Indomitus

That would make sense, since we can share any custom games we build, and I expect it would be pretty cumbersome to make Ylands limit access to custom games based on something like that.

No Explore-style map generation in Editor? Or does that option only show up when the player gets access to Explore mode? And a question about the Beta: If we try it out and aren't comfortable with it, how hard is it to roll the game back?

The crafting menu in general is not behaving correctly. The Recently Crafted menu, and the recommended crafting menu both appear completely unsorted. Both are currently unusable, and have been for quite some time. And when they are able to work on that, could they please look into a search by ingredients as well? It would be nice to be able to search for unlocked recipes that a specific resource is used in.

I know this happens for the stone hammer. Have not tested the other hammers yet. Every time I activate the hammer, it gives a message about not deconstructing objects outside the "active zone." I know this refers to the protective barrier, but it is a strange message to show EVERY time the hammer is selected. edit: I also does this when using the War Hammer, so it does seem to affect all of them.

Looks fantastic. My main question is this: Will the current "explore" mode still be available, in the Editor at least? Will this new Explore mode be available in the Editor, or do the random encounters cause issues with that?

A full water world sounds interesting. I was thinking more in general, a hard mode for Ylands Explore but that does sound like a challenge to build and play. Sounds like a specialized hard mode, kind of like Skyblocks is for Minecraft. Is yours for multiplayer or is it a single player challenge? Mobile or PC? As always I'm open to helping, time and attention span permitting.

I've been giving this some thought, as I work on ideas for putting up my own private explore server. (It won't be full hardcore, but it will have limitations such as no gunpowder and no Ylandium.) For me, a hardcore survival mode would look like this: Stronger predators. Higher HP and attack damage. Larger detection areas. Line-of-sight detection if possible. (Plus more improved AI, which I think BI is still working on.) More predators. More dense populations and higher respawn rate. Handicapping if the player doesn't get enough sleep. Slower speeds. Higher hunger rates. Lower attack damage. In other words: Get some sleep! Very dark nights. (This is why I asked about it in the other thread.) Aggressive predators at night. Challenging Research Tree for recipes rather than the auto-learn Ylands currently has. No Ylandium. No gunpowder. Resources would be buried more, less obvious on the surface. Some kind of handicap or penalty for death/respawn. Lose all learned recipes? Or lose any points you made toward the next Research unlock? Drop keys and maps as well? Not sure, but there would be something. Some of these are things we can build in custom scripts. Others would need help from the devs. I've been doing a little work on a Research Tree structure for the game. I designed a series of "Research Table" workstations for gaining points, and so on. The main problem is that I would have to list nearly every recipe in the game somewhere in the script to manage them all, which is insane.

I feel you may be underestimating my ability to beach a ship.

Using the Interior game logic could be a problem if we want it over an entire island. Or multiple islands and the water between them. For larger effects, it would be better implemented as a "weather" option or something like along those lines.

Looks fantastic. Will it be possible for us to make our custom games completely dark at night if the game calls for it?

Currently, the Car Trunk entities can be used as containers separate from a vehicle, but they don't trigger any Event Listeners that are specifically listening for Container events such as Open or Close. Can that be changed to make them trigger Container events?

My feelings on that news are, of course, mixed. But it had to be done.

Sorry for the late reply. I've been away from the game for some time. I set up a simple scenario to demonstrate (not a full game idea, just showing the issue): I put in a selection of different containers, and an Event Listener. The Event Listener is set to listen for players interacting with the Entity Class CONTAINERS. It simply shows a Warning message with each event that is detected. The events will trigger when the chests are opened and closed, and when the player used "E" to open the coal basket or seed box. They do not trigger for me when any of the Car Trunk entities are opened or closed. I've attached the Scenario file (not exported). CAR TRUNK CONTAINER DEMO.zip

I've seen it too and I've gotten into the habit of using that one as my "new" each time if it's near the top of the list. First time it did it for me was when I started a blank scenario then opened one of my Explore maps to fix something. The blank scenario auto-saved apparently. Weird thing is, if I open that "saved" blank scenario, add something into it, then click Save, it will prompt for a new name.

So it could be different for each player? In a battle game, for example, if a player is knocked out, could we move them to a neutral area, and set their camera to follow a player that's still active? Or attach the camera to an object that they can control and "fly" around the scene? This sounds like it's going to be a fun feature to experiment with. Can it follow logic objects? (Invisible, and no collision, for a true spectator mode.)

For situations like this, it might be more difficult to manage, but easier to prevent abuse, if there were a way to allow multiple accounts to participate on a single transaction. For example, on a recurring 1000 coyn transaction for something, Player A could commit 250 of that, Player B could commit 250, and Player C could commit 500 of it. The transaction would only be successful if all have the amount that they have specifically committed to it, maybe with an option for others in the group to pay the difference if one falls short. Would also want an option for one or all of them to cancel their specific portion and walk away if they want, and notifications for whoever still have coyns committed. Not simple from the standpoint of programming and data logistics, but less prone to abuse. (for example, they would probably have to implement some kind of "hold" on pending amounts if only one part of a multiple-account transaction fails, which could get messy pretty fast)

There are certainly a lot of concerns that come up, from copyright to format compatibility, asset upload/download size, and even the possibility of abuse by some creators. The copyright question is especially complicated, given that the game is released internationally. And the size of the sound assets could cause new performance issues to come up. Not saying it's impossible. I just wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

If it's scripted it would actually be much easier to deliver to a specific player, by either putting the message directly on screen or writing the text to a blank paper on demand, and not just leaving them in a box. It could even work similarly to the Ender Chest script I wrote not long ago, where anyone can open the chest, but only see their own items inside it.

Very happy to see some features being added to the map. That's a big step forward, and something that's been wanted for quite a while. Maybe in the future we can consider some admin features that affect maps, such as placing marks that show on everyone's maps, auto-revealing areas of the map, or displaying barrier and player locations on request. Another suggestion for maps and navigation could be for players to be able to select a point on their map, and make it appear on the outer wheel of their compass while sailing (like the island icons do). (edit: The more we get, the more we want. Isn't that how it always is? ? )

Interesting. I have a competitive game mode I've been working on, and specifically trying to scale for mobile. I should have scripts working this week (assuming the attention span holds). I might be dropping in on P1 for some help with testing and maybe play area design, since that's not really one of my strong points. I kind of wish I could join in on the Beta for mobile, but you said it's just iOS at the beginning and I have only Android.

I thought it best to start a thread in here, rather than hijacking the unrelated thread where the conversation started...

That's kind of why I'd suggested tying it to the protective barrier. In Ylands, placing and turning on the barrier is our way of making a "permanent" home. It would make sense for anything inside it to be protected against whatever clean-up routines get implemented in the game. And it provides a mechanism for optimizing players' structures.

I don't think 7 days would be a good time frame for this game, though. Not everyone plays online that often, and I know I wouldn't want things I've worked hard to build falling apart just because my RL took my attention away for a while. 14 or 21 days, maybe, once the servers are able to last that long. If I'm away for that long, odds are I wouldn't care. There might be more elegant solutions, like automatically optimizing everything inside a player's barrier when they log out, and re-enabling editing when they log back in (like turning build mode on or off for the ships). For multi-player barriers (which were requested, but don't know if they'll be a thing) then it would be if any of the players logs on, or all of them are offline. Or maybe we could have a special "construction" setting on the barrier itself, that we could turn on or off like with the ships. That could also work to prevent accidentally deconstructing parts of our building when we're aiming at something else. Anything outside of a barrier? Let it "decay."

My immediate use case: I'm scaling down the Scavenger Hunt game idea I told you about ages ago (wouldn't be surprised if you don't remember) to something suitable for mobile. That means, among other things, I need to streamline the bajeezus out of the code. One thing the game has to do is manage the contents of a lot of containers of varying size across the play area, because I'm going to have "found" items respawning at certain intervals from a queue. I have a strategy I can use to track the available space, but it's kind of painful in terms of code complexity and size. I can already get the number of occupied slots in a container. If I could get the total number of slots and subtract from that, or just directly get the available slots, it would save a ton of memory and scripting overhead. The full scale version of the game works fine, by the way, it's just really big. Beyond that specific use, it's a generally useful piece of information for anyone building a game that involves spawning into containers. If you don't watch the container's capacity, the items end up spawning on the ground under it or not spawning at all. And just to reply to myself for the sake of an answer to this one: An Event Listener can watch for Containers, and trigger a Label and/or Entity Storage to be attached on their Create event. This one's already implemented.

I've noticed that if we try to spawn into a container that is already full, the new items will spawn on the ground under the container. Could we get a way to see the total number of slots in a container, and possibly also a way to see the available slots? It would help avoid some messy situations. All we really need is 1 or 2 tiles that return the count. edit: Also, a way to tell if an entity IS a container would be useful, especially if we're looking at items in a player's inventory.