Hey there, fellow ylanders!
I have some good news and some (well, actually one) bad news - so let‘s start with the bad one. Internally we planned to release the update 0.9 early this month, but it has become obvious that it will happen sometime in the second half of May instead. There are several reasons for that - the most important being, as usual, that some feature requires more testing - in this case, blueprints. Also, what started as gradual GUI tweaking ended up as a complete GUI / main menu / in-game menu overhaul, which is also taking more time than expected.
So let‘s move to the good news. To make up for the delay, we‘re adding one of the first options players will be able to set when starting a new game. In 0.9 you can set if in your game players can hurt each other. This means damage done by melee and ranged weapons, but even catapults and such machines. There is, unfortunately, one area where deciding whether what players do should hurt others is not always trivial - explosions. What we're very likely to do is make the option allowing you to set if players get hurt by explosions a separate one, and leave it up to you to decide what works the best for your game. We hope that this (along with many other game customization options that will come in the future) will improve your Ylands experience, since many of you have been asking for this for a long time.
Also, we‘re all aware that there are still the two elephants in the room, so let‘s talk about them. MP issues and optimizations. Another good news I have is that recently we have been able to acquire several new senior programmers, and more will be joining us in the next two months. So far, every single new programmer has made quite a difference, so we‘re very excited about this. And now, after we announced our partnership with Tencent, things seem to have accelerated even more.
Blueprints will be great... but they need a bit more time
Because we‘re quite busy with testing the upcoming update 0.9, let me mention just one last thing. For some time, we have been working on the new visual scripting that is planned to be introduced in 0.10. We will start discussing with you some of it as soon as 0.9 is released, but at this point I have to say that I can't remember the last time I got so excited about some new Ylands feature. Not only is the new scripting truly fun, but along with that, we will be giving players much more control over various aspects of the game world (remember how some time ago - not that long ago, really - we talked about being able to chose if players can hurt each other? Well, things like that you will be able to affect during the game with your scripts...)
So that‘s it for today. In the next Dev Diary, we will be discussing dedicated servers - we are aware that we promised you we‘d do that quite a long a time ago. Until then you have a great time, ylanders, and stay classy!