Hello again. It's time for another devlog again. Time flies super fast and I cannot believe it has already been a week since I returned from Lapland.
This week I made good progress on the team system. Although it is not completely ready I don't want to make you wait any longer for it. We also spend some time this week managing our company's bureaucracy work and other mandatory things.
We also are aware of the hackers that currently ruin many players' experiences. We will address this issue more in the coming weeks. For now, we will need to trust and thank our community admins for keeping the game clean from hackers as much as they can.
Currently, we can make new logic and mechanics way faster than we can make models and art in general, so we've started hiring. If you know any modellers, riggers, animators, UE4 devs, please ask them to send their prior work to this email: contact@uuvana.com
The header image is from community Discord user "elliot"
- Nilsson
Wipe schedule
Nilsson
For now, we see that the best practice to prevent the islands from filling with houses is to wipe the progress completely. This is only a temporary solution before we can implement a better decay system for houses. Wipes will be done bi-weekly so the next wipe will be on 22.4.2022.
Team system improvements
Nilsson
A big feature that we wanted to add is to know where your friends are and find them easily without the Satellite Communicator. Once you are far enough from your teammate the colored bubble indicates which direction they are in. The color matches the player's shirt color.
You also now gain score by picking up flowers, fishing and hunting birds. You can see your teammates and your own score on the new team tab that is accessible from your inventory.
Julia's Mysterious Shop
Nilsson
This was idea from discord user @Izanagi.
The mysterious shop has a changing catalogue that will re-roll every 90 minutes. These are located near points of interest and they sell and buy certain items for a specific time and are worth checking out every now and then. The machine shows in the description how much time until the new re-roll.
The house electricity update has been a big grind because they require a lot of metal parts and light bulbs. These items are already common and should spawn most often. But on populated servers loot is gone really quickly very often. This was a quick bandage fix before we could add player trading and a more dynamic economy that way.
You can separate these shops by their purple color as shown below.
Test new features early in the experimental branch!
Nilsson
Here's how you can participate:
Other notable changes
Changed tent decay to 24 hours
You can now invite other players to your team by clicking on them
Teammates are shown with a green outline
Fixed a bug where a turret woke up too quickly after being disabled with gun
Added Community created seeds icons, Now every seed has a unique icon that matches the plant it grows. Thanks @Tucker
New string now available for translations in Crowdin
Friday Devlog #11
Hello everyone! As you might have noticed, there was no devlog last week, and we're going to start doing bi-weekly devlogs from now on. It makes more sense time management-wise, but also there is not enough content to show off every week, content that would be in such a state that it would look good in pictures.
Nilsson is going camping to do some "research" for the entirety of the next week, a quick vacation that he truly deserves, so no bug fixes next week. I'll be here the whole week, as usual, working on the character customization and some other stuff that will probably bring a lot of new playability to the game.
Currently, we can make new logic and mechanics way faster than we can make models and art in general, so we've started hiring. If you know any modelers, riggers, animators, UE4 devs, please ask them to send their prior work to this email: contact@uuvana.com
The cover + header image is from community Discord user "xXKISCOYXx"
- Teo
Player feedback: March
Teo
I asked you guys and gals to complete a quick survey this week and some 160 of you participated, thanks a lot for that! The optional "tell us anything" was quite useful, and we read every single message you left there and contacted a couple of you that wanted to help us more!
We asked you to pick one option out of the 5 that would make it easier for you to recommend the game to your friends and make it more fun. Here's how that went:
Here's the split on hours played between participants:
PVP is the winner here, PVE being a close second. These are quite broad questions without going into details on what exactly you'd want, but that's alright since I believe we know what the game needs. Some of you also explained what it is, in particular, that is missing so that's nice.
We thought that fixing bugs would definitely be the biggest in percentage, but not at all. It's a given that they are fixed sooner or later, but I thought it was way more urgent than adding more content. Seems like I was wrong.
This data is quite useful to us, but more so the optional messages you left, so we'll probably continue doing this at the end of every month from this point on.
New team system
Nilsson
The first feature from our road map has started to take shape and you can already test the team system in the experimental branch.
You can invite anyone to your team by clicking them with your mouse.
We are currently ironing out the inviting, joining and kicking users from teams. After those actions are smooth we want to add additional features such as seeing the location of your other teammates even if they are offscreen.
We will also add a scoreboard where each team earns a rating that is based on their presence on the island.
Your teammates are now highlighted with green to help you identify them from hostiles
Here's what the UI will look like, minus some features:
Here's how it currently looks like in experimental:
Test new features early in the experimental branch!
Nilsson
Here's how you can participate:
Small bug fixes
Fixed an issue where some turrets would not turn on if 2 house areas where overlapping each other
Made entering house more reliable. Previously if the center of the house had items it would usually prevent players from entering. Now it tries 9 different locations inside the house before giving up
Turrets now show how much energy they require when hovering a mouse over them
House upgrade screen now shows how much each upgrade adds to total energy output
Fixed a bug where in some instances the turrets gun spawned at the root of the model and not in it's intended place
Fixed a bug where in some scenarios you could not get items out from crafting inventory
Adjusted the arena turret range to not shoot people that are inside the arena
Electricity transmitter now adds passive +30 electricity as temporary buff before more ways to generate electricity are added
Lowered turret electricity requirement from 30 to 25. A low turret max capacity should encourage players to position their turrets in center of their property to protect their property and not to shoot people just passing by
Fireplaces are now removed when dismantling the house
Fixed player getting stuck behind the containers. See GitHub issue #200
Quality of life updates and electricity now used by turrets!
Fixed Placing duplication glitch where you could place 2 items with left mouse and spacebar
Made another look how chest are saved. Discovered that there is certain scenarios where chest only saves id's. There is a possibility that disappearing chests were saved but their location was reset so they spawned in the 0 point of the map and not where they should have. Changed that the chest always saves everything about itself. Chest also saved them way too often which caused unnecessary load on server
Fixed a pub glitch that allowed you to sell items in James recycler store and keep the items
Fixed house property area rotation resetting after server restart
Admin panel now has manual save button in the action tab
You can now unban players that you have banned on your server
Disabled discord initialization on server
Map size was getting very big and a one suspicion I had is that the server ran out of memory when it tried to save all player placed items all at once. Now map is divided in 3 zones that are saved one after another. Hopefully this will make servers more stable
Kills and turret sells are now shown in admin panel
You can now plant seeds to autumn region
Trees should now appear correct color when respawned after being cut
Added backup system that saves all values every 6 hours. 3 different versions are stored and admin can load a version from admin panel
Players should no longer respawn in other peoples houses
Added global message that is showed to everyone when they start playing. Will be later used to inform about hotfixes and restarts
Turrets now use electricity. And will be turned off if there is not enough
Added message to bottom of main menu that we can switch without updating the game
Added admin tool to send message to every player that is playing on the server currently
Added two new parameters that control player bases. You can now disable tent decay and change how many bases are allowed for each player. Tent decay now also saves. You can enable these by adding these lines to your game.ini config file
TentDecay=false MaxTents=2
Friday Devlog #10
This update should be quite relieving for the high population servers. For starters, there's a whole new island next to the main-land, and secondly, tents now decay if not upgraded in time!
Personally, I feel like the speed at which new content is added is still not what it should be, mainly because of my time being divided between so many other equally as important things, and to add to it, those other important things, which are mostly business-related things, really eat away the creativity in a major way. I think we'll learn to manage that as we go forward and as things settle down a little bit!
Now that the damage control is mostly done, when will we get a roadmap, you may ask? Next week!
I hope you enjoy this update. Please report any issues you may find on our Discord!
- Teo
New Island: Isla Inocentes
Teo
The new island is horizontally as large as the main-land but slimmer. It has new fish, a new plant, and a new vendor. I promised a new type of POI, but I sacrificed it for new fishes instead. The new POI is coming later, and the main-land AND this new island will be gradually filled with more interesting locations!
New House Upgrades
Nilsson
Workbench lets you now choose your energy production method. When you upgrade you can see your house's electricity production in the workbench tab. Currently electricity has no use. But next week's update will add electricity requirements for some items for example turrets and lights!
Tent Decay And No Wipe
Nilsson
Island has been packed with houses and new players are still having a hard time finding places to add their base. Now all the tents will decay after 48 hours. If you upgrade your base to a wooden cabin this will stop the decay process. In a future, we might add some kind of upkeep to the cabins also but we want to wait a week and see how this change affects the free building area.
You can view any tent's decay time by hovering the mouse over it. Keep in mind that server restart also resets the tent decay time.
Other changes
- Added 4 new fish - Cooking now has its own sound - Added battery icon (made by community member 'Matavatar' <3) - New plant: Chanterelles - Added Chanterelle Soup - Added Hunting Hat model - Added new vendor 'Pix' - Moved Mezereon world location - Added 2 new travel points - Moved the player respawn point to the inside the house to prevent spawn killing - Fixed a couple of duplications related to item placing. Thanks to @Tucker for figuring these ones out! - Tent decay can be viewed by hovering the mouse over the tent all tents will now Decay after 48 hours
Test new features early in the experimental branch!
Nilsson
Here's how you can participate:
Friday Devlog #9
Issues with saving seem to be solved now, at least we haven't gotten any reports of progress resets on Discord, other than some random chests not spawning after a server restart, so here's hoping we fixed it, for now.
There's a new tent limit that we wanted to test, so we wiped the official servers to see how it affects the available space on the island after a week.
I myself got to do a lot of new content this week, which is always cool, and I'll be showing some of that on this devlog!
- Teo
Dynamic vendor prices
We wanted the game to feel more like a multiplayer game where player interactions have even more impact on the world around them. In today's update, we re-enabled the Vendor dynamic prices. This system has two main components one that changes prices randomly over time and the second which is affected by what is sold to a vendor and bought from a vendor.
For example, if all the players are selling common pike fish to a single vendor its price will drop to a minimum of 50% of the original price. This will force people to either stash their fish and wait for a price to go back up and then sell in bulk. Or the player can try to find another vendor that buys the item for a better price.
Autumn Biome + Island
Teo
You'll have to start updating your community-made maps soon because there's a new island coming most likely next week, called "Isla Inocentes". it's horizontally as large as the mainland but vertically much slimmer. Right now the island is divided into 3 separate islands that are connected with building blocked bridges.
This island will be the new home for the Capercaillie birds and mushrooms, which I'll hopefully get done by the end of next week. There will also be a new type of looting POI that players can explore, but more on that next week!
Bugs fixes and house Dismantle feature
Nilsson
The first week in the new experimental/stable development model has started well. The stable version of the game was in a pretty horrific state the whole week but I wanted to still keep changes in experimental a while before pushing things to stable so as to not break everything again.
Quality of life changes
I managed to fix 4 duplication bugs. Prevent players from spawning into the black void. And a couple of logical changes to picking up and placing items.
These made the player experience more enjoyable but this is only the start. I will try to focus more on new features but I will also dedicate a day or two every week to fix issues with the current systems.
New house dismantle feature and turret changes
Now Every player can only have 2 tents/houses on a server at any given time. This hopefully greatly lessens the houses in a server and allows more players to fit in. You can dismantle your base from the workbench menu. Keep in mind that this will wipe everything inside the house so remove everything except the workbench before you dismantle the base.
We got a great suggestion from one of our community members about making base yards raidable. Now turrets go disabled if you shoot them enough. They will be disabled for 60 seconds and then reactivate. We have more planned for the raiding mechanics but this change was a fast and easy way to make big changes in how turrets behave.
More house upgrades next week
Nilsson
Next week I will focus on making the house have more things you can upgrade such as bigger interiors and visual changes outside. If you want to be an early tester for new features I would highly suggest you download the beta branch from steam go to experimental servers to try out new features. Below are instructions on how to do them!
Here's how you can participate:
You can join an official server with "EXPERIMENTAL" in the name, the password is "experimental"
Official Serve Wipe and Experimental changes to Stable
We decided to wipe all official servers because they were filled with houses. We hope the new 2 player house limit will slow down the real estate claim.
Here are all the changes in today's update.
- Made login smoother by adding in delay between letting players in. Should no longer spawn players in the black void - Fixed an issue where an item could not be picked up near your own tent - The arena box now respawns correctly - Fixed duplication glitch where you could make infinite wood with slow ping - Fixed duplication glitch where people could pick up the same item twice - Fixed duplication glitch when adding and removing stuff fast from chests caused some items to duplicate - Paintings now drop to the ground in houses after being picked up - Fixed auto-detect setting from putting settings too low and breaking the water - You can now dismantle your house from the workbench. You can now have only 2 active houses - Reverse rotate placeables with Shift-R - Increased ammo price - Language selection now saves - Tried to apply a fix for a kill and construction achievements - Made changes to the way tents check for other people's property. Should now let you put it down more reliably - Added Dutch, Spanish Latin America, Vietnam and Russian languages
- Fixed a bug where you could get random items from James recycler by selling first and then buying back the same item. This was caused by desync between player and server inventories
- James vendor UI is now removed if the player dies while it is on - Added small space between the feather and bird meat. Sometimes caused the player only to get 2 meats and no feathers- There was an error when calculating the farming hat buff effect on the harvest. The 30% reduction was actually calculated for nearly 300% buff. Now should be milder - Player placed chest can now be destroyed so they can no longer be used as fence - Energy drinks gave big movement speed buff in the status effect ended in the water. Movement speed is now correctly restored
- Added the vendor price fluctuation system back after fixing the bug that caused all items to change to wood and matches. This system will drive vendor prices up and down randomly. Also, players that buy and sell stuff to vendors will cause prices to change. Buying increases the price and selling lowers it. After a while price ticks near, its original starting price. You can see the price change percentage next to the MK in vendor UI. James recycler will not be effect by this system
- Changed the way player based turrets behave. They can now take damage but instead of destroying after 0 health, they go disabled for 60 seconds. After this time they return to normal. Thanks to @Fyreblade for this suggestion.
New Turret Mechanic
- Changed the way player based turrets behave. They can now take damage but instead of destroying after 0 health, they go disabled for 60 seconds. After this time they return to normal. Thanks to @Fyreblade for this suggestion.
- Language selection now saves - Tried to apply a fix for a kill and construction achievements - Made changes to the way tents check for other people's property. Should now let you put it down more reliably
Price fluctuation system is back
- Fixed a bug where you could get random items from James recycler by selling first and then buying back the same item. This was caused by desync between player and server inventories
- James vendor UI is now removed if the player dies while it is on
- Added small space between the feather and bird meat. Sometimes caused the player to only get 2 meats and no feathers- There was an error when calculating the farming hat buff effect on the harvest. The 30% reduction was actually calculated for nearly 300% buff. Now should be milder
- Player placed chest can now be destroyed so they can no longer be used as fence
- Energy drinks gave big movement speed buff in the status effect ended in the water. Movement speed is now correctly restored
- Added the vendor price fluctuation system back after fixing the bug that caused all items to change to wood and matches. This system will drive vendor prices up and down randomly. Also players that buy and sell stuff to vendors will cause prices to change. Buying increases the price and selling lowers it. After a while price ticks near, it's original starting price. You can see the price change percentage next to the MK in vendor UI. James recycler will not be effect by this system.
House dismantle feature and bug fixes
- Made login smoother by adding in delay between letting players in. Should no longer spawn players in black void - Fixed an issue where an item could not be picked up near your own tent - Arena box now respawns correctly - fixed duplication glitch where you could make infinite wood with slow ping - Fixed duplication glitch where people could pick up the same item twice - Fixed duplication glitch when adding and removing stuff fast from chests caused some items to duplicate - Paintings now drop to ground in houses after picked up - Fixed auto-detect setting from putting settings too low and breaking the water - You can now dismantle your house from the workbench
