Hey there, fellow ylanders.
It’s a lot that Update 0.11 is going to bring to the table, so let’s once again uncover some of those features for you.
We’ve already mentioned that with 0.11 you will be able to find other ylands around you more easily. Eventually the ylands will pop up in the distance but until that happens we came up with a temporary solution that works like a charm. The ylands around you are indicated inside the compass that is visible when you're in control of a ship. Don't worry, though, that we would make it too easy for you. We all know how much fun the actual process of exploration is, so you can forget about seeing all the ylands appear on your compass right away ːsteamhappyː You will still have to pack some food supplies as you set out into the great unknown...
And another new thing: we liked how our avatars looked, but who says they can't look any better? Well, certainly not us, because we've just improved them (and even their bodies to a certain extent). We even threw in some brand new ones. We're very happy with the result and the feedback we've been getting so far about these has been nothing but very positive.
We must make sure that when Ylands 1.0 is released all present features are working as they are supposed to. That leads us to the water simulation. If you don’t play the game in multiplayer, chances are you didn’t come across any of the truly serious issues, but in multiplayer this feature can become a real nightmare - resulting in some very unpredictable behavior and even severe exploits. There's no easy fix for this, the water system needs to be rewritten. Once that is done, it will look better, run faster without any issues, and we'll be able to simulate very cool things you asked for - like lava or rivers. Unfortunately we won't have much time to work on this before 1.0 is supposed to hit, so after spending a rather long time discussing this, we decided to disable water simulation in 0.11 and keep it that way until the system is reworked. That will happen some time after 1.0 is released in 2019.
What does this mean? Well, actually not that much ːsteamhappyː Visually the water will still look the same. You will be able to swim both on the surface and below. There will be waves, ships will sail over it as they do right now. Only when you create a hole, the water won’t start flowing into it. You won’t be able to add water with the Terraformer.
We know that this is quite a change, but it's definitely not permanent (we would like to add at least some way of adding the water to selected areas in the editor before the new system is available), and we feel it’s better to do something more radical like cutting a feature out, rather than releasing something bugged in an otherwise polished game version. Of course we'll gladly discuss this with you below this post!
That’s it for today. Have a great week, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!