Ylands News

Hey there fellow ylanders - it's that time of the week again!

The time when you settle in with a steaming cup of coffee, lay back and enjoy the latest Dev Diary, especially knowing that this one might be* the last before a new update comes out.

So let's prepare for this beautiful eventuality, by collecting all the sneak peeks and teasers we have released about the upcoming 0.13 update.

• The amazing new friends list - dev diary #75
• The new in-game chat system - dev diary #77
• Advanced object grouping and dynamic objects - dev diary #79
• New and improved terrain generation - dev diary #80

The new terrain generation in effect

As you can see, 0.13 is going to be concentrating on the social aspects of the game, laying down the essential foundations for some very cool upcoming systems (like clans). It is a very significant update for us and for the game - paving the way for the rest of Yland's future.

The new terrain generation is also a necessary (and beautiful...you'll see) step towards improved AI pathfinding, something we've discussed in:

• Improved pathfinding - dev diary #76

While this feature will not be present in 0.13 (it will follow in a later update), it's a huge step towards a more interesting and challenging AI that will improve every aspect of the game and will be a true game changer.

Of course no update could be complete without a host of fixes and improvements (and maybe a new costume...) that are too numerous and small to mention here, but you can read about all of it in the changelog as soon as it goes online.

We'll also be releasing a video dev diary (as per the gentlemanly tradition of Ylands) to walk you through the biggest features of the update - keep your eyes peeled for that as well!

Say "update 0.13 is coming soon and you'll love it"

And until then...have a great weekend and stay classy everyone!

* fingers crossed

Version: 0.12.3.71538

• Moved official Gold Rush servers to a different provider
  

Hey there, fellow ylanders!

Let’s talk about another exciting feature coming in 0.13! The new and improved terrain generation. We have changed the way the terrain is generated in both the surface and the underground caves – this paves the groundwork for future updates that will allow us to quickly and painlessly generate more unique terrain variations. Let’s take a look at the changes!

In the old system, we were able to create nice terrains, but there wasn’t a big diversity after all – all ylands were basically a cone, where the top of the cone was the highest mountain peak and on the surface of the cone random changes were applied, so that it always looked a little bit different. This ultimately resulted in the ylands being a bit repetitive – the mountains were always in the middle, there was never a large flat area, and it was impossible to add some unique terrain features.

Another big issue with the old system was that, by breaking the surface of the cone (so that the ylands didn’t look completely the same), the terrain got too fragmented, and animal pathfinding was not able to navigate through there.

Some smaller modifications could be made to the old system, but in the end we weren’t able to keep the same visual quality and at the same time add much more variety and make the pathfinding work there, so we decided to make a completely new system.

Ylands meets Astroneer? By @Spyler.X!


With the new system, each yland is split into several sections and each of those is handled separately, so we can decide in which section there will be mountains, where lowlands, and so on. This way, we can have mountains on the edge of the yland and flat areas in the middle, which was not possible before.

Those sections are then connected and blended together, and each section can be completely unique, therefore creating ylands that don’t look so similar to each other.

Another big plus is that surfaces are not so fragmented as before and animals will have much less trouble navigating on them. And with changes made to the terrains, vegetation needed to be adjusted as well, so we optimized its spawning in all of the biome areas.

This all results in a much better control over the process of how each yland is created.

Since 0.13 just lays down the foundation of the new system, we will add much more polish to it and make sure there’s much more variety in the future, but we consider it already a great improvement!


And that’s all for now. Have a great weekend and as always - stay classy! And remember that in this post here you can leave your questions for next week :)

Hey there, fellow ylanders!

Today we’ll take a look at two things that Creators will love in the upcoming update 0.13. Even though they have quite sophisticated names, they are actually very easy to describe, and you’ll see that they are very handy.

So, without further ado, I give you the Advanced object grouping and Dynamic objects!

Advanced object grouping is a fancy name that describes, well… advanced grouping :) So far you could group objects into simple groups. This was a nice way of putting together objects and then moving them around as one – however, it was obvious that more control was needed.

Therefore, we’re coming up with groups that support hierarchies. You can now group objects in a way that they reflect their world relations. Door handle can be child of a door. If you move or rotate the door, the handle will follow. At the same time, you can still easily adjust the handle position relative to the parent door. Here we’re talking about two entities, but you can even make one whole group a child of another group.
This very common and useful feature will help you work better even with very complex scenes.



Dynamic objects are our way of coming up with a solution to another problem - moving and rotating objects over time. What used to be very time consuming to achieve and had quite a large impact on performance, can now be done easily. You can specify where should an object move with what speed / in what time or do the same for the rotation. You just need to make sure that all objects that are moving are marked as dynamic, and you’re good to go.

The best thing about this is that it can be combined with the grouping feature, so you no longer need to move all the object parts - you just move their top-most parent.

Also, the new dynamic objects will work correctly when interacting with players, so by marking Groups/entities as "Platform", you will have the option to create moving platforms that will transport players somewhere in a smooth manner.

This is just the beginning, though. In the future we will be providing tools that will give you much more control over objects’ position and rotation.


And that’s all for now. Have a great weekend and as always - stay classy!

Hey there fellow ylanders,

You probably remember that a couple of weeks back we presented one of the new fancy features coming in 0.13 - the friends list. And what's the use of having friends if you can't actually communicate with them? That's why in this update we're also expanding the in-game chat.

Marci already nicely summarized why we're focusing on the social aspects of Ylands and why we're adding these features to the game. So today let's talk specifically about what the new in-game chat will bring!

Did someone say... work in progress?

The chat will actually be present not only in-game, but also in the main menu and in the Editor. There will be 3 different channels: Whisper (for private communication), Game (for the current game session) and Clan (connected with the friends list), plus All, that will work as a filter, showing messages from all channels. There will be a list of commands for you to use - /s (say, for people who are close to the player, /w (whisper, for private communication), /c (clan), /all etc., and each channel messages will have their own specific color, so that you don't mix them up. Also, bear in mind that no matter how hard you try, you won't actually be able to send messages to offline players!

And don't worry about missing any message, as there will be a visible chat icon for you to easily see your unread messages (from Whisper and Clan channels), and a notification button that will let you know you have new messages (in the main menu and Editor)!

This should cover the basics of the new chat! What do you think? (sonrisa)


Have a great weekend, ylanders, and stay classy!

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Now let's take a look at the questions you had last week!


We started with Bolt (which got later acquired by Photon), now we're using code that our programmers wrote.


Yes, there is a plan to show whose barrier you've just entered.


This would definitely be a nice feature to have. It is not currently planned, but we will discuss that.


That is our goal. The ability to set up entities this way will come at a later update than 0.13, though.


The random structures won't be available this way because doing so would take away the element of surprise (smile). Letting players use the protective barrier in the Editor is something we've been discussing quite often in the past weeks, and it will definitely happen.


Not at this point. This is yet another thing that we're discussing.


We are aware of this. In 0.13 we are making some changes to how terrains are generated. Once this is done, we'll look into this - it's related.