WijkagentAdrie

Hey all! Today's build is dedicated to @kimbuck and her fight against the sharks! I wanted to research the issue and study the sharks behavior, so I had to find a way to observe them and follow them underwater, safe and fast! This is my yellow submarine! It's built after the submarine on the cover for the Beatles' song "the Yellow Submarine". Let's start off with the technical side! It's actually built on a large car chassis instead of a boat chassis, to be able to get under water and drive over the sea bottom. To prevent the engines from stalling they are located on a huuuuge periscope. This can be done using a technique I discussed in another topic: The problem with having such a long mast is that the car wanted to tip over, but the chassis tries to keep it upright. The car kept moving like a pendulum on the bottom of the sea and every time the engines submerge the car loses all it's power. To prevent this, I've added a load of engines in the bottom of the submarine. In every engine you see are 2 more engines to put in more weight! The driving underwater finally becomes doable, sort of. I've tested it with shorter snorkels and driving under water is funny in general, no matter the car's balance. The inside of the submarine is very cramped as most space is reserved for the ballast. I could've used a rope ladder and put some more seats in, but I might do that at a later time For now, let's see a short test of how it works and look for some sharks! I've first tried to reach the island, which went perfect! Next was a short depth test: At this depth the periscope still sticks out a lot above the surface, so I can go a lot deeper still! When driving on the surface the car does wiggle, so when you go deeper the engine occasionally drowns for a few seconds. The handbrake stabilizes the car and if on flat terrain, raises the engine above the water again. Now let's investigate some sharks! It only took me less than a minute to find a shark! However it seemed to show no interest in me, instead the shark tried to flee! I've tried to throw some bait in the water, keep it in the sub, but to no effect. After chasing it, more and more sharks joined it and they all went in the same direction. Where they taking me somewhere? Unfortunately my chase had to stop early as my submarine got stuck in a ditch I managed to get it out a few minutes later but the sharks were gone. Were they playing me or did they want to show me something? This story will be continued! Adrie

Hello everyone! I've been having another go at the cars since the most recent patch/hotfix. Now we can finally use the move/drag button to move parts around the car without them disappearing! Some errors that are still present: When you move a block in the editor and then click undo, the block quite often "disappears". When you play the scenario however, the blocks are there again. Another problem is that the grid "snapping" snaps to the world grid and not to the car grid. I have found a workaround for you guys! A block is 3.75x3.75x3.75 units big, so place the chassis on a multiple of 3.75 in all directions and the chassis is on grid Be sure to set the rotations on multiples of 90! This way I've been able to place/move blocks beyond the normal allowed box, with absolute stunning results. Feedback/suggestions: Therefor, my first suggestion is to actually either change the box we can work in and make it more forgiving, or make the suspension sit way lower. I'll show you some examples why I think the current cars are riding too high: The front truck is made "legit" without moving parts around, and can be made like this in survival as well. I couldn't even make the front bumper the way I wanted unfortunately. The truck in the back is made using the movement of parts in the editor. Some parts are actually clipped into the chassis, and the front bumper is 2 blocks below where you can normally build and even touches the ground. When actually testing the trucks you see that the second truck has a far better looking ride height. The gaps between the fenders and the weels look good. Obstacle clearance is compromised but not by much. Players can decide whether they want to trade obstacle clearance for looks I intended this truck to be more of a normal on-road model, so if you have a road structure you should use this truck! The V3S on the other hand has a higher bumper (but would still benefit from lowering the entire cabin etc.!) and is more capable off road. I'll show you another example of what can be done with this technique with a sports car: First off in the editor: The front fenders look very nice, but the rear ones are too low. I could place the same ones as used on the front, but then on the rear. Also notice how I clipped a 1x2 slope into 2 1x1 slopes to create a more flowing car body. Here you can see that the front fender gets more space, but still looks quite good. The rear fender looks like a nice fit! Again the seats and engine are clipped into the chassis (2 ylandium engines on their sides), and the blocks on the side and front are next to the chassis where you normally can't even build. My suggestion is therefor to allow us to increase the overall car size, at least 1 block (but for the truck preferrably 2) down of the chassis or have the suspension sit way lower, so we have to build the fenders around them ourselves. This will greatly increase the creativity/possibilities as they feel rather limited. And with the way the editor works now we can avoid the limits anyway, however we can't apply this in survival. Another "error" I've found is that the large/truck chassis is tilting backwards: I believe this has to do with the rear axle being 1 block more to the center of the chassis/center of mass, while having the same spring rate. The force on the rear axle is bigger due to the bigger leverage ofcourse, so the spring rate should be higher or the center of mass should move. The last "problem/suggestion" I'm facing has to do with the position of the wheels: Right now the middle of the wheel sits under the outer edge of the car. It wouldb be nice if the wheels would fall just a tiny bit inside the chassis, so we can for example make fenders that cover the rear wheels like many old cars used to have Again, more creativity points! If anyone has any additions to this, feel free to add them! Adrie

Heya, I've been trying to break test car physics some more and found a few more "problems" in car behaviour: After testing cars on boats and horses on boats I thought, why not test cars on cars? But unfortunately before the latest release I couldn't make a car big enough to put my other cars on. But now with the new glitch/mechanic where the drag/move function works again, I could finally do it and make a nice truck So I tried it and what you see here is the result I used a crappy ramp and drove the car straight onto it, all went perfect! However there are some very weird things going on: 1 The driving of the van changed quite a bit. It's still drivable/doable to get your payload from A to B But this is the same problem as with the boats/horses so I suspect this is being worked on, 2 When I got into the car and drove around I could actually move both the van and the car by driving the car on the back. Steering was not really good though, but when I went backwards I had loads of control! 3 Skid marks appear in mid air, 4 When I drive the van/truck, the car wheels start to rotate with the same speed as the van is moving while the car is not moving relative to the truck bed it is on. I checked how this works, but it doesn't happen when I throw the car in upside down, 5 Birds fly into the car and get a load of hits really fast and then die, Here I'm driving the combination by driving the car! And when pulling the handbrake the skidmarks are in mid air I checked the wheel behaviour, but in this position the car wheels don't rotate when driving the van! Thanks for having a look! Adrie

Very nice, well done! How did you get the exhaust smoke out the back?

LOL @ SS sharknado I think it's quite weird that some people never have this problem but others have it constantly, how could this be? Both on survival/creative this never happens to me or my mate.

It is on the top of the blocks in the bottom right of the picture! Sometimes it's buried under the ground so you have to dig it up to find it Adrie

Well the sum reads XLVII - XX. I'm not gonna tell you the answer, only how you can calculate it All the roman "letters" have values, V for example is 5, I is 1. If the smaller letter is RIGHT from the bigger letter, you add it, if it's on the other side you substract it. For example: VI = 6 (5+1), and IV = 4 (5-1). M = 1000 D = 500 C = 100 L = 50 X = 10 V = 5 I = 1 Good luck trying to solve it now! Adrie

I've been thinking about one more thing: How about cars/boats? Are they standard equipped with protection or is there gonna be a way to protect them? If we can get larger doors we can store our cars safe inside, but ships would need a mobile generator I believe. What would happen if 2 generators overlap, say you sail your ship right next to someones house on the coast? Etc. Adrie

Hello, I'm designing some buildings now in the editor, and I noticed that when the part count goes up the editor starts to struggle. When deleting an entire group of blocks, only half of the blocks get deleted when you try to delete them, some blocks are unable to delete at all. When grouping a quiet large amount of blocks it can freeze the game for 5-10 minutes. My PC specs are quite good and should be capable of handling this easier, also the functions don't require much calculation I believe (just simple grouping and deleting actions?). The builds aren't that big. Some blocks that are impossible to delete I simply drag all the way under the surface to make them "disappear", but this isn't the right solution I believe Edit: Also notice that this behaviour is inconsistent. When reloading the map and repeating the same action (deleting the exact same group of blocks) it sometimes works flawless, and sometimes gets messed up. I haven't been able to find out what causes either situation.

Thanks for your response! I think this is part of the discussion of "should we even build things this huge". I don't think many people are going to encounter this problem for now. If you do have the problem that you can't delete a block, here's a workaround: for buildings, just drag it allll the way down into the earth as deep as you can. For ships, drag the blocks into the hull It's not a nice fix but it gets the job done!

Ah, I thought you meant that with enough force you could still raid people But sounds good! Enjoy your weekends! Adrie

Very nice idea for the energy barrier! Some suggestions/questions: Make the non build, paint and terraform area larger than the non destroy area. This way people won't build all the way on the edges of the barrier and get built in right outside the barrier, Will there be a way to grant rights to friends/groups of players? Please make the initial broken generator non lootable/droppable and also not respawnable if you die, otherwise it's more worthwhile to farm players for generators, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The player made ones could be droppable ofcourse Adrie

Heya! Feel free to post them ofcourse, I'll have a look! If you want you can also add me on steam: wijkagentadrie Adrie

Hey Ane, I've been playing a few other maps in the mean time so I guess the logs aren't gonna show it anymore right? Instead I have the map where it happens a lot. Especially the corner pieces are prone to this problem. You should be able to replicate it with this map! I've changed the .yland extension to .txt to upload, you will have to swap it back. Adrie ADRIE'S_STADIUM_RACE_1.txt

Interesting views there! I've tried to use as many 1x4x2, 2x4x2 and 1x2x1 stone slopes as possible to reduce the part count. One place where this is impossible is the roof, which is mainly built out of 1x1x2 slopes and 1x1x1 cubes. I have the vague feeling that solution 1 is already being used, because when I place 2 modules against each other I feel that the performance gets better. One thing that I do notice in the editor however, is that not every block gets placed correctly. Rotations and positions randomly vary between -0.000010 and 0.000010, when blocks are placed exactly on grid. Sometimes the variations are bigger and more odd numbers. If the system you mentioned is quite sensitive, it may affect the optimization and the rendered won't combine the edges. One of the other problems I can see with this is that Ylands apparently doesn't use any textures at all, but relies on polygons being colored. I'm not sure if this way of optimization is possible that way? For solution 2, say if you build a large city/town consisting of many small, detailed buildings this isn't quite a useful solution right? It mainly works on large, repetitive buildings/structures. Adrie

Looks very nice! I'm really curious to see more of the interior!

Sounds good! Looking forward to the way to protect area's, this is gonna improve gameplay a lot on the servers! Also I can't wait to repaint literally everything I've made so far! Adrie

Have you got the logfile opened, or the game running? This may prevent uploading as well.

Thanks for reporting, It should be fixed now. Enjoy your time! Adrie

I've had the same problem with the game and had to reinstall everything to a different directory, because reinstalling to the same directory didn't work. So I reinstalled to a folder named Ylands2 for example. Regarding your saved worlds: if you go to documents/Ylands/ you will find folders containing your savegames, screenshots, compositions etc. I would make a backup/copy of all these folders and after reinstalling the game paste them over the fresh empty folders to get back your savegames. That's how I did it and it worked for me, I didn't lose any data Adrie

I've had the same with my last 2 ships "leaking" through the roof when it's raining. I want to test this more, but I noticed that the /weather command is not in the game. Is there any way to get this command to test? Also, the problem with dead sharks on your ship also happens when you die yourself. The grave block that gets placed (or my loot dropping) nearly flipped my boat upside down, which I believe is related to the shark problem.

Hey Ales! I'm very pleased with this Dev Diary! Both the feedback on bug reporting and the dedicated server "solution" is realistic and more transparant. Perfect! I've still got a tiny suggestion/question: Can we give certain bugs lower priorities ourselves? Or do you/Ane assign a category to it when it's being entered into the system? Some of the bugs we report are of the category "game-breaking", others are a minor visual inconsistency. As for the dedi server: I feel this is the right choice! I will still be hosting my server to test Regarding this bit: What exactly can we do to help? Just play on the official dedi servers? Or is there more we can do? Adrie

Hello, Rotating a block which I'm about to place in the editor using the F button makes the camera move, usually towards the placed block I have selected. It's not always doing that. Rotating the block with the K button (same direction) doesn't show this behaviour. Adrie output_log.txt

Thanks for the response @Aleš Ulm! I totally forgot that I've been running -translator parameter, my bad, I'm sorry! It makes sense the way it is now. I would love to help doing the translations for Dutch, I've sent Ane a message and made a crowdin account.

Heya, did you know you can rotate every block with J, K and L? And if you hold H you can rotate using the mouse? When you hold H and you right click the rotating direction changes. Adrie