Sneak Peek #40

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hey there, fellow ylanders!

Firstly let me mention Dedicated Servers. Originally we wanted to start discussing those this week but other things got in the way, so we‘ll start next week (around Wednesday). We‘ll start a specific thread where we will post our analysis of the current state and what we consider our goals. It would be nice to get as much feedback on that as possible - features you think are important and which we might have missed, ones that you consider most critical and those which can be added at a later date... We will provide you with a link where those interested will find the DS to play with - but as I already said in the previous posts, do not expect any improvements in this build since we‘re still fully focused on polishing Ylands for the Steam release. We will let you know as soon as the work on DS starts and we're fully focused on it - at that point, we‘ll proceed based on your feedback and will keep you informed about our progress.

So what‘s new with the painting system? Well, Countless Colors is shaping up to be one of the best updates to this date. For example, have I told you that you can paint animals? Obviously, there will be some limits - for example, you probably wouldn‘t like to find your own horse painted blue by someone else after getting back to the game, right? On the other hand - if your idea of a perfect world is having a Barbie-like pink house surrounded by wild pink horses who are we to say "no" to you?

 

Something tells me you don't meet animals like these quite often in your world...

 

Also, there‘s another new feature we‘re testing - a context radial menu. We really need that for a lot of things; many important features and actions are now hidden under obscure keys, which are difficult to find when playing with mouse/keyboard combo... and impossible to use when using a gamepad which the menu will solve. For example, emotes will be removed from F-keys, where they are now by default, and will become accessible via the radial menu (you will still be able to bind emotes to any keys you like, though). The radial menu will be set up in such way that getting to often used features will be easy and fast and it will even let us use previews, which come handy especially for things like the mentioned emotes. Also, as we keep adding more sophisticated items in the game, we feel that some of those could allow for more interactions than is now possible, and one way of solving that would be to contextually put some of the lesser used interactions in the radial menu (with a proper indication that such an extra object interaction can be found in it). In general, we feel that the contextual radial menu will have a very positive influence on how user-friendly controlling the game is. Even though some features may come at a later time, the first iteration of the radial menu is planned for the upcoming update.

So that‘s it for now. Next time we‘re going to talk a bit about what we plan to do so that combat becomes more fun. Until then you have a great time and stay classy!

[AashifProXD 7]

So hyped! for the Countless Colours (Colors) update

 

Edited October 13, 2017 by AashifProXD

[BigBoss87 68]

What kind of interactions will we have on objects? Whatever we do in this radial menu context when it comes to crafting we can do it the way we do right now?

I didn't understand what impact context radial menu will have.

[WijkagentAdrie 384]

A week ago I literally thought, what if this game had a radial menu? I've played Star Wars galaxies where this was used everywhere. A good default button would be the ` (tilde) key right between ESC and TAB  Looking forward to the colors as well, gonna have to recolor everything I made so far which is gonna be a huge task!

Adrie

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

@BigBoss87 We still need to do some tests to see what would work well with the menu. I'm not sure if we end up using it even with crafting at some point (in fact, the menu is not meant to duplicate those existing controls that work well and can already be accessed without much effort) but what I meant when I mentioned interacting with objects were situations, where you're focusing an item that can have several possible interactions (for example armed bear trap can be both armed and picked up ). The current controls are not very good at handling these situations but the radial menu would let you access some of the additional interactions with ease. Also since I mentioned emotes (short animations like waving, dancing etc.) - imagine that you have 20 or 30 of those and want to find and use a specific one fast - using the menu with previews will help you with that. We are considering letting players quickly toggle pieces of equipment via this menu (like a turning on/off a headlight on a helmet without having to go to that item's detailed view etc.). There's really a lot it can be used for.

@WijkagentAdrie Speaking of huge tasks - this was a  huge task for our artists as well since they had to manually adjust most of our several thousand assets to make them work properly with the new painting system (but even they agree it was worth it   ).
 

[BigBoss87 68]

Thank you Aleš for your answer.

Ill see it when its launched. You got this! 

[Unranked 23]

Well I hope it is a easy to use tool becaus my newest ship contains atleast 38 thousend blocks, and I would rather not click those all again

Edited October 14, 2017 by Unranked

[WijkagentAdrie 384]

I've got a question: Can you actually color only 1 side of a block, or only certain "triangles" on a mesh?

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Short answer is no - actually what we call painting is closer to "color switching" - I think you'll understand more when you try it because it's not that easy to explain this in words. Each object can have up to three areas (channels) defined that  contain colors that you can change. For example grey stone block has one channel - if you paint it red, it will - as a whole - turn red. Armors may have parts that can be colored and three zones where you can change the color. Coloring only one side of a block is not possible - technically that is basically painting only some of the polygons. While this would be technically possible it is far from trivial (both because of amount of data to store/send, the need for very precise controls etc.) if it is implemented it will be in rather distant future.