Hey there, fellow ylanders.
Today we’ll talk about what tools and improvements we’re planning to provide Creators with before Ylands 1.0 gets released. If you're not interested in creating your games, you can skip this Dev Diary, but if you do, we think you will find the following very interesting.
As a sidenote - this week we were presented with some of the games the P1 guys are working on, and some of the things we saw were just breathtaking. Kudos to everyone involved!
Update 0.12
Inside the Editor you will be able to create maps like the ones that we generate for the Explore mode. Another cool feature is that it will be possible to add multiple objects to labels via multi-editing (this probably sounds like dark magic to those who are not familiar with labels, but those who do will love it (wink))
We’ve added a brand new Game Logic and made large improvements to existing ones, so you will be able to place impassable barriers to prevent players from getting to (or out of) specific places. Speaking of zone game logics - we made them dynamic, so it is now possible to change their position, rotation and size on the go. And last but not least, the Event Listener has been MASSIVELY improved, so we have added many new event types and it's now even possible to set multiple events for one listener.
Visual scripting will be much more fun with a support for "For loops", "Break" and "Continue" instructions. You will have control over energy linking and you'll be able to dynamically change player roles and teams. Process custom player console commands. Perform string and math operations with flexible number of operands. All this and usability improvements as a cherry on top.
New Visual Scripting instructions make the scripting much more powerful.
0.12+
The absolute majority of improvements coming with 0.12 are based on your direct feedback, and we will keep providing you with things you need to make great games before 1.0 is released. Because future changes and updates are interconnected with your feedback, it’s difficult to predict what the exact changes will be - however, there are two larger features we know we would like to implement before 1.0.
Right now, moving (or rotating) objects around dynamically via script is very painful. It requires a lot of effort, and as every operation is performed every frame, it takes some toll on the performance (and this has to be done for each of the objects you want to move).
So to combat this, we would like to implement what we are calling Dynamic groups. This will let you organize objects into hierarchies and link them together - so that in order to move a lot of objects at once you will only need to move their parent object.
At the same time, instead of animating the movement yourself, we want you to be able to just say “move this there in X seconds.” We have seen a lot of your creations where we think this feature alone will save you countless of hours of scripting.
The second thing we would like to add is a GUI editor. Right now you can script a very primitive GUI for your games, but it’s not very intuitive and it's very limited. We want to give you something where you will be able to see the GUI right as you’re designing it. We will give you ways of evaluating events like buttons being pressed from the script, so you will be able to create your own panels with custom functionality.
That’s it for today. Have a great weekend, ylanders, and as always - stay classy!