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Aleš Ulm

Dev Diary #15

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Hi there, fellow ylanders!

So what’s going on with Ylands? Quite a few things actually! We’re about to leave for Gamescom... but before we get to that let’s talk a bit about the upcoming update.

As some of you know, based on the final tests we decided not to release the Rainy Roads update and take some more time working on the cars. It wasn’t an easy decision, especially given the fact that due to many other reasons this update has already taken WAY longer than our updates normally do. 

But every single time I sit down behind the wheel in Ylands and take one of the nice (or weird) cars for a ride I feel more and more that it was the best call to make. The cars have been reworked to a great degree and things you can now do with them are just incredibly fun - long jumps, driving inside a U-ramp or doing some pretty cool tricks with the handbrake. 

The good news is that we’ve been able to get the vehicles to this point rather fast, and while those who come visit us during Gamescom next week will be able to get their hands on them, the smaller part of the team that stays back here in Prague will use the week to do some final touches. If everything goes right, we’d like to release the cars sometime after we return from Gamescom.


Uramp.png
The new cars went through a lot of intense testing :) 

 

The bad news is - well, actually right now there aren’t really any :)

Also, some time after we return from Gamescom and everything settles down a bit again, we will give you the update info about monetization - we’ll post the FAQ we promised you some time ago.

And now to Gamescom - most of the team will spend the whole next week in Cologne, Germany, presenting the game to players. Those of you who will be there make sure to come visit us - talk to any of us, tell us that you are already ylanders (that actually means a lot now, given the fact that the game is not being sold till November! ) and we’ll greet you with all the glory you deserve :)
On the other hand, since Ane, our Community Manager, and pretty much everyone who often replies on forums will be there during that week, it may take longer for you to get replies - we will try to keep you updated about how things are going in Cologne at least from time to time.

We’ll be looking forward to meeting some of you in Germany and with the rest, I will get in touch through the next Sneek Peak. Until then - have a great time and stay classy!

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Unfortunately no rain on the roads for now :( but will love to drive around in the cars at GamesCom2017, hope you guys will get everything combined and working real soon, really can't wait for the new update, and driving on @Hurricane43's racetrack. 

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Woah those are some wild looking car parts, looking forward to having a peak at those at gamescom! Looking forward to trying cars as well :) Also, good thing is I've now got a holiday for a few weeks so I can spend quite some time starting up my server quite full time as soon as the patch is there!

Adrie

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1 hour ago, Aleš Ulm said:

The bad news is - well, actually right now there aren’t really any :)

You got me there for a second xD I don't usually play race games, but it looks like I will do an exception. Can't wait to test those cars. :D Have a nice time at the Gamescom and I'm looking forward to the (now even with better cars, thank you!) update. 

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Keep up the good work and have fun at Gamescom!

Game development is a slow and steady road, there's no need to rush it, that's when mistakes happen or things get overlooked! 

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Great job once again to the team... Have an awesome time and please Mr. @Aleš Ulm or Ms. @Ane for those of us working hard at our regular jobs next week and can't meet you, it would be nice to have some video footage even for 30 seconds of a car driving on a nice road... ??

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1 hour ago, Hurricane43 said:

Great job once again to the team... Have an awesome time and please Mr. @Aleš Ulm or Ms. @Ane for those of us working hard at our regular jobs next week and can't meet you, it would be nice to have some video footage even for 30 seconds of a car driving on a nice road... ??

I can see if I can film with my phone if it's allowed? :D Anything specific you wanna see?

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5 minutes ago, WijkagentAdrie said:

I can see if I can film with my phone if it's allowed? :D Anything specific you wanna see?

Thanks so much buddy that would be awesome. A car in action going around a corner and or a jump. 

Check for new blocks in explorer mode ?

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49 minutes ago, Hurricane43 said:

Thanks so much buddy that would be awesome. A car in action going around a corner and or a jump. 

Check for new blocks in explorer mode ?

/additem creator_cube :D That's the first thing I'm gonna check haha. Only if it's allowed ofcourse!

Adrie

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On 8/18/2017 at 11:32 PM, WijkagentAdrie said:

/additem creator_cube :D That's the first thing I'm gonna check haha. Only if it's allowed ofcourse!

Adrie

Oh boy, this is what happens when you give away all your secrets :D

On some of the PCs we will be showing a newly made racing track but if you'll want to try to drive it through some rougher terrain I'm pretty sure for you guys we can go beyond what's meant to be shown to the general public ;)

Please bear in mind that some minor things are still being tweaked so the demo does not represent 100% of what's going to be in the update. In general the maximum car speed is yet to be finalized (based on some MP tests that will be performed while we're at GC; especially cars with just one engine are now rather slow on the racing track - this speed, though, is fine out in the open where due to many obstacles going real fast is not possible anyway ) and proper sounds still need to be put in place. 

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Just wondering will add creater cube still remain in multiplayer games in the future? I feel it will take away alot of the adventure in exploration mode if people are allowed to use it

Edited by Achilles77

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I'm not very experienced with the MP aspects of the game but I suppose that all of the consol commands will be (if they are not already) disabled for normal players on the servers. 

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5 hours ago, Miguel Preguisa said:

I'm not very experienced with the MP aspects of the game but I suppose that all of the consol commands will be (if they are not already) disabled for normal players on the servers. 

yeah, currently only the user account that is hosting the server gets admin by default, and access to the admin commands. An admin has to /promote /demote a player to temporary admin rank to allow this, and this doesn't seem to save when they log out. 

There are some player commands for re-spawning etc that do not require admin rank.

So to answer the cube question, like Miguel pointed out, only the admin could do this.

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11 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

Oh boy, this is what happens when you give away all your secrets :D

On some of the PCs we will be showing a newly made racing track but if you'll want to try to drive it through some rougher terrain I'm pretty sure for you guys we can go beyond what's meant to be shown to the general public ;)

Please bear in mind that some minor things are still being tweaked so the demo does not represent 100% of what's going to be in the update. In general the maximum car speed is yet to be finalized (based on some MP tests that will be performed while we're at GC; especially cars with just one engine are now rather slow on the racing track - this speed, though, is fine out in the open where due to many obstacles going real fast is not possible anyway ) and proper sounds still need to be put in place. 

I'm jelly! I will wait patiently for the updates to go live at our end! :) Sadly, circumstance does not allow me to take a trip over to meet you guys, perhaps in the future.

Any joy with the engines on boats with this update? Or more likely in later updates?

On that subject, some thoughts for later updates:

- Able to put wheels on a boat, to make an all terrain vehicle.

- Able to power a propeller on the car or boat, enough of them might let you hover or fly?

- A small sail for a car, making a land ship! If the engines are reasonably hard to craft, perhaps a wooden framed car, not capable of supporting an engine, instead having a small sail, and this could be made by the players at a far lesser expense of resources. A super low tier and lower speed car etc, also it would be good fun!

- Able to make flotation blocks, that can be placed on a car, or on their own, to make a custom ship. Flotation blocks would just be required to provide their namesake (float), and be able to stick to another block or blocks, to make those float. Perhaps if something like 1 flotation block can support 2 normal blocks etc, this could be made to make some pretty interesting floating things, and could be attached directly to a car, to allow you to float it!

- Land claim blocks for multiplayer, I'm not 100% sure what you guys have planned for this, and I'm sure you have your own ideas for it, but something needs to be implemented pre-Steam, as this will be a major grief factor, combined with players logging out and their bodies disappearing or changing state, being able to claim some space that only you can build within, will stop some of the issues to come.

Edited by John - Ylanders

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Hey everyone! I'm back from my trip to Gamescom 2017 in Cologne! Last year my friends and I went on Friday/Saturday which was really busy, yet Wednesday this year seemed less busy :) 

First of all thanks to the Ylands team for taking care of me and my friends! We went home with some very nice merchandise, thanks a lot! But even more amazing was finally seeing the team and having a chat with you guys! I felt really appreciated and I hope I gave you guys the same feeling, I'm really happy with where Ylands is going.

That being said, let's discuss the cars that I got to test! Car physics are very very very nice, I'm glad the team has delayed the update to make sure it's perfect. When driving a car you can feel the weight/physics behind it, the springs are quite flexible and soft. They take bumps well but if you make them too big it will get tricky. When cornering too fast you start to understeer, yet when tapping the handbrake or trying to drift it will oversteer in a controllable way. Cars will try to upright themselves, also you can climb some serious hills with them and not get stuck. Besides feeling quite "realistic like" the usability is absolutely huge. You don't need perfect roads or anything to use them. The only place where I felt physics reality and usability were conflicting is when jumping over objects such as fences, where usability has won. In reality the car would've gone out of control and flipped dozens of times (which it did sometimes as well :D )

Cars are very quick around islands with 2 steam engines (at the moment 2 steam engines or 1 ylandium engine give maximum power/speed), with 1 engine they still felt very usable. Although I would say that more power/speed is nice, the double fuel consumption is quite high. The engines use a rather large amount of fuel anyway, although I have been driving around like a maniac :D I think making hybrid (Ylandium+coal) cars would be nice, since in case you run out of Energy you can always go back to coal which is quite common to find.

Are there any flaws to cars? I've tried to be mean and "break" the game which I partly succeeded in. Cars on ships didn't quite work well, and some sloped blocks have square collision models which made driving on them look funny, yet they would still drive onto them. Also the /unstuck when the car went into the water wasn't 100% reliable yet. On the other hand, I've been told that an improved car update which fixes a few of these problems was gonna be there tomorrow so to the people that are still to go to Gamescom, your experience will probably be even better! Like Ales already said, this isn't 100% what the update is gonna be like but it's already very awesome.

@Hurricane43 I've snapped a quick video of me driving a car on the fun fair horse track. If the devs want me to take it down I will do this, just give me a nudge or manually delete the link from this message, the YT video is on private.

@Aleš Ulm Thanks for the great hospitality! I'm sure I'll see my pictures appear somewhere :D If there's anything I can help you guys with just drop me a message.

I hope you all (devs and visitors that are still to go) enjoy the rest of Gamescom!

If anyone has got any questions feel free to drop them, I will answer as much as I can.

Adrie

Edited by WijkagentAdrie
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Sounds like you had a great time! Ylands has so much potential, and the people behind it are all so nice, it truly is a great game.

Once I finish with my current studies, I will have more free time and availability to take such trips! Hopefully I'll get the chance to say hi to you and the team in person as well, and thanks for the video and information, I've been highly curious to know these things!

The cars seem to handle how I'd imagine they would (especially on what looks like bike wheels!), seems they have done an excellent job of realising this addition to the game.

Edited by John - Ylanders
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I also forgot to say I've had a very brief look at the new weather, which looked very impressive! Hats off for the massive difference in feeling it gives. I haven't checked for waves during storms, nor how they affect ships or whether we can actually be dry indoors during rain/snow.

Adrie

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Nice to hear you had a great time @WijkagentAdrie and I am also excited to test out the cars, to look at some of the new weather features and have a chat face to face with the Ylands team :) 

I will be there Saturday and will be mostly at the BI booth and meeting up with a lot people from twitter (meet and greet with my twitter fanbase lol) so I hope I can get passed the busy area's real fast. 

Kinda going with a double feeling as I am realy excited to meet a lot of the Bohemia Interactive developers with who I have been in contact with for over 4 years now but never had a chance to meet IRL, and from what u heard they are just as excited to meet me so that makes me feel like a famous person at gamescom;)

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Wow the cars looks amazing and handling looks impressive... Thanks so much for the video, really impressive how the car moving...

 

Glad you had a great time and enjoyed your trip... Can't wait to see the weather and cars together... 

 

Was there any new blocks ?

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3 hours ago, Hurricane43 said:

Wow the cars looks amazing and handling looks impressive... Thanks so much for the video, really impressive how the car moving...

 

Glad you had a great time and enjoyed your trip... Can't wait to see the weather and cars together... 

 

Was there any new blocks ?

You're more than welcome! The cars really feel super awesome/amazing, having a car ingame is definitely a big goal I think.

The amount of different car parts (seats, front/backsides) is absolutely amaaazing, also the chassis that has been shown is 4x12 (6 with wheels), but there is also a 6x14 or 6x16 I believe, 8 wide with wheels. I forgot to check for other parts. I even went back to the Ylands booth a second time because I wanted some more time to check things but I still forgot something hmm. Maybe @A3_Melle could have a look? Or @Aleš Ulm or any of the devs could give us a nice spoiler? :D I'm specifically interested whether there are 1x1x1 size front/rear lights which we can place all over the car instead of only use the fixed ones with the grill. If not I've got a few idea's which I can show. Also it would be nice to have 8x4 or 10x5 doors so we can park our cars inside :) 

Adrie

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I'll try to make some nice pictures of the new parts and go after the wheel base :) looking fowerd to it! even though I think I need a own booth at the BI stand with a "meet & greet A3_Melle" as I will have a lot of chats with many of the devs from Bohemia Interactive :P I am hyped to go to gamescom and some from BI are hyped that I am coming to gamescom ☺

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