tiered", to make making a basic aircraft fairly doable, but making a very advanced aircraft something for late game. The parts that would be needed are: A basic chassis like cars/boats to build on. Most difficult is to make a chassis that's stable and allows for people to build all sorts of aircraft. In the same era as the cars, all aircraft were either float planes or tail draggers (with 1 small tail wheel being higher). I have tried to make a tail dragger concept that isn't too determining but I have found this to be nearly impossible. On the other hand, the float plane makes much more sense because we all live on islands There are even float planes with retractable wheels so you can still land on land and make a nice airfield if you want. Here's pictures of the floats, they come in different sizes. The small one is roughly 19 blocks in size and is the cheapest. Then there is the smallest one with added wheels and finally there is a 25 block version with added wheels. Sizes are just for rough size ideas! Next after the chassis/floats you will want to place some cockpit/seat blocks along with an engine. I've decided to make the default cockpit blocks the same size as the normal car engine which should be usable on airplanes as well. On the screenshot is 1 normal car engine, as well as a 5 cylinder radial engine with an optional fairing. More engines should be added, at least 1 larger radial and maybe an opposing 2 cylinder engine that is very small and basic for the slowest and most basic type of aircraft. Of course we need a propeller on our engine. I've designed 3 props, a simple 2 bladed one, a faster 3 bladed one and a variable pitch 4 blade. The variable pitch propeller will allow in air braking. All props should be able to slowly push an aircraft backwards when standing still to prevent people from getting stuck into objects. Also added is a prop spinner to decrease drag. You can't have an airplane without wings of course! For the wings there should be various sizes which connect to each other, including universal control surfaces and rounded end caps. Current sizes are all 4, 6, 8 and 10 long and all are 4 wide. On the right is an example of a wing you could possibly make, on the left a normal block for size reference! Especially tail stabilizers should be placed half a block off grid to be in the center of the tail. If this therefor should apply to all wing parts (would also benefit engines mounted on wings) or if there should be dedicated tail wings and normal wings I haven't found the answer to yet. Further to make the fuselage nice and streamlined we're gonna need blocks that connect from the new cockpit/engine/radiator block to square, sloped and pointed blocks. Also, seeing that single seats are only 2 blocks wide, 8 wide cabins with multiple passenger seats could be a thing and still be relatively compact. All wings are top/down symmetrical so no left/right parts to keep part count down! Now with these very limited blocks, what can you make? I'll show you a quick example I've thrown together, this would be a very basic plane. I will make a more advanced one this week and add it to this post! Further blocks we need but which I haven't got around modeling yet are cockpit/sloped windows, doors, the instruments to measure speed and flow, a normal cockpit seat and a passenger seat to place in a larger aircraft. If you want to I can have a go at those as well Thanks for reading again, and please throw your ideas at the developers with me! If you have an idea which you want me to visualize for this purpose please feel free to shout Adrie
  8. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #150 - Ships in 1.5 Exploration

    I assume that you can have a passworded server with your friends, but then take your ship elsewhere (public servers) to raid or visit others?
  9. Hello! I'm hoping to get a discussion going (also with the rest of the players!) about block limitations. I've tried to find the limit of what's possible for both the game and the editor when building my Modular Stadium: Whether using the play area or not, high or low graphics or not, the game will keep stuttering when moving/driving around, probably when loading blocks. The result is that it's not really doable to have a race in there. My PC specs are i7 5700, 8GB of ram and a GTX 960M. Definitely not the best, but not bad either. The play area is definitely very useful though! I also have no idea on the actual part count, but be advised that the roof is made of 1x2 slopes and 1x1 blocks, double layered. Anyway, my point isn't to say "the game isn't optimised", my question is, should this game be more optimised? Are the devs already working on this? Should we even be able to build this much? Ofcourse there is gonna be a limit to what is realistically possible and maybe I have went over that limit already with this stadium. What should we be able to build? A few houses? What will happen when groups of players build cities and literally fill an island? I'm curious to see how both the Ylands team and the rest of the players think about this Adrie
  10. WijkagentAdrie

    Building techniques/freeplace mode

    Hi all! I'm currently designing/building a house in singleplayer to build in multiplayer later on and I thought, why not share some building techniques with each other? Off grid placement and clipping of items and blocks allows for unlimited creativity and by placing blocks just a little bit off the grid you can give some extra depth/detail to your builds First off, one of the first pieces of test wall I usually make to check dimensions/sizes. In here I've placed the center stones of the windows off grid, the glass windows themselves and I've been experimenting with iron bars. Also added is sand onto the sandstone to give it a more rough finish. Especially on a distance where the textures start to become more vague this gives it a good look! Here is the 2nd test which I'm still working on as you can see. I take my inspiration from a castle/chateau I've visited a few weeks ago, with a few changes to make it more practical Connections like those look impossible without any inner triangle corners available, but by going into freeplace mode and clipping a triangle into the roof you get a very nice seamless roof structure. Can also be used to make L or T shape roofs Here I've clipped the corners of the windows into the arch. You could also make window arches by using glass this way Also, the keystone (the middle top stone of an arch) comes forward a bit. Here I placed some blocks just a tiny bit into eachother to give way more depth and feeling to the columns. Especially during certain times of the day cycle the shadows this cast gives it a lot more detail! I'm looking forward to seeing your building techniques, hope we all can learn from them and use them Adrie
  11. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #142 - Experimental Build (and Ales)

    It's good to see Ales back - I didn't knew you were no longer working on Ylands. I've met you in person and we had a good chat together. I couldn't really understand why Ylands was going the way it was going the last 2 years, knowing what your vision on the game was, but it makes sense now. Hope we can see results from your work soon!
  12. WijkagentAdrie

    What makes you enjoy the Exploration mode?

    I agree, when I bought this game I thought it was going into a completely different direction. To see I've got this game almost 4 years and how little advancement exploration has seen makes me sad. I honestly have given up hope for Ylands to become what I thought/hoped it would become, and just like DayZ it seems design mistake on design mistake. I feel that the exploration game mode has got moved to the side in favor of the editor and the mini games made with the editor, which may have to do with trying to push mobile where there is more money to make. The whole cosmetics/coyns blunder also failed, as did the dedicated server thing. Does anyone actually think any of these things through? The biggest ingame issue for Ylands I think is the split between the editor and survival. If it would be possible to switch to editor-like building in the protective barrier, that would give people more and easier building possibilities, especially if you want to change things. Building a house is already difficult, but having to rebuild/change it is a lot worse. Building in exploration is a chore and because of that all I see on servers is just some crafting stations on the beach. There are almost no game mechanics that need you to build anything nice. I'd love to make a greenhouse to grow food on the arctic but why should I? I can grow banana's at -30 degrees. I'm not sure how tied in the Ylands team is with the DayZ team but it seems that not much was learned from the DayZ experience overall. Edit: The topic is actually called "What makes you enjoy Exploration mode?", so I'll answer that as well: I really like the lush environments and the actual exploration. Working the voxel landscape has so much new potential to make amazing things, which I would love to enjoy together with my friends or in an online community. Adrie
  13. WijkagentAdrie

    1.2: Astonishing Adventures

    I can't deny I bought this game for the survival aspect, and I agree that not enough has been delivered in this aspect. I've reported countless bugs and broken game features/mechanics, and I've done plenty of suggestions. To see plenty of these bugs still in the game at least 2 years later isn't encouraging to go play the game and report some more, or taking time to write up another suggestion topic.
  14. WijkagentAdrie

    1.1: Eastern Endeavors

    I really like the first implementation of farming, it's a much needed mechanic for explore gamemode. Some suggestions for it: Grass seeds that turn a dirt voxel into grass, Moisture/temperature system for plants. Moisture could be based on the biome, but also improved using irrigation. Temperature could be improved using heaters. It would be nice if plants would have 2 temperature ranges, one range where it will grow, but really slow, and one much smaller ideal range. This won't make farming impossible but will add lategame content as people will have to make multiple "greenhouses"/farming systems for different plant types. Can't wait for more explore content/polishing as that's what made me buy the game in the first place.
  15. Maybe we can have dynamic events such as plain crashes, which can be broken up into resources? I've had a quick glance over the 1.0 release update list but it seems that there's still not really a way of opening a server and set it up in such a way to block most forms of grief, basically limiting you to coop with people you know only. I hope we get a change in this soon!
  16. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #100

    I'm actually pretty satisfied with this as well, I bought this game mainly for exploration, and seeing that it hasn't been forgotten and will get it's own place is good news!
  17. WijkagentAdrie

    Suggestion: Address 1st person camera issues in Dev Diary

    Interesting timing, as the DayZ devs (BI's previous early access title) just released a status update basically stating that long promised features will never make it to the game, and features that were once implemented won't be coming back. Looking back at the DayZ development process and comparing it to the last 2,5 years of Ylands development the similarities are all too obvious in my opinion. Biggest issue IMO for Ylands is that it clearly lacks it's unique selling point compared to DayZ, and like mentioned it's a competitor to Roblox. I do value Ales' honesty and openness in the latest dev blog, which is what DayZ lacked. For Ylands to not end up like DayZ I think there should be more communication and involvement with the community, and maybe a slight change in priorities. My main concern with the current game state is that it's still not possible to have a good "survival" experience with an online community, for various reasons. Are you guys going to be at gamescom this year again? Adrie
  18. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #86

    I see an airship in the background there on that chinese edit, any updates on those?
  19. WijkagentAdrie

    What would you change about survival servers?

    Slowly respawning plants/seeds/ore, to keep maps playable over a long time, also makes it impossible for people to have a "monopoly" over certain resources, Proper admin features, to prevent griefing etc, and where done, revert the damage, Multiple barriers possible, and a way for barriers to decay/despawn with some tax system. This removes dead bases and random crap on spawn island, Tools to make items you placed unpickable, and revert this process, The options to set up a trader, and some form of "market search".
  20. WijkagentAdrie

    Flintlock Manor - Server Spawn Headquarters

    Beautiful build! I really like your map table
  21. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #74

    I'd like to see craftable plastic blocks
  22. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #68

    Oof, I'm a bit surprised by the removal of the wind feature. Is this temporary or permanent? I don't think that the indication was the problem, it was merely the fact that the wind changed 180 degrees every 5 seconds, making it so that you couldn't plan your sailing tactics at all. Instead of removing I suggest actually working out the wind mechanic properly, with slower changes to wind direction/strength, maybe a way to predict this vaguely to plan journeys ahaid, and most important, have different sail shapes with different speeds according to the direction. This mechanic would actually make sailing fun instead of just pointing your boat in a single direction and tap W twice. For those players there's steam/ylandium engines anyways. Adrie
  23. WijkagentAdrie

    Dev Diary #67

    Images seem broken hmm ?
  24. WijkagentAdrie

    Weekly sneaky WiP #7

    spooky!
  25. WijkagentAdrie

    Weekly sneaky WiP #1

    Ohhh yes, I've asked for this section quite a long time It looks like something we might encounter in this "new world" you guys hinted at. Can't wait to see where we're gonna find this!
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