Dev Diary #59

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

 

I hope that the beginning of the new year has found you well and you are ready and willing for new adventures.  

This is the year when we will be releasing Ylands 1.0 - and later this month we would like to tell you more about what you can expect, and what updates and features we would like to release in the following 12 months.

In the next Dev Diary, we will address once again some of the specific issues and features, while today we’ll concentrate on the questions you sent us over our social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram) as well as the questions you asked on game / Steam Ylands forums.

Here’s what's keeping you awake at nights:  

 

OS X release for Christmas please?

While we understand that there’s a significant number of players who wants to play Ylands on Macs, the truth is that the number isn’t large enough for us to implement this version at this moment. Before we consider having the OSX version of Ylands, the game needs to be polished and become somewhat more “established”.  

 

Any plans to add railways and carts?

Let’s just say that you shouldn’t miss some of our upcoming Dev Diaries where we'll be discussing this (among with a lot of other cool things).

 

Will it be possible to have better tools to navigate because it's a pain to find new ylands. And some kind of visible barrier so one knows when to stop looking for the islands.

Definitely. In 0.11 we’ve introduced a new feature where nearby ylands can be seen on the compass. This however, is more of a temporary solution. We are working on improvements that would eventually allow us to show ylands at large distances and improved maps.  

The fact that there is no clear indication when you're leaving the area where the ylands are located (you should at least get a warning right now, but it’s neither intuitive nor very elegant solution) is something we indeed need to fix.

 

There are so many stories around us - like the one about Philip and his Happy Pets store (Happy Pets courtesy of @Spyler.X)

 

When will you release the offline mode?

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any progress regarding this topic - we still don’t plan to work on this before we release Ylands 1.0 (long story short: while this is an important feature to many players, our priority remains to deliver Ylands in the best possible shape in 2019, and any non-critical complicated tasks will have to wait for that).

 

Is there (or will there be) abilities to freeze freely placed items?

Yes. We understand that often it’s quite annoying how easy it is to unintentionally pick up something carefully placed and positioned. Few months back we internally discussed a way of being able to “glue” such objects so that they can’t be (or at least not easily) removed, but it was put on hold in favor of other features. We definitely plan to return to this.

 

Will the first person mode be supported again?

The first person view as you know it from other games won’t be added before Ylands 1.0. However, in the next week’s DD we will present you with something that you will very likely find handy in most of the situations where first person camera was (or still is) helpful or even required. We do understand that such situations still exist and don't consider this matter closed in the least.

 

Will you be fixing the lag on ships? This is the biggest issue with the game. I would say fix this before you add anything new.

We’re already working on this and we believe the next update 0.12 will fix this.

 

Any chance we will see musical instruments with or without an ABC notation system?

We would definitely love to have this (I still remember very fondly how much fun I had with this in Lord of The Rings Online ).

 

But there's one more thing that we would like to share with you in this week's Dev Diary - some time ago we have started working on the Ylands Wiki. At first we have focused on Visual Scripting, so there's not that much else in there yet, but that will definitely change during this year. Very soon we will be posting a document about how you can help us with that - in the meantime go and check it out yourself at https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Ylands.

 

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

 

[bojo2736 1016]

Is there an estimate of when 0.12 will be released?

[Indomitus 388]

44 minutes ago, Aleš Ulm said:

Will it be possible to have better tools to navigate because it's a pain to find new ylands. And some kind of visible barrier so one knows when to stop looking for the islands.

Definitely. In 0.11 we’ve introduced a new feature where nearby ylands can be seen on the compass. This however, is more of a temporary solution. We are working on improvements that would eventually allow us to show ylands at large distances and improved maps.  

The fact that there is no clear indication when you're leaving the area where the ylands are located (you should at least get a warning right now, but it’s neither intuitive nor very elegant solution) is something we indeed need to fix.

Maybe things like the color of the water (from light and pleasant inside the boundaries to very dark and ominous outside), or a special severe weather system that makes it nearly impossible to travel farther in that direction?

[zarwil 393]

5 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

Will the first person mode be supported again?

The first person view as you know it from other games won’t be added before Ylands 1.0. However, in the next week’s DD we will present you with something that you will very likely find handy in most of the situations where first person camera was (or still is) helpful or even required. We do understand that such situations still exist and don't consider this matter closed in the least.

 

That's a bummer  I was away from 0.7 untill 0.11 released so I never caught why It was removed. I can't remember any severe first person bugs from 0.7 days.

Will there be a better way to aim cannons? Aiming cannons through port holes on ships and other tight spaces is pretty rough and would be much better from first person.

[StoutCrusher 37]

9 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

Is there (or will there be) abilities to freeze freely placed items?

Yes. We understand that often it’s quite annoying how easy it is to unintentionally pick up something carefully placed and positioned. Few months back we internally discussed a way of being able to “glue” such objects so that they can’t be (or at least not easily) removed, but it was put on hold in favor of other features. We definitely plan to return to this.

 

Glue sounds like a heck of a plan. Wax and something would make that resource more useful too. Hyped about .12 release. =)

[handofthesly 214]

Happy New Years!

It’s good to see work starting on an official wiki. Hopefully I can help with the creation of it as I have done on the unofficial one.

[Dreed84 4]

Quote

Will it be possible to have better tools to navigate because it's a pain to find new ylands. And some kind of visible barrier so one knows when to stop looking for the islands.

Definitely. In 0.11 we’ve introduced a new feature where nearby ylands can be seen on the compass. This however, is more of a temporary solution. We are working on improvements that would eventually allow us to show ylands at large distances and improved maps.  

The fact that there is no clear indication when you're leaving the area where the ylands are located (you should at least get a warning right now, but it’s neither intuitive nor very elegant solution) is something we indeed need to fix.

Hello. Thank You for your brilliant work. I am looking forward to 1.0  Can You please just consider also players who wants the game to be a bit more challenging? If the islands will be as near as they are now and you will be able to see them from greater distance, where is the fun from sailing the ocean looking for the new islands? It would be ok, when there is hundred of islands, but this is not the case, at least not for now. When you are building the ship for few days and then you can discover all the islands on the map in 90 minutes is quite disappointing. Why to build nice ship with details, color it and so on, when you will sail the see just for such a short time. Please add the optional setup for distance between the islands and also option to turn off the sign in the compass for players who wants to sail the sea a bit longer  Thank You very much.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

an estimate of when 0.12 will be released-

we learned the hard way not to give any estimates, but at the same time I don't want you to expect this update to be released any time soon. Since 0.12 will be a very large update (note that that they get larger and larger) once again with more fixes  and improvements than ever before, it will take some more time, especially since we will be doing a lot of additional MP testing etc. Because of that I think it would be reasonable to expect it around late February.

Will there be a better way to aim cannons?

Yes, that's one of the situations we would like to fix (I will tell you more this Friday)

an official wiki. Hopefully I can help with the creation of it

We do hope that in future this wiki will be mostly edited by the community, with us providing all the support. We just want to create few topics (templates) for every major section, so that the editors have something to work with while making sure the formatting stays consistent etc. We will create a specific FAQ covering this later this week.

consider also players who wants the game to be a bit more challenging

The challenges Ylands presents you with at this point are pretty poor. The game was always meant to be more difficult (with few options that you can set it to make it easier). We won't be making it into a hardcore survival sim, where you have to spend most of your time looking for food or fixing your wounds - this part we're quite happy with. What will change before 1.0, though, is the level of danger you're in at certain times. Nights will be much more dangerous. Venturing into caves even more so (but also more rewarding). There will be enough incentives for players to travel more among the ylands and explore. Which gets me to the second part of you question -  the ylands showing in the compass area is only a temporary solution. We added that because we realize that lot of players either could find many of the ylands or, unfortunately, haven't realized there were more than one yland in the game. This is really just a quick fix, which I believe will be removed once we're ready to give players more realistic and engaging means of finding another ylands. That being said there's definitely no harm in looking into it and check if even this temporary solution can't be made a bit more challenging.

[Igor Q. 519]

Hey, I don't know if this has been mentioned, but can we make spotlights customized? We are limited to 4 spotlights, but it should be really easy to instead give us 1 spotlight that can have customized light values using an RGB code. It would be tremendously helpful.

Additionally, if we can have a "light source option" where the alpha values of a color provide actual light in the darkness and not only "glow" would be a great asset too.

Edited January 7, 2019 by Igor Q.

[RedEagle_P1. 905]

@Aleš Ulm - I play mostly mobile games so I was not aware how far AAA games have come in the last decade (I played console 15 years ago). When comparing this game to subnautica I found that other game had a lot more to explore. I realize creating explore-content is likely expressive. How will Ylands push to satisfy gamers looking for MC-style almost-infinite exploration? 

 

 

[Brbrmensch 32]

16 hours ago, RedEagle_P1. said:

@Aleš Ulm - I play mostly mobile games so I was not aware how far AAA games have come in the last decade (I played console 15 years ago). When comparing this game to subnautica I found that other game had a lot more to explore. I realize creating explore-content is likely expressive. How will Ylands push to satisfy gamers looking for MC-style almost-infinite exploration? 

 

 

i believe they expect the game to be the base for other games, so that they would make "game modes" aka "mods" that would be actual game, but the idea is that other players would make these mods later

[Bob Salvador 82]

hello, a small question: is it possible to add an option to adjust the depth of the ocean.It is especially at the time of generating maps in the editor, because I am currently on a mini game project with a friend for 3 weeks and we are getting stuck because of it. Our mini game needs boats and every time, the ocean is not deep enough and the game does not work. (I think you know why I do not use the teraformation tool)

 

Just a small tease for the mini game:

 

we love your game and we wish you all the desired success, thank you for developing a game that makes me spend as good time as playing Lego when I was a child.

 

Edited January 11, 2019 by Bob Salvador