Dev Diary #55

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

Today I would like to address one specific concern that some players seem to have.

You’ve probably already noticed that we're getting closer to Ylands 1.0 and thus the updates contain more and more fixes, optimizations, and improvements - and yes, at the same time we decided to temporarily disable some features even though it wasn’t easy. The good news is, however, that the game runs faster and looks better, and once we do some MP-related improvements, we believe we will be quite close to the full release.

With sandbox games it’s quite common during this stage for players to grow concerned about the fact that feature X or Y may not be added before the game is “released”. To feel that the game, if it stays this way, is missing something essential.

Let me assure all of you that we still intend to put a lot of effort into the game before we leave Early Access and we believe you will be happy with what will be added / improved before that time. That being said, we understand these concerns.

We’ve said that for us everything begins with Ylands 1.0. We have some very cool things in store for you in 2019 - both features you asked for and features that you didn’t know you wanted until you laid your hands on them. We’re planning to add some very original features and fresh ideas in Ylands - something we wanted to do for a long, long time now (with sharegames being such a unique feature and an indication of many of the cool things to come!).

  Are you ready for some treasure hunting? ( Pirates vs Indians! game made by @Igor Quintero)
 

To make sure these are not just vague promises, we will present you with a post-Early Access roadmap for 2019 sometime next year. You will see that if anything, the pace of adding new exciting things will accelerate. That we definitely are not interested only in expanding the Editor and Visual Scripting, but that Explore will get a ton of love as well. We hope that not only will this help you better understand where we’re headed and diminish those concerns, but that we will be able to cooperate with you better than before.

I’ve been saying this for several years now, so someone can possibly say that it’s getting a tiny bit old, but since it has remained true the whole time and nothing has changed since that, I feel there’s no harm in repeating this:

We’re just getting started

 

That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!

[RedEagle_P1. 905]

Looking forward to the big release! 

[RedEagle_P1. 905]

I would like to mention a few things that need a close look before that time: 

1) Ships seem to be broken for a lot of people

2) FPS is still really low in custom builds we make

3) A lot of us would like to build custom explore maps and integrate logics into them -- this could be something interesting for the game -- or adding caves, multiple biomes and protection barriers to editor games could be helpful. 

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Alright! As for 2) - do you think you could provide us with some of the scene that runs slow? We should be able to find rather fast what is the cause of that (many times it's actually not something obvious like a high number of building blocks etc.).

[Igor Q. 519]

I feel honored 

I hope we get more editor support in the near future

Edited December 7, 2018 by Igor Quintero

[bojo2736 1016]

@Aleš Ulm I will say that while fps in explore remains an issue, I am having better results since the update and patch. I am still running at less than uktra, but i am getting fps in the range of 20 - 25 regularly. Which is an improvement for me. It also seems our maps are a bit more stable. Both running around 30 mb which would have killed us prior to the 0.11 update. 

 But my players are reporting ships being unsteerable. Some glitched and unusable. I don't know why.

I do like the water being turned off. It does make things look a little weird when the block doesn't load in. But it is still sailable even so. And no broken water. 

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Thanks. We've already noticed some people reporting losing control over their ships - we're looking into it.

Speaking of how well games run - the optimizations we made were aimed at visual side of things (basically rendering a lot of things is now much faster). There are still some things that can slow down games quite significantly - especially having ships in your world (even those that are not moving / in SP ). Many of those things will be fixed in 0.12. 

Unfortunately sandbox games are quite difficult to test and it is possible that we may overlook something when fixing things - if you want to make sure your game runs as fast as possible in 1.0, the best thing to do is to send us the game so that we can take a look at what is slowing it down (that goes for everyone - we're appreciate a lot when players help us this way). It goes without saying that your game will be safe with us. Whoever has a game with unreasonably low fps (considered the PC it's running on)  feel free to PM me if you have anything we can take look at. Thanks.