Hello everyone! Welcome to the 184th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week saw further advancement on all things planets, from an upgraded city generation algorithm to vehicle exiting. There are as yet a few bugs remaining, but as always exciting progress! First up, the new city generation system. Last week, we showed you a randomly spaced selection of buildings that were nearly impossible to traverse by vehicle. This just won't do for official RoVerse-grown cities. One of the basic types of city generation we plan on supporting, the gridiron, has seen its first few iterations. Starting with a simple square grid, we then removed random intersections to add to the variation, added randomized diagonal cross-streets, and trimmed it down into a circle. Each of the 16 intersection types have a special case, from dead-end roads to three-way intersections to corners. Roads are now sized appropriately for vehicles that will be driving down them, from tanks to jeeps to anti-space artillery. Another impressive update to the flight system involved rending ships on the client, even when they're in character mode. While before the ship positions were correctly replicated, there was no code running on the client to make them visible. Now, it works! In a rare first-time success, a bit of code was added by Idyllic that didn't break the first time it was tested. This immediately led to ships flying in formation, and the proposal for a trick-flying competition. These are not just coded ships flying in a line, these are real players buzzing through the sky, ready to rain hell on those below. Ships running into vehicles is still a bit touchy, but we have ideas on how to solve the flinging problem. Until then, take a truck for a drive through space, just watch out for the landing. This week there were 15 kills, 8 with auto, 1 with beam, 5 with plasma, 1 with railguns, and 1 with autos. The top ship was the Excalibur, with 6 kills, followed by the Hummingbird with 5. 5 different ships achieved at least 1 kill. The most dangerous map was Frostland. The leaderboard topper this week was Imaboss2122, with 6 kills, 3 deaths, and a 2 KDR. There was a tie for second between 15robloxj with 3 kills, 0 deaths, and Kronos_Tempori with 3 kills, 5 deaths. Keep it up pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 28) This week is also the end of the fourth Championship cycle! This cycle, there were 1800 kills, 1045 of which came from lasers, 298 from auto, 182 from autos, 155 from railguns, 107 from beam, and 13 from torpedoes. The top ship was the Excalibur, with 240 kills, followed by Iridium at 153 and Equinox Interceptor at 135. 41 ships were used to get a kill, amazing! Overall, there were 267 players who played the dogfight. The approval rating has maintained at 81% positive. There have been 101 likes, and only 23 dislikes, with 221 favorites. Of the 267 players, 60 managed to snag at least a single kill, and 84 died at least once. We have some cool graphs this week documenting the weekly use of the various weapon types. Check them out! Laser has taken a dominating lead this cycle, and plasma has fallen quite far. Very interesting data... The Grand Champion of this series, and the one taking home an exclusive ship skin is... devOmegax! With 269 kills and 194 deaths, they put up a KDR of 1.38. Congratulations on the victory! Second place goes to NOVA with 250 kills, 21 deaths, and a whopping 11.9 KDR. Nice work! The highest KDR belongs to Nova, with a 11.9, followed closely by Kronos_Tempori with an 11.81 KDR record. The lowest KDR is by Ashleypoprocks123, with .01, dying 57 times to one kill, narrowly edging out animelegend98 who died 43 times to one kill. The highest Developer KDR has returned to normal, with Juszl snagging a 3.0 KDR - 33 kills and 11 deaths. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Championship Series 3) Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Randomly generated clouds? A1: Ideally. Q2: Species-specific atmospheres and suits/rebreathers? A2: Unlikely. That would really put more restriction on the game than it would add to it. You'd have to worry about clothing and atmosphere types, whether your species could breath naturally or not, it'd just be a mess. Plus it'd be a bit challenging to code. Q3: Whats the biggest problem with tiny scale planets? A3: There are quite a few problems being tiny causes, and with the upgrades Roblox has put forward not many positives in exchange. Characters slide around pretty badly, raycast hitboxes are a bit less accurate, textures are gigantic... there's a lot. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the 183rd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. After another week of development, something new appeared on the horizon... Through the atmospheric haze it was hard to distinguish what it was exactly, so a closer inspection was required. It is, of course, much too far away to just walk over to it, some other form of transportation is required. Much better, now we can easily drive over to that strange sight in the distance. It appears a city has finally grown on the planet! Idyllic has completed an early-phase demo of the colony city generation system, that includes building randomization, and random locations clustered around a central point. Further enhancements will include collision checking, slope checking, and eventually grid generation. This version primarily deals with clustering, density, and building scale. Vehicles also now function correctly, without being crushed by the gravity of the planet whenever a player enters. Unfortunately the standard Roblox VehicleSeat was unable to be used for vehicle control, but a custom method was easy to get working quickly. A whole slew of community members were anxious to get driving and complete the first vehicular circumnavigation of the planet. It was a tight race between 4 contenders, but in the end Imaboss came away with the win, with a time of 23 minutes to drive all the way around a planet. The other drivers were met by sabotage from their passengers, and took a little bit longer to complete their runs. This test did, however, look promising for any future pan-planetary combat races that may pop up in the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Of course, we also had to test the all-terrain capabilities of the vehicles, which were proven to be up to our standards by a pyramid-climb. Quite the feat! Someone also managed to launch their truck into space, which is a requirement of any good vehicular system. As it flew through the atmosphere, it narrowly missed striking a fighter flying through the skies. The visuals of planets are extremely pretty, even at this early stage. A quick test of fighters flying through a generated city was also undertaken. Sustained low-altitude flight will take quite a bit of practice and will be fairly dangerous, but should be possible. This week, there were 96 kills in the dogfight - 80 with laser, 8 with auto, 4 with railgun, and 2 with both beam and plasma. The top ship this week was the Scutum, with 28 kills, followed by Sentinel at 23, and Excalibur at 13. The most dangerous map was The Great Hollow, with 39 deaths. The leader this week was faith4875 with 31 kills, 12 deaths, and a 2.58 kdr. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 27) Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Will faction-claimed systems need to be contiguous for it to be recognized? A1: Not at all. While it certainly makes for pretty maps, forcing factions to claim one system after another just doesn't fit in our game design. Ownership is based on how active a faction is in a system, and how much infrastructure they build there - claiming a remote system will be default be harder to manage than ones closer to a faction's capital. Q2: Will defense stations be able to be built in planet orbit? A2: Unfortunately, no, only structures on planet surfaces will be able to be built, nothing in orbit. Stations and outposts will stick to the star systems, while cities and bases will be built on the ground. Q3: How many stations can be built in one system? A3: Hard numbers have not been confirmed, but we would like a good variety and variations in density. A home system should feel much more built-up than a remote border system. Q4: If there are lava oceans, will there be lava boats? A4: We hadn't considered the implications. We'll have to think about that a bit. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the 182nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic took a deep-dive into a tech demo for planet mechanics, from improving player gravity to shrinking players down and there is a new faction ship rigged and ready to deploy to the dogfight. First up, the new faction ship: the SOL-1 scout. The only other faction ship submitted this week was not a fighter, so it'll be a while before that one gets added. This past week saw a fantastic expansion on the early planet demo revealed last week, with many new features being thrown into the mix. Overall, Idyllic managed to throw vehicles, ruins, base components, day-night cycle, atmospheric effects, character scaling, and a pre-generated planet surface all into one game. Now it didn't all work flawlessly on the first try, as that never happens in game development, but it did work well enough that we are highly optimistic about the future of these features. One of the first upgrades was a tweak to the gravity system. Originally it was more of a magnetic-boots system where the player would stick to any surface they wanted to, which wouldn't work for planets all that well. A simple raycast filter to only check the planet's surface quickly solved that particular issue. One question that has remained has been how long it takes for a player to walk around the surface of a planet. Last week we demoed how long it would take a ship to fly around the entire planet, but that made them seem much too small. This week, we had a volunteer community member take up the challenge. Tzleo was up to the challenge, and has earned the honor of being the first to circumpediate a planet in RoVerse. This is the documentation of his journey: After he passed the horizon, Idyllic added a target icon to keep track of his progress. Since the planet was, as yet, a featureless green sphere, it could have become very boring constantly walking forward with nothing but the studs moving beneath his feet to mark the passage of distance. As he neared the end of the journey, a target was added to Idyllic, who had remained at the spawn point, to mark the finish line. The journey was completed, with a final time of 55:43. So, on a flat, featureless sphere at nearly the max size, a player is able to walk around the entire thing in an hour. If there was any sort of terrain or obstacles in their way, that time increases significantly. I think these planets will be just large enough to support the gameplay they need to, without breaking too many computers. The next treat revealed was the pre-generated low-res planet surface, complete with oceans, continents, and islands. Basically, this version is a low-res triangle visualization of what planets will eventually look like, where the complex generation function that calculates continent shift and collisions to generate realistic mountain ranges creates elevation differences that will later on be filled in with detail when it becomes smooth terrain. It was very exciting to be able to walk around the planet for the first time. A simple change in color palette is all it takes to drastically change the feel of a planet. From a green and vibrant planet to a dry and dusty one, with only a single command. We have plans for a wide variety of environments across the 835 planets in the RoVerse galaxy, to keep exploration exciting. Next up was moving the sun in the sky, and blinding everyone with sun rays. A few higher-res versions of planets were generated to add some variety to the tech demo, and will be arriving shortly. The next important feature was getting fighter launches to work for everyone. One small tweak to the code, and they were available for everyone to fly. Here we have a VAK fighter floating ominously behind a player. Then the world was turned into a lava planet... ...and later on, some miscellaneous junk was added to the sphere. Small, unimportant stuff like landmark ruins, jeeps and trucks, and base elements... Vehicles have been added to the game, but they don't quite work just yet. Player gravity crushes them under the weight of the character, which will need to be toggled on and off as players enter and leave vehicles - luckily that's nothing too complex to achieve. Some early miniaturization tests were also carried out, but the results aren't quite where we'd hoped. Even with maximum friction, the players slide about the surface and get pulled to the lowest elevation across a triangle, which doesn't feel very good. We'll keep trying, but we'll be happy with whichever size works the best and is the most fun. We also managed to import the day-night cycle system we've had in our back pocket for quite some time. Since the normal Roblox sunrise and sunset obviously wouldn't work on our planets, we had to improvise - moving the sun around the equator horizontally, using a bit of complex math, allows days and nights to move around the surface like they really would. The far side of the planet even grows dark at night! Race the sun anyone? The latest feature added to the game was the thinning of the atmosphere as elevation increases. From atop the highest mountains, or as your spaceship clears the atmosphere, your view of the galaxy will be unobstructed by the light-deflecting gasses of planet atmospheres, bringing the stars brightly into focus. All in all, a very busy development week. We've finally gotten the chance to combine all these features that have been developed separately over our development cycle into one single game. Still upcoming are the colony city generation demo's, the bug fixes for vehicles, higher-res terrain and biomes, and vegetation. Check back next week! This week, there were 91 kills, 49 with laser, 21 with railgun, 10 with plasma, 6 with auto, and 5 with beam. The top ship this week was the Sentinel, making a return to the battlefield with a vengeance, with 44 kills. Excalibur was next in line, at 12. The most dangerous map this week was The Great Hollow, with 45 kills. The pilot that takes home the trophy this week was Imaboss2122 with 57 kills, 8 deaths, and a 7.12 KDR. Fantastic work! Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Do cities have any sort of city planning involved? A1: While recreating cities skylines in Roblox would be an interesting technical feat, it would really go beyond the depth of RoVerse. Instead, cities will grow pretty much on their own after you place the foundation point, and without any user input. If you want to go around placing industrial buildings by hand, that is up to you, and will replace the automatically generated skyscrapers. Q2: Could there be tidally-locked planets? A2: That's a fantastic idea! Scalding hot on one side, absolutely frigid on the other. Easy enough to implement. We'll make it happen. Q3: Will there be mountains? A3: Are you kidding? Q4: Can we jettison cargo? A4: Maybe? Q5: Can you arm cargo/trade ships? A5: You can, but you'll be trading cargo space for turret mounts, which might not be worth it in a lot of situations. Find a friend or hire a fighter escort to get you safely to your destination. Q6: Will you be able to send credits to other players at-will? A6: We currently plan to allow that, yes. It's an important part of the economy for players to be able to pay others for certain actions without having to write up a contract (that we'd have to code in). Stuff like escorting ships, or paying bribes. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite!
Hello everyone! Welcome to the 181st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.
This week, we have a new set of faction ships added to the dogfight, continued work on the outpost strike gamemode, another gun remodel from galb, and a small proof-of-concept planetary test. First up, galb's gun remodels.
Starting with a very familiar base model, to which will be added new and unique details, galb has significantly improved on the original gun model seen to the right. We look forward to where he takes these guns next.
Progress continues on the Outpost Strike gamemode, this week saw additions to the code that will allow the flak bolts to damage fighters. We intend to have damage from flak to be two phase - a medium-damage area-of-effect blast damaging ships in the vicinity of the explosion, while raycasting a few 'shrapnel' vectors out that deal a bit more damage. Next up, the new faction ships: The Kun'jal Series Warlock Assault Drone The T1/21 Mockingbird and the Kobold
Very nice work, shipbuilders!
On to Idyllic's small side-project. A certain secret project recently required a stripped-down version of flight mechanics that didn't include all the junk associated with gamemodes or ship selection, which left a very nice basic version of our latest flight code. This gave Idyllic an idea. For a long time now we've had all the pieces of planetary combat at our fingertips - flight mechanics, vehicles, planet generation - but we've never had the chance to glue them all together in one place and see how they worked and get the first glimpse at their future potential. But no longer!
Code-named Daedalus Rex, members of the discord got a sneak peek at the results of Idyllic's testing, which involved adding the fighter flight code to our full-scale planet, scaling the tiny fighters up to planet scale, and blitzing around the planet as fast as possible. The results are extremely promising, and in the next few weeks we can expect him to continue experimenting on this proof-of-concept.
The first official circumnavigation of a full-scale planet has been completed. It took right around 3 minutes and 30 seconds flying at maximum speed in the Vortex, which could fly at regular speed 515, and boosted speed 625 studs/second. The fight is not slow by any sense of the imagination, and it still took over 3 minutes to fly in a straight line around a planet. Amazing!
Not satisfied with just demoing fighters in atmospheric flight, he took it one step further...
Is that a space turkey?
No! It's an Idyllic! But what is he doing standing on that oddly shaped rock?
As yet there remains quite a few things that have been built or demonstrated to work, that we can now start testing on an actual, physical, round, giant planet. Bases, ruins, cities with growth, vehicles, resources, vegetation, actual planet gen, fighters, atmospheric effects, day-night cycles... We can't wait!
This week was a very quiet one in the dogfight, and the end of the holiday double credits, which means most of this week's kills were dropped from farming. The remaining kills totaled 13 - 8 with laser, 5 with auto, and 1 with beam. The top ship was Iridium, with 7 kills, followed by Reaver at 4 and Excalibur at 2. Ecumenopolis was the most dangerous map, with 10 deaths. The winner of this week's dogfight was FangABXY with 5 kills, 1 death, and a 5 KDR. Immediately after swearing off the dogfight until there was more to do, fang managed to go on a 5 kill streak against Idyllic, who only barely managed to break that streak. Nice work! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 25) Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ There were few community questions this week, so Idyllic made up a few. Q1: Will there be ramming between ships? A1: You will be able to bang your fighter or capital into another ship, but don't expect it to do any damage. Keep your turrets forward and your guns firing, and you'll have much more combat success. Q2: Will we be able to walk that fast on planets? A2: No, that walkspeed in the gif was only possible because of modification of player walkspeed to 1000, to show the curve of the earth and gravity in a 7 second recording window. Planets are gigantic, and walking around them will take a very, very long time. Q3: Can we make faction-themed outpost modules? A3: Outpost modules will be a very involved system to make sure they work correctly. If you really want to do it, Idyllic can work out the limitations and format for faction developers, but custom outpost module designs are definitely not expected of every faction. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! |
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |