Ylands News

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

Hopefully, this will be the last Dev Diary before we release update 1.6.

Not that long ago, I (Аles, Ylands Project Lead) was in Naru‘s Tuesday stream and tried to answer as many questions (both asked in advance and during the stream itself) as possible. If you‘re interested in learning more about what we discussed, you can take a look here (huge thanks to the incredible @ocnoglittle). It was great and we would like to continue doing this on the regular basis every two weeks. So, if you have any questions, comments or criticism, you‘re welcome to join next Tuesday‘s stream here.

With 1.6 almost out of the door, it‘s time to start talking about what‘s next for Ylands. In a few weeks, we plan to release a roadmap for the rest of the year but I think we can already give you a rough idea about what 1.7 will be about.



Update 1.7 will once again, focus on Exploration. We are slowly getting to a stage where we feel good enough about the Exploration experience, and can actively start bringing in more players. And to make that a reality, with update 1.7, we would like to focus on:

* giving Exploration gameplay some sort of progression, with a clear path/goals to follow
* making it more friendly & welcoming towards new players
* making it easier for players to socialize there
* add some sort of Exploration "trial" for those who may wish to see, what is the new Exploration about
* bringing in more interesting, unique handcrafted ylands to make exploring much more fun and rewarding
* fixing / improving some of the things mentioned by the community on a regular basis

But our Editor team will definitely keep working as well. You can expect further improvements to text scripting, many quality-of-life improvements as well as enhancement of existing features.

That‘s it for today and the next time we will talk some more about 1.7. Until then stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

Hi there, fellow ylanders!

Good news - we are now mere days away from releasing 1.6! We've just recently released the PC-only Experimental build and you have already reported some issues, which is great and we are very grateful for your time! This update is packed with Exploration features as well as with some pretty cool things Creators will love and since there are still some we haven't mentioned yet, let just quickly go through some of the remaining features.


One of the coolest features of this update is the possibility of "inviting" vendors to your ylands. After you create a specific workstation, you can make vendor banners that can be placed anywhere on your yland. What vendor comes to settle on your yland depends on the type of banner you create. You can use this feature in many ways - not only for yourself but to create a trading hub where other players can trade with your vendors, for example. In future updates we are planning to enhance this feature even more - for example, allowing the vendor owner to set prices and get profits from sold items.

Unfortunately, we have witnessed many times players that join a game not to experience Ylands but to annoy and harass others. To make sure this happens as few times as possible, we have implemented the Player reporting tool. Whenever you're in the game and someone harasses you or misbehaves, you can report them along with the reason. This will be sent to us along with a screenshot and recent chats of the reported player. We will look into this, see what has happened, and take appropriate measures.





We've already mentioned this before but only partially - in 1.6 Creators will be able to import midi files and use those as music in their games. Not only they will be able to use single songs, but we've added an option to set up playlists that you can later play in your games.

We noticed that letting you use your custom bitmaps in games resulted in some awesome things so we are enhancing this feature even further! Now you will be able to scale, rotate and flip these images... and also position them from Visual scripting.

Last, but definitely not least there is a brand new Custom controller. What is it good for? Well, this allows you to re-route the controls from a character to any custom object in the game. So now you can easily control, say, a rocket. But the best part is, that this feature comes with client/server prediction, which means, that using this feature even with MP games (or any games not hosted on your client) will mean way less lag than you would normally get. This really opens the door to some new & exciting game types.


That's it for today! Hopefully, we will release 1.6 as soon as possible and can start talking about what cool Exploration and Editor features we're already cooking for 1.7 (and Exploration fans are in for a big treat (wink) ). Until then, as always, stay healthy, and classy, ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

Today I would like to continue talking about some of the concerns you have voiced and the problems that you’ve faced.

One of the most common complaints was about the quality of the servers; progress being lost or wiped. I know this did happen quite often in the past (especially with Exploration games after 1.5 - that’s one of the reasons Exploration was marked as “experimental”) but with several fixes released post 1.5, we believe this shouldn’t happen anymore. There still may be some hidden bugs that under some circumstances require a server restart, but I promise we'll do our best to eliminate these as well. Due to how the game works now, even if a restart happens - in no case should the player lose more than around 10 minutes of the progress. If your current experience differs, please let us know on our forums and feel free to PM me. I will do my best to help you with that.

Another thing I promised to talk about is the size of the Ylands community. By focusing on the platform more than on Exploration in the last few years we've lost a lot of the players we initially had. We also made some unpopular decisions such as going F2P, that caused the community to shrink further. At the same time, we didn’t really try actively to bring more players to Exploration because we wanted to fix it, improve it ... but never really got to it until now.

So our plan right now is to release 1.6 before the end of this month. This update will bring a lot of cool new features to Exploration and fix many of the issues you've reported (missing smoothing tool, overpowered propeller pack, and more). We hope that by fixing and improving Exploration, we will eventually get to an amazing experience that you all be happy with. We have already started working on two major features for 1.7, which are directly based on your feedback and will, without any doubt, make Exploration much better and closer to what we all want it to be. We will start talking with you about those immediately after 1.6 is released.



We are so confident about 1.7 being a major Exploration improvement that we are planning to actively start bringing players into Ylands again. At that point we would like to ask those who have left at any point, disappointed by the state of the game, to come back and see what we’ve done with it with the last 3 updates. At the same time, we will let even those who don’t own Exploration to try it in a limited way (currently we’re thinking of limiting them to their starting yland, however, we will allow other players to visit them - if they own the DLC).

So that’s our plan. I understand the disappointment of those who were more interested in Exploration than Editor, but I truly believe that if they spare a few minutes to check out the new Exploration this summer, they will be pleasantly surprised.

That's it for today - next week I will tell you more about what great Exploration features you can expect in update 1.6. Until then, as always... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

Originally I planned to discuss some cool new features and improvements update 1.6 will introduce but seeing the discussions about the current state of the game and where it‘s headed, I thought it's more important to react to these instead.

Let me start by addressing the concerns about us focusing mostly on the Editor/platform instead of Exploration.

In the past years, we have spent a lot of time working on the Editor, the Workshop and the platform in general. During this time it was our primary focus, and this meant that - unfortunately - Exploration got less love than what we would have wanted. That is a fact, and we understand the disappointment of those who wanted us to improve Exploration in the first place. While we did make some Exploration improvements, these were not necessarily enough. We are also aware that some features are now actually might even be worse than they used to (probably the biggest issue is still maps being smaller).

All of this happened because of three reasons.

This year Ylands will be officially released in China (which is something that only a few dozen „western“ games achieve each year) and thanks to the support from our team here, now, months before the release, the platform there already contains hundreds of games. For Ylands, a project that we still plan to develop for many years to come, this is obviously very important.

The second reason is something we haven‘t talked about yet, but since some of you already started asking - and we are close enough to start discussing this as well; here we go. Often in the past, actually even years ago, when the Editor and platform was nothing like they are now, we kept being approached by teachers from various countries who were interested in using Ylands and its visual scripting and easy to pick-up systems, as tools to teach kids the basics of scripting & programming. At that time we didn‘t feel ready to provide such a solution, but now we got to a point where we can and want to; so this year we plan on introducing Ylands to schools as a learning tool. At first here, in the Czech Republic, followed by other countries. The Ylands version for schools will be pretty much the standard Ylands you know and love but stripped of some features (quite obviously monetization and some others). We have all the features we wanted to have but it took us long to get here.

So what‘s next?

Exploration.

We have already started focusing on Exploration with update 1.5 and that has brought a major change to the basic gameplay loop. Instead of playing many Exploration games, building your structures, ships only to lose them when you start another Exploration game, you now play in a large Exploration universe where you can keep your progress, explore any number of ylands - be it local games, games hosted on dedicated servers or locally hosted by other players.

In 1.6 we will continue with these improvements. We got rid of the barrier and will give you more power over your ylands. We are adding new ways to build with your friends and tools to prevent visitors to your ylands doing any harm. We are giving you better ways of building. We even made a lot of smaller improvements that you asked for (like introducing a rake, an object you can use to smooth terrain, etc.). Actually, there is so much cool Exploration-related stuff in 1.6 that for the first time we won‘t be able to introduce all of it in Dev Diaries before it comes out!





And the updates past 1.6? Again, a ton of cool Exploration features, fixes and improvements.

We are already planning something that will make the maps much, much bigger (the actual local maps where you move without loading). In 1.6 we, the devs, are already able to create special unique scenes in the Editor that then can be found in Exploration by players (think of Random Encounters, but entire islands). In the future, we will give the same power to you. That is how the Editor and Exploration will „click together“ and all the time and effort we put into Editor will be beneficial even for the only-Exploration players. Imagine Exploration with custom made worlds, that can be pretty much anything...


And that is, actually, the third reason why we focused so much on having a working Editor/platform first (if you look back in forum posts and Dev Diaries, you will find we dreamed this up this looooong time ago).

That is what the future of Ylands is.

I hope that this answers some of your questions (and maybe even concerns) about the future of Ylands and what role Exploration and the Editor play in it. I understand that this covers only parts of what your concerns are, and I will continue in the next Dev Diary with some other topics like server stability, our plans to get more players to play Exploration and anything else you ask for in the discussion below this post. Please note that with CM gone (we are already talking with some promising candidates) and finalizing features for 1.6 we may not be able to answer everything you ask right away and it may take some time / it will be answered in the next Dev Diary.

That‘s it for today, I will talk to you next Thursday so until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

Hey there, fellow ylanders.

After we‘ve talked about several Exploration improvements you will find in the next update 1.6, today we focus on something big that Creators will surely like (if you‘re interested in Exploration, don‘t worry, there‘s plenty more cool stuff in 1.6 we‘ve yet to talk about).

We‘ve seen a lot of amazing creations that pushed the limit of what is possible with visual scripting (and many time genuinely surprised us). Games like this make us, the whole platform, move forward, but it also showed more clearly what is not really surprising. Visual scripting is a great tool for learning, for making simple-to-medium complex games, but once the game complexity reaches a certain level, working with the visual script, navigating through it and in general making the code intuitive and easy to work with because really difficult.

That‘s why with 1.6 we‘re bringing you a beta version of non-visual scripting. You will be able to create text scripts, that can be attached to Entities and Game logic object in the editor and when the game runs this script will be executed in a similar way to the visual script.





The fact is that internally the visual script has always been a visualization of javascript-like language so now you will get the chance to bypass the visual scripting and type in the code directly. Instead of describing these features in many more paragraphs, we put together a short FAQ that will, hopefully, answer most of your questions. We are looking forward to discussing with you this topic more in the followup discussion.

Q: You said „beta version“ - what does it mean?
A: This feature requires a lot of work based on a lot of feedback that we would like to get from you, the Creators. Therefore it is very likely that 1.7 may bring some changes and you will be required to go through your scripts and update them. Also, as always with a feature of such size, there may be bugs. The more feedback you provide, the better it will get.

Q: What language is it? What syntax can we expect?
A: The syntax and commands (the „generic“ ones, not the ones specific to Ylands) is pretty much javascript (even its file extension is .js). However, it‘s not 100% javascript, since it does not support some features, so you can probably think of it as a javascript subset. You will find more about this in the online documentation.

Q: Is this meant to replace visual scripting?
A: Absolutely not. For us, visual scripting remains the primary way of scripting and we will keep improving it in future.

Q: Can we use both scripting and visual scripting in one game?
A: Sure!

Q: Will there be some sort of editor, IDE we will be able to use to edit the script?
A: No, not at this time. With so many cool editors out there supporting .js syntax we‘d like to focus on other areas of the scripting/game - at least for the time being.

That‘s it for today - don‘t hesitate to ask about anything that remains unclear and I‘ll talk to you next week. Until then - stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

Let us know what you think on our forums!