Dev Diary #172: Bigger ylands
Hey there, fellow ylanders.
A couple of years back we had to do something that was quite unpopular but, unfortunately, necessary. Ylands maps got smaller.
The reason for this was related to some inner workings of the Unity engine (or, to be precise, something that every engine has to deal with to some extent). In a nutshell - the further you get from the of your world, the less accurate some computations are. At some distance from this scene origin, the shadows started acting weird and other issues appeared.
Ylands wasn‘t the only game to experience this. In fact, every larger Unity-based game at that time suffered from this. And to make sure players didn‘t run into various problems in these more distant areas, we decided to make the maps smaller. It wasn‘t a popular decision by far, nevertheless a necessary one.
Why am I bringing this up you may ask?
Unity engine has come a long way since then and so I am happy to announce that with this issue gone we plan to make the maps bigger again. Consider this yet another step we‘re doing to get Exploration back on the right track.
Speaking of things that have improved and allow us to do things we were not able to do before:
The mobile devices (even the average ones, not just the top tier) can now handle even demanding, sophisticated games and so it‘s my pleasure to announce that Exploration is coming to mobile devices as well.
We see this as an opportunity to let more players experience it so that we can keep focusing on it more and more. And just to be perfectly clear - the existence of mobile Exploration won‘t affect the PC version in any way. PC players will still experience the game the same way they always have. We will release more information about mobile Exploration specifics in the upcoming weeks.
That‘s all for today. As always - stay safe and classy, ylanders!
A couple of years back we had to do something that was quite unpopular but, unfortunately, necessary. Ylands maps got smaller.
The reason for this was related to some inner workings of the Unity engine (or, to be precise, something that every engine has to deal with to some extent). In a nutshell - the further you get from the of your world, the less accurate some computations are. At some distance from this scene origin, the shadows started acting weird and other issues appeared.
Ylands wasn‘t the only game to experience this. In fact, every larger Unity-based game at that time suffered from this. And to make sure players didn‘t run into various problems in these more distant areas, we decided to make the maps smaller. It wasn‘t a popular decision by far, nevertheless a necessary one.
Why am I bringing this up you may ask?
Unity engine has come a long way since then and so I am happy to announce that with this issue gone we plan to make the maps bigger again. Consider this yet another step we‘re doing to get Exploration back on the right track.
Speaking of things that have improved and allow us to do things we were not able to do before:
The mobile devices (even the average ones, not just the top tier) can now handle even demanding, sophisticated games and so it‘s my pleasure to announce that Exploration is coming to mobile devices as well.
We see this as an opportunity to let more players experience it so that we can keep focusing on it more and more. And just to be perfectly clear - the existence of mobile Exploration won‘t affect the PC version in any way. PC players will still experience the game the same way they always have. We will release more information about mobile Exploration specifics in the upcoming weeks.
That‘s all for today. As always - stay safe and classy, ylanders!