Hi there, fellow ylanders!
Well, what do you know - Christmas time is once again upon us. If you‘re among those who celebrate it, let us all wish that you spend this special time with your close ones (if you manage to survive the regular shopping Armageddon), eat, rest, eat some more, and play some games!
Since the team will take some much-needed rest from this weekend till the end of the year, you may find that your requests and questions on forums stay unanswered for a longer time - but we will still check it and will be ready to help you if something critical comes up.
But until the Ylands factory engines stop for maintenance, they‘re still going strong. One of the things we‘re working on these days is the long promised fix that should remedy the issues with ships. Saying this is a "fix“ is a little bit like saying that a nuclear plant is a slightly more sophisticated steam engine. A lot of things had to be changed, improved, or rewritten so that this issue (or group of issues) would be eliminated. Let me tell you a bit more about what‘s causing this, what we‘re doing about it and how it‘s going to affect the gameplay.
Basically what happens is that whenever you build on a ship‘s hull, we want the objects to have colliders so that your avatar can‘t walk through your cabin walls, tables and more. The problem is that Unity isn‘t such a big friend of the idea of hundreds of blocks, each with its own collider, placed on a moving platform. As you might have guessed, the same goes for cars, but there the situation is quite better because you usually don‘t create your cars out of hundreds of blocks.
The solution is to combine the colliders into few larger ones so that the general shape of the ship (or, more specifically, the part placed over the hull) would remain the same. That is not a trivial operation (especially when you need the number of resulting colliders to be as low as possible). But this is something that is a problem that programmers have been working on and have made a really nice progress so far. The second problem is that you don‘t want your ship to stay this way forever, because at some point you may want to remove a block here and there, replace it with something else etc. At that point the combined colliders need to be broken down back again into the original state.
And on top of that, this operation takes some time, it‘s not instant.
Have a classy Winter Break, everyone! :)
So what we‘re going to do about this is that we will provide you with a (single-click) way to "optimize“ your ship whenever you're done building it. Within the next few seconds, all the colliders will be optimized and you will be good to go and sail the sea with almost no impact to performance (which is currently easily dozens of fps). When you feel like building some more or changing what you built so far, you will be able to "de-optimize“ the ship, perform any changes necessary, and bake it again.
This "optimization“, however, won‘t be important only for ships and cars. The Unity engine has a limit as to how many colliders can be active in the scene, and it‘s 250 000. That may seem like a lot, but if you imagine a large city and think how many bricks (=colliders) one small wall has, you‘ll see that this limit can be reached pretty fast. So we will let you (in the Editor - unlike with ships and cars where you will be able to do this in Explore as well) optimize whole buildings, which will effectively fix this issue.
That however isn’t the only thing we’re fixing about ships – as you are well aware, ships have had their share of MP problems in the past, most notably the disagreements between the client and the server on where exactly a character should be. This would cause teleportation and, more often than not, unfortunate man overboard accidents. Starting with the next update, it should be smooth sailing from here on out, with the disagreements happening much less frequently, if at all. And finally, we’re making overall sailing improvements across the board – better ocean wave simulation, smooth wind intensity transitions between ylands, and different weather presets… There’s definitely a lot to look forward to!
And that‘s it for today! Have a classy Winter Break!