Dev Diary #25

[Gritty Kitty 3]

Can we get longer hair style for female characters? 

[linyufei 0]

hello,i think i v met a problem in games.

When i was on a big ship,i cannt place the things in the right position.It always in a wrong angle.

Hope you can look at it.

And we want a language pack in chinese,you know:)

[Ray-Sa 5]

Thx for the update Ales. Your openness and honesty is awesome and appreciated a lot! 

Nevertheless I don't fully agree with the following:

22 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

* Host Unreachable
This is a rather unfortunate issue. If you're among those experiencing it, first take a look here http://steamcommunity.com/app/298610/discussions/2/1620599015865077154/. The thing is that the absolute majority of possible causes resulting in this issue have nothing to do with Ylands itself (we're using Steam networking). The sad truth is that with pretty much every MP game there are some players who are experiencing this behavior because it may be caused by anything from an antivirus or firewall setting, their network topology or it can be related to their provider and as much as we would love for everyone to be able to play Ylands, these issues are something we can do nothing about. That being said we are still looking into this to make sure that there's absolutely nothing on our side which could be a reason for this as well. 

First of all, I am a professional software tester, therefore I have some experience and a good gut feeling in analyzing issues in software. Additionally I am playing online games since more than 20 years and have seen a lot.  

Yes, there can be thousands of reasons why a host is unreachable and most likely the majority of people seeing this error message have the issue on their side.
BUT there are also situations where I am 100% sure the issue is related to Ylands. Unfortunately I did not yet find a reproducible situation.
Hints for that:
- In some situations restarting the game fixed it.
- Sometimes restarting my PC fixed it, BUT everything else was working. All homepages reachable, every game playable, communication tools working, no hiccups, no high memory/cpu/whatever load, etc.
- I even had the situation: Connected to server, immediately disconnected, tried to connect again: host unreachable, reconnected, worked. (Yes, could have been a hiccup anywhere, but I know my PC and connection quite well. Its VERY stable.)

In the end its a question about robustness of the connection process and here you could improve I guess. Anyways, this is not critical from my point of view since most causes are in the responsibility of the user.

Keep up the good work, I love your game. Even though I have a professional allergy against bugs.

Greetz,

Ray-Sa

[McDuffee 0]

This game is already one of the best i ever played! But there is one big issue that games like Minecraft can do better than Ylands: I think it´s urgent to put in a sleeping ability in Multiplayer mode! This long periods of waiting until dawn are very annoying. You can do just nothing in this time!

The other issue that need to be fixed next is the vanishing of objects/items if you try to place them or just putting them elsewhere in your inventory.

If these two things could be fixed soon, it will bring up more exploing and crafting motivation to all players!

Thank you for doing such a great job. I'm really curious how the finished game will look like. That will be awesome! 

[JeremiahKane 24]

23 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

* Map not saving in MP for clients
This is a known issue - map doesn't work correctly outside of SP. It needs more than one simple fix. We understand, though, that it is a crucial tool and needs to work in MP as well. As soon as it is fixed, we can start working on one of the most requested features - putting notes or symbols on the map.

While I can't claim to know how Ylands' save system is setup to handle maps, from my time as a former admin of a Minecraft server hub, I can make a suggestion. Setting a system up to give each map, both crafted and generated an ID number and saving map data to said M[ap]ID# should fix this issue. Depending on how the data is handled currently, you might even be able to make this fix by the 0.7 update.

[Master John 12]

Can you also fix that when i joined my inventory disapeard and my BED disapeard in SINGLEPLAYER! >:()

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Thanks for your feedback and ideas!

Host unreachable: let me assure you that we didn't give up on players that are having this issue - just as I said we'll keep looking into it to see if there's anything that can be fixed on our side but even if/when we do find and fix something it won't almost certainly help everyone because of the reasons I stated.

Map: there are actually more issues with the map than just this one. Its current implementation is quite obsolete and needs to be reworked because of many reasons. I totally agree that it needs to be fixed soon and I would love to see it fixed in 0.7 but I can't promise that.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

@Master John That surely sounds awful - have you already created an issue in the Bug forum section? If not, please do so. Someone will then put it into our bug tracking system with an appropriate priority and I'm pretty sure one of our programmers will get to it soon. Thanks!

[sydthecat 9]

Glad you're fixing the steering issue. I built this awesome pirate ship and it stopped steering. I had to go to editor top turn it back to base

[Lupowop 31]

On 1/5/2018 at 9:13 AM, Aleš Ulm said:

Sure - that's exactly the reason why the next week's Dev Diary will be dedicated to this very topic

I love this dev team... thanks for listening... I think @Ane wears the pants in the family... I can totally picture her going... "hmmm ok we have this HUGE list buuuut... the community wants to tie a small boat to the ship... we should also work on this"... You guys are awesome... Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year and welcome back!

[KittenRaee 2]

Okay, you speak about fixing most annoying/critical bugs.

But what about the most throwback issue there is with the game? The "random freeze" thing, where game literally stops responding and simulating for up to 6–7 seconds.

This is the reason many people are afraid of picking up the game in the first place and (might've already) detour(ed) many from playing it at all. I fell in love with Ylands, but keeping such major optimization issue in the game for long time calls under Steam governed rules, which state failing to deliver working product allows for unconditional refunds. 

I am really looking forward to further development, but it's simply unacceptable to not look into issue as soon as it emerged.

[Vega3221 32]

1 hour ago, KittenRaee said:

Okay, you speak about fixing most annoying/critical bugs.

But what about the most throwback issue there is with the game? The "random freeze" thing, where game literally stops responding and simulating for up to 6–7 seconds.

This is the reason many people are afraid of picking up the game in the first place and (might've already) detour(ed) many from playing it at all. I fell in love with Ylands, but keeping such major optimization issue in the game for long time calls under Steam governed rules, which state failing to deliver working product allows for unconditional refunds. 

I am really looking forward to further development, but it's simply unacceptable to not look into issue as soon as it emerged.

yes, if one search the forum you will find a few times that players with HUGE rigs all complain that the game have huge needs for optimization. Alos a few times i read that the problem start if one start to get a bit bigger and after you travel a few islands. I notice also like other complain that if one look quick to the ocean you also get HUGE stutters.... Somewhere is a huge BUG or mem leak or poor graphic routines. I even tested the game with the lowest graphic settings and you still get the same stutter result, this proofs that there must be hidden optimized code. In all this weird lagg-stuter game play i notice that the pc HHD not even working (must be mem, graphic optimized problem)

Like i said early i create a 4th world because the game-play start to degrade so that it is not fun anymore and that one just get more and more crashes how longer one play.

If you ask me:

- Game have a huge mem leak bug.

- It keeps loading all world data over and over again even if one is not in that area of the world. This is because the longer you traveled in world the more laggy the game becomes.

- With new started game you enter and logoff very quick the game to your desktop.. but after exploring like 4 islands and build some stuff you get slow logon and very slow logout.. with a few times a total game-crash

 

Again, thanks again for this SUPER fun game. I will play it 24-7 but with game-play degrading how longer one play is not fun. Optimization is of very importance. I think a lot bugs and problems may be fix if the game runs smooth

Cheerz

Vega

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

@KittenRaee Hm, I'm not really aware of many players who are experiencing such long periods of time when the game becomes unresponsive or frozen. That being said, there are some awfully big performance drops when moving over ylands when chunks of a terrain and objects are being loaded, moments when fps plummets momentarily (these happen even to people with powerful PCs for whom the game otherwise runs rather smoothly). We've actually talked about those several times in the past and it's obvious that this needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, there's not really an easy fix for this since it requires rather large adjustments done to several areas of code. We're already working on it but as I said earlier these optimizations will be gradual over the course of several months.
However, I haven't really heard from anyone for whom this would manifest in such an extreme manner so I'm not really sure if we're talking about the same issue and yours isn't, in fact, caused by something else (if there are others among you who are experiencing something similar, please let us know - thanks!).

May I please ask you to post this in the Bug section of the forum? You may want to add your game logs and dxdiag right away - if you're not sure how to get those, just start the thread and we will help you with the rest. If you already done this, please post the link in here. I'll make sure it gets enough attention (I understand that it must be very frustrating for you). Also, feel free to contact me via PM at any time. Thank you!

@Lupowop Well, it is true that she's the one who compiles this "Most pressing issues" list and knows the best which features are the most requested ones so yes, she has a big say in what gets fixed or implemented  (plus, one simply does not argue with the queen of memes   ). 

 

 

[WijkagentAdrie 384]

@Aleš Ulm Should the current barrier protect us against other players painting our houses? If so, it's not working since I can paint my mates house which is barrier protected. I hope he likes pink houses  

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

No, that will be a part of 0.7 - along with players not being able to modify the terrain in any way inside other players' barriers and creating/removing energy streams. In the upcoming 0.6.3 offline players (owners) will be completely invincible inside the barrier - right now they can still get hurt by fire etc.

[Chris Young Noize G. 8]

@Aleš Ulm It does happen to me too we decided to make a new game and now every minute or so game freezes for a couple seconds ram and cpu go off the charts nearly hitting 100% and i have a rather powerful computer imo this probably is an opt issue as games like the witcher 3 have HUGE MAPS and game runs fine even on my old rig with high settings i suggest this and every other bug glitch like getting stuck between object or thrown in the sea cause the ship goes too fast have to be fixed early on because players will probably won't waste time to try and fix things and most people certainly don't have the patience to make a new world and learn all crafting recipes from the start

Edited January 7, 2018 by Chris Young Noize G.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Thanks for letting us know! We'll definitely look into it (very likely we'll contact you sometime next week via PM with some questions).

[Yanaba 0]

Friend and I play multiplayer on his server - we will be _so_ very delighted not to find our characters dead anymore when we log on again.

 

 

[Gristle-4e5a1c0e661b6b1a 6]

Bohemia Interactive is the reason I bought Y-Lands. I've been a customer of BI since Operation Flash Point.  They have done many multiplayer titles and undoubtedly have someone on staff who is familiar with how to write network code for a multiplayer game.  I would respectfully ask that you use your relationship with BI to request some consultation with one of their veteran network engineers.  I think this would go a long way to improving your network code.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

We are indeed consulting with the other teams... but this might actually be a good time to talk about something that seems to stay hidden from many players.

Even though Ylands may look like a "simple" game due to its low poly graphics - in some aspects, it can be more demanding than games like DayZ or Arma, even though those support more concurrent players etc. Firstly as opposed to those games everything in Ylands can be interacted with or destroyed (even the terrain itself) - we don't have the "luxury" of working with mostly static (as in "unchangeable") objects placed inside premade maps (and that itself prevents us from using many available optimization techniques). 
In our MP we need to synchronize things like sudden massive terrain changes or simulated water. There are features that from the outside may seem simple but which are true nightmares and actually are not that common even in larger projects than Ylands - like letting players move freely over ships that are controlled by other players (I'm not talking about being firmly seated in a vehicle someone else drives or flies, which is much easier to implement). And last but certainly not least - we're using a completely different engine.  

We are confident that we will fix and improve everything, but it does take time. After all, let's not forget that this is an Early Access and just as we state on Ylands product page we went to EA exactly to fix and improve performance and MP while getting important feedback from the community. Also, things will speed up as the team grows - FYI the latest addition to our team is a programmer that joined us shortly before Christmas and who will be focusing purely on MP. You can trust us that we want the MP to be great just as much as you players do.  

[Gristle-4e5a1c0e661b6b1a 6]

11 minutes ago, Aleš Ulm said:

We are indeed consulting with the other teams... but this might actually be a good time to talk about something that seems to stay hidden from many players.

Even though Ylands may look like a "simple" game due to its low poly graphics - in some aspects, it can be more demanding than games like DayZ or Arma, even though those support more concurrent players etc. Firstly as opposed to those games everything in Ylands can be interacted with or destroyed (even the terrain itself) - we don't have the "luxury" of working with mostly static (as in "unchangeable") objects placed inside premade maps (and that itself prevents us from using many available optimization techniques). 
In our MP we need to synchronize things like sudden massive terrain changes or simulated water. There are features that from the outside may seem simple but which are true nightmares and actually are not that common even in larger projects than Ylands - like letting players move freely over ships that are controlled by other players (I'm not talking about being firmly seated in a vehicle someone else drives or flies, which is much easier to implement). And last but certainly not least - we're using a completely different engine.  

We are confident that we will fix and improve everything, but it does take time. After all, let's not forget that this is an Early Access and just as we state on Ylands product page we went to EA exactly to fix and improve performance and MP while getting important feedback from the community. Also, things will speed up as the team grows - FYI the latest addition to our team is a programmer that joined us shortly before Christmas and who will be focusing purely on MP. You can trust us that we want the MP to be great just as much as you players do.  

Thanks Aleš. Just wanted to make sure you had BI resources in your toolbox.

Edited January 7, 2018 by Gristle-4e5a1c0e661b6b1a

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

No problem!

[Chris Young Noize G. 8]

this game has so much potential honestly the other game that comes in mind is don't starve but i think it's missing the aspect you guys are trying to create and this if done right will probably open borders on how survival sandbox games are made because it also has the feeling of little big planet and also i suggest you take some notes from them like how they implement the ui and how they add so may stickers and the skin sales they do they colaborate with big corporations like marvel and sell hero costumes and other stuff your game has potential to reach this level

[kimbuck 746]

What makes Ylands so enjoyable is  that it is  different  ...and  not following the paths so many of the Mass "produced run of the mill" almost identical  games now  flooding the market.

What puts me off a of of  games is   once you start,  you have to  "buy"  extras  in order to advance..  ..and you are constantly  reminded to "spend  spend   spend"  on just the basic  stuff to progress.  Ylands does a have a market, but the objects "sold" are simply for your visual enjoyment and  not having  any direct  effect on how the  game or you  advances.  In other words,  its  optional.

Some time   external  marketing can be  counter productive

[Soondead-27d3f9fbcbfb78c3 20]

Aleš, is there any chance the DS 0.6.3 can contain a way to harness the logs a bit? Perhaps limit the logging rate, file size, a command to reset the log file on demand or even allow some way to filter out unwanted noise.