Dev Diary #88

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hey there, fellow ylanders!

In the last Dev Diary we discussed the new GUI Editor. In the upcoming months you will probably notice that we’re going to focus on a lot of the platform aspect of Ylands. You can already see it when you look at the previous Dev Diaries - we’re giving the Creators among you more and more tools to create great content.

Even though it may seem that Explore is no longer among our priorities, that is absolutely not the case. Explore will undergo some very interesting changes before 1.0 as well.

I’m talking about both the features specific to Explore (the actual exploration) as well as about improvements to various features and mechanics which are integral for the Explore experience (and can also play a major role even in custom games).

Let me now quickly go over some of the features that will make (not only) Explore more interesting and which are planned for 0.14.

We hear your complaints about the missing first person camera view. We introduced the Interaction view, which helped to a certain degree. But we want to do more. While we can’t enable the FPS view entirely (there are a lot of situations where things are very broken), we decided to set the first person view as the default view for building. This means that whenever you are placing something, FPS view mode is activated (you can still switch back to the 3rd person view via “C”). We are sure that this will make building a lot easier.

 

Building. First person camera view. It just works.

 

Second thing I would like to mention is the updated Codex. We’ve changed how it looks and how it works. The new codex contains basic information on various topics. You can always get more detailed information by clicking an appropriate button in each topic. It will take you to the wiki where we are going to place additional information, images, tips - and so will you, because we want the wiki to be our common achievement.

Then there are a lot of improvements that are smaller, but fix a lot of very annoying issues. You will get better indication whether your target is valid/in range when using tools like annihilator or paint gun. We’re also improving digging, and the ways the players use torches and sleeping pads and much more.

There is so much planned for Explore before 1.0 (and yes, even some major crafting mechanics improvements) but we’ll talk about this more some other time.

Have a great week until we meet again and, as always, stay classy!

[Indomitus 388]

As one who likes to make bases underground, I look forward to trying out the changes to digging.

[jchob 354]

When you talk about aspects of Exploring and mechanics that plays role in custom maps, are you saying you are going to add the random buildings and make us able to take blueprints in custom explore maps generated via Editor? That would be awesome.