Hello everyone! Welcome to the eighty-fourth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has been very technical, with lots of progress made on backend systems and organization, with a successful demonstration of reading google sheets data passed through our VPS, improved security on the server side, and continued work on reformatting planets. We also have a long-awaited announcement to get to, so don't miss that. Lordrex has taken on most of the heavy load in developing systems to run on the VPS, as well as designing how data can be saved remotely, and the security for various assets. In collaboration with IdyllicDestroyer, they have begun designing the layouts for everything from wearable assets to faction asset submission, the security clearance for various databases, and how to keep all this information sorted. In the process of testing reading data from google sheets from a Roblox server, it came to light that we'd have to encrypt both the api key, and the sheet id in order for data to be held securely - for the roblox server to read it, the sheets database would have to be open to the public - "anyone with the link can view" - meaning that anyone that broke into our code and managed to find a sheet id, would be able to link directly to our database. While that might be fine for public and unchanging data like we have generated in the star systems list, private data, like ore spawn rates and locations - things that would give players who cracked it an unfair advantage in gameplay - cannot be allowed to be viewed by the public. This was a good thing and a bad thing - unfortunately for us, it means we had to do a bit more work securing things, researching our available options, but on the bright side, it did give us good incentive to research security measures that we will be responsible for implementing before the game releases. Routing sensitive data through the VPS as a second layer of security ended up being the most viable option, over figuring out hash functions and 3-way handshakes directly on the roblox game server. The eventual solution is rather straightforward - the VPS is validated with exclusive access to the sensitive google sheets, when a server needs such information, it requests it from the VPS, which in turn validates the request, then retrieves the data from google. This both secures the entirety of the data, and reduces the risk of going over the request limits google imposes on its systems - once a request is retrieved, it is cached for a limited time, and updated only when required. Some truly remarkable feats include reading data from multiple sources, allowing us to sort our systems to be understandable by the average person, rather than all stacked one on top of the other. We've also taken steps to unify the project's various resources into a more usable form - after a year and a half, things have really spread out. Up to this point the development team has been using a fairly wide variety of online resources to hold various bits and pieces of the development process, from Trello to google drive, but now we have put in place an official central hub to connect all those pieces. Moving forward, we should have a solid measurement of progress we've been making, and a firm description of what our next target is, beyond just the next newsletter. Now, the moment you've all been waiting for. We have some development guidelines for Faction-submitted Fighters: The part limit for all classes of fighters is <40 parts/unions, prior to combining colors or meshing. Every fighter you see here follows these guidelines, so it is definitely possible. While we are flexible if you happen to design something amazing that goes a little over, try and match these guidelines as closely as possible. Fighters are distinguished by two primary variables - bounding box volume, and number of weapon mounts, and are separated into 4 categories. Light Fighters Medium Fighters Heavy Fighters Very Heavy Fighters These classes are roughly determined as follows: Light <=3 Mounts <35,000 real volume Medium <=4 Mounts <110,000 real volume Heavy <=5 Mounts <230,000 real volume Very Heavy <=6 Mounts <260,000 real volume Volume is determined for Fighters at 'real-scale' compared to a Roblox Character, and is done by sizing a separate brick to enclose a majority of the visible parts of the fighter build, excluding antenna and projecting details. When building, build your ships to regular character scale, and we will take care of scaling it down to the proper RoVerse dimensions. Typical Light Fighter with Character Typical Medium Fighter with Character Typical Heavy Fighter with Character Typical Very Heavy Fighter with Character Moving forward we will be working on a convex hull calculation system to more accurately measure the volumes of ships, but these rough guidelines should be pretty close until then. 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 we be able to upload custom weapon sounds? A1: One of our goals is to have faction assets truly represent the factions that they belong to, which has so far meant that everything from ground vehicles to fighters to ships have been set up to be interchangeable with faction-built assets. Allowing factions to customize the sounds their weapons make would go a long way to distinguishing themselves, and will be something we will look into doing moving forward. If we're moderating faction ships, setting up a few sound bites doesn't seem that hard at first consideration. This would also apply to particle effects, which we'll look into. Q2: Will missiles be able to be shot down by a PDS system? A2: Missiles are a little bit trickier to implement, and one of the more unique weapon types, but we have always had a plan for a counter to them - if you provide a homing missile as a weapon, it is only fitting that you provide some sort of defense against them. This last question comes from the development team of Skirmisher - Q3: does 2 + 2 = 4 A3: I cannot reveal that answer to the public, as it would be revealing trade secrets and is paramount to treason. You'll just have to put your heads together and figure that problem out yourselves. 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 eighty-third issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has seen some great progress on our scripted systems, including a remastered chat system from davness, and some continued work from lordrex on the VPS backend data retrieval system. We also have some unfortunate news about the status of the Capital update as well, which we'll cover at the end. A few months ago, Idyllic roughly mocked up an edited chat system that modified the Roblox-provided scripts to try and customize the format and the look of the guis to better fit our theme, in a very short time frame. The system worked passably well, as long as you didn't look too closely at the edges. Since then, we've spent quite a bit of time building our own system from the ground up, with the features and design that we've always wanted. Developer Davness has been creating this system, and the progress he's made has been exceptional. Creating a custom chat system is more complicated than it may seem - there are lots of little features included to make sure that use of the system is as smooth as possible for all users, features like multiline chat messages and supporting usernames of any length up to 20 characters that are easy to ignore in a good system, but make use horrible if they are overlooked. He's also set up the system to easily scale with screen size, so that all users get the best experience possible. He has also set up an early demo of a shout system, so that RoVerse Admins can shout important updates, faction leaders can relay messages to their fleets, all with an easy-to-use system. Lordrex has successfully gotten our private server to read data from Google sheets, marking an important step in the development of our backend systems. Reading from saved data, making decisions about where to place people and fleets based on recorded information, sending star system data from the database we showed a few weeks back. A critical feature, and one that must be done right. Idyllic has continued remastering planet generation, this week taking a stab at table sorting as a way to easily grow continent shapes by having a handy list of all the closest points. While not completely solved yet, it does have some pretty results. We can't wait to see what else he comes up with. So many of you have been asking about the status of the Capital Alpha over the past three months since the originally planned release date passed. Since December, 90% of the update has been completed, including fighter models and rigging, gamemodes, all new custom maps, everything that would improve on the original system ten-fold... except for the mechanics of the capital ships. Since we couldn't release a Capital Update without Capital ships, we had to push that release back. To complete a rework of the system that NoCollider made nearly a year ago, we hired on craftsmashbuild, who had demoed several versions of his own ship flight scripts for his own project, that showed great promise for a robust and fun capital ship system fitting for a project as ambitious as RoVerse. Since then, craft has run it many, many personal problems, and has been unable to handle the stress of working on a professional development team with expectations and deadlines. Because of this pressure, he has chosen to leave the team permanently, and shows no sign of allowing us to use any of the progress he's made over the past 3 months, if any exists at all. While he had asked us to remain civil in the explanation of his departure, he proceeded to post several entirely incorrect tweets since then, and blocked all the RoVerse Devs, so civility is not something I can provide him. When we hired him in December we were clear with our expectations - while we understood he couldn't have made the original Christmas deadline, which we proceeded to push back, it was made clear that the Capital ships would be an important feature of this project, and if he didn't think he could manage such work in the required time, we would hand that portion of the project over to SmellyPencil and TheFurryFish, two talented devs who have done an exceptional job on the rest of the Capital Update. He insisted that the assignment was well within his grasp, so we hired him on to let the others do the final polishing of the other systems. After pushing back a planned release to the end of January, and now to the end of February, with no visible progress since the demo we showed of a capital ship doing donuts, the managers of this project, namely Vedrakkerous and IdyllicDestroyer, obviously had questions and concerns about the status of the project, that were always met with 'can't talk right now' or 'Ill have something to show by the newsletter' without any progress. Since it didn't seem like the completion of his project would occur within a reasonable amount of time, we initiated our backup 'plan B' - having the Update Dev team complete a rudimentary Capital system effective enough to release as the Capital Update in a limited capacity, to give craft enough time to complete the official and robust Capital system. It was at this point that craft decided he didn't want to work on this project anymore, due to the pressure of developing in such a public position. So don't worry, craft's sudden departure doesn't mean the Capital Update won't be coming out, but it does mean that it will take a bit more time than previously expected. In the future, we will be making sure that the devs we hire for such an ambitious game understand the expectations prior to assigning them any significant portion of our project. And to craft - if you had properly communicated to us at any point in the past 3 months that you didn't think you could complete the portion of the project we had expected of you, we could have provided support, or reassigned the parts that were out of your grasp, rather than having wasted our time for three months before deciding you wanted to work on your own space game more than you wanted to work on ours. Also, we are not the type of people to become vindictive to those who have legitimate reasons for leaving the team, as several members have come and gone over the development of this project without incident. But you spreading falsehoods in an attempt to slander us for who knows what reason is not something we take lightly, and as such I have written out the proper sequence of events for the public record. Had you be clear with us, or communicated when we asked, and even remained civil as you asked of us, this could all have been avoided. Let the facts stand as they are, and if they 'destroy your development career' as you claim we said, it is naught but your own fault. And on that note a quick recap - chat systems are progressing nicely, with lots of neat little features tucked inside. Backend development is progressing slowly but surely, with an important step towards our end goals being made over the past few weeks. And Idyllic has been playing around with planets, as he has always been. 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 there be indicators of ground combat from space, like explosions and stuff? A1: That's a great idea! We'll have our scripters look into how expensive it would be to send a notification to star system servers when and where ground combat is breaking out, but having little explosions appear on planets would be a cool little feature to notify people of things going on down below. And as always, ships 'in orbit' in the planet server will be able to see combat directly. Another light week on questions from the community. If you want to know more, feel free to ask in our community Discord. 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 eighty-second issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've got continued progress on both the planetary generation and vehicular miniaturization development. Idyllic has picked back up with the old planetary generation scripts, continuing work on updating them to use tables instead of objectvalues, improving loading times substantially. He undertook this project last year when the generation of high-detail planets became too long to be sustainable, taking significant amounts of time to generate just the subdivisions and continents, not even terrain details. Generating 539 planets in that fashion would've been nearly impossible, so a change had to be made. This week, he managed to retrofit the continent selection system, and has moved on to fixing continent collisions, all to speed up generation times. Off to a promising start! He's also continued work on miniaturizing our fleet of ground vehicles, this week shrinking an armored cargo truck and a mobile artillery platform, each with a significant number of wheels to make work. Oddly enough, 6-wheeled vehicles seem to have even less traction than the 4-wheeled vehicle completed last week, probably a side effect of the middle wheels raising the rear ones off the ground - problems to solve another day. The Cargo truck, codenamed the Behemoth, is designed to carry your important cargo cross-planet - carrying important munitions for a planetary invasion, carrying resources to resupply outposts on or past the edge of safe space, or just protecting your usual shipments from pirate attacks, it will undoubtedly come in handy in a variety of situations. The mobile artillery platform is a study but slow vehicle designed to mount and transport the heaviest turrets used to do the most destruction possible to enemy ground forces, from heavy missile launch systems to anti-air guns, this vehicle is sure to be a vital part of ground force defensive and offensive strategies. Shipbuilder SkinnyThePimp has headed off on his continued military schooling, so we won't be hearing from him as much in the coming months. We wish him the best of luck in his duties, and await his return. 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 Idyllic destroy the universe? A1: While it is too soon to tell, we have our suspicions... This week, the Community dev_questions channel had a lot of questions and a lot of answers from both Developers and community members, and as far as I can tell, they all got answered, or were questions that had previously been answered. As always, feel free to drop by with any questions you may have, and if its a particularly notable one, you may wind up finding in a newsletter. Until next week! 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 eighty-first issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. Continuing off of the excellent work with vehicle gravity last week, Idyllic has continued to improve the system, as well as take a first stab at miniaturizing the vehicles, which didn't turn out to be as easy as first expected. To go with his work, a new, larger, generated planet, has been created, with Vedrakkerous working on the details of both planet biomes and other atmospheric effects, like a day-night cycle. After some important tweaks to a scaling plugin to scale the effects of attachments properly, and setting up a specific grouping and process for welding, miniature vehicles got off to a bumpy start. With some interesting results that looked more like a foal trying to stand for the first time, than a suspension system, tweaking of forces was necessary. That was the earliest, most promising results, because when it didn't spasm out like the above, it would either just disappear completely, having been launched out of view in a single frame, or explode into individual pieces. So it may not look like it, but it was very important progress. After extensive work balancing variables, Idyllic managed to get a vehicle that could stand under its own weight, and operate as designed when driven. There are still a few things that need to be smoothed and tweaked a bit more, but the results are looking good. The suspension is a bit rigid going over obstacles, and prone to breaking when hitting anything exceptionally hard or at a weird angle, but nothing unfixable. Idyllic was also able to tweak the radar system to work with planets, the major change being that anything that is at your elevation is displayed as such, even if it is around the curve of the planet making it seem to be below you. So ships strafing you overhead will appear with a riser, showing their location. We look forward to more work on that system moving forward. While Idyllic was working on the technical systems for planets, Vedrakkerous took to improving the green, grassy boring planet Idyllic had been testing on, filling it with biomes like the polar zone, a desert, and some rocky plains. While not officially generated procedurally, these test runs will provide a basis for designing the systems that will generate biomes, using a variety of terrain materials and colors to create unique, and sometimes alien environments. But it wasn't just painting terrain. Other atmospheric touches include a transition from clear at night, showing the thousands of stars, to nearly opaque during the day, resulting in a nice blue sky. And since the day-night cycle moves around the planet, rather than using the Roblox-provided one, the math behind finding where exactly the player was, turned into an interesting challenge that proved to be no match for the two devs. And what's a desert without a pyramid rising from the dunes? Next up on the list of features are a more dynamic camera than one fixed to the back of your turret, and the big challenge of getting characters to rotate to match the surface. We can't wait to see what our talented devs come up within the next week. 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 there be scanning of planets to get extra information about them from orbit? A1: Having a readout full of useful, and maybe some not so useful, information display when looking at a planet from orbit would be really cool, adding a bit of extra depth to the universe you're exploring. We'll look into putting important information, like a rough estimate of resources, hazardous conditions, and day length, when we get closer to implementing those sorts of guis. Q2: Will faction members be forced to wear a set uniform, to avoid those embarrassing ones? A2: It will be left up to factions whether to require members to wear a specific uniform, with the possibility of certain accessories being allowed, so characters keep their identity. Or, alternatively, we leave it up to factions entirely to manage their members - there's nothing stopping you from kicking members that violate your rules. Q3: Will we be able to make hovering land vehicles? A3: Of course! Wheeled vehicles may be what we're working on now, but only because they were expected to be the most problematic. Hovering vehicles are a staple of sci-fi, we'd be remiss to not include them. They will of course handle much differently, and will have certain situations where they excel, as well as situations where they hold you back. Q4: What benefit will AI colonists provide to factions? A4: Building a colony on a new world will be a significant step in a factions growth, making them as an interplanetary force to be reckoned with. Besides the boosts to the economy, and increasing faction population statistics, a city on another planet is a significant stronghold should that planet come under attack. Taking care of a colony will reward you with a better presence, and an improved economy that could mean the difference in your military campaigns. Q5: Swarm Missiles over traditional single-shot missiles? A5: We'll look into it, because they're sure cool to watch. Q6: Will there be unarmed combat? A6: In the hopefully rare occurrence that you run out of all ammo while invading a planet's surface, you'll be able to scavenge for other weapons or ammo, bring in shipments on friendly cargo ships, possibly even call down a consumable drop pod with supplies. When that runs out, you'll be provided with a weak laser pistol, that should hold its charge for a significant amount of time. While hand-to-hand combat would be cool, it's not really within the scope of RoVerse, and probably wouldn't work exceptionally well at the tiny scale we're working with. 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 |