Hey there, fellow Ylanders!
This time we come to you a bit earlier than usual as our team will spend rest of the week surviving in the woods. But we have good news and good news can't come early enough, right?
During our journey to make Explore great again (and even greater) we've already fixed and added a lot things that we promised and that you asked for. We're still not done by any means, but we are very happy that we can announce that in the upcoming update 1.10 you will finally find a fully working first person camera view.
Originally we planned to release this in update 1.11 but we managed to fix some blocking issues sooner than we expected. This, in combination with the fact that you've waited long enough, led us to the decision to include the FPS camera in 1.10 instead of 1.11. We delayed what we internally call "Custom Exploration" into 1.11 as the FPS camera is, based on your feedback more important, and we managed to make it work.
Why did it take so long?
Well, having both camera modes in a multiplayer game that has melee combat more sophisticated than just simple bashing in front of the avatar (like Minecraft) and is low-poly is quite tricky. It has to do with camera position, different control schemes, animation problems, balancing both modes in MP where each player can use a different one... the list goes on.
When we introduced the new combat support, having both camera views was no longer possible with the amount of time and manpower that we had and so we decided to disable the FPS mode until we're able to make it work.
So how did we managed to solve all the problems?
The honest answer is - we solved most of them and, at least for the time being, got around some of them. The new mode is not perfect, we will continue working on it of course, but for now, it's fully working.
Basically there are three things you'll notice when you use it:
- You'll see just your hands, not your forearms and rest of the body. It's not because we would plan to release a VR version but simply because otherwise we would need to make a ton of new animations. The main character has roughly 1500 animations and, unfortunately, we can't use many of those, as it wouldn't work well with FPS camera.
- Riding a horse or driving a car in the FPS mode can feel a bit nauseating for those who are prone to such things. That's why by default the camera will switch to third person as you start controlling those (you can override it, though)
- There are few cases where the existing features need to be a bit tweaked to make the experience better.
So FPS camera has finally made it back and this time it stays. Yet another promise kept, still some to go :).
That's it for today and we'll talk to you next week. Until then stay healthy and classy!