Hello everyone! Welcome to the 189th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week had a significant merge of many features that have been nearly complete and ready to go combined with the outpost, to get the ball rolling on future portions without leaving anything behind. The list includes ship skin purchasing and selection, weapon classes loadout, models, and deployment, armament potential calculations, and UI to go along with it, changes to weapon purchases to make turrets permanent on a per-ship basis, and more. Lets get started. First up is a feature that has been in waiting for quite some, nearly ready for deployment, but always less important than other priorities. But no longer. In the Outpost Demo, players can now purchase and equip ship skins for default fighters. Cruise through the sky as a man of iron in the Ferrous Iridium skin, or make your hard-earned Cardinal look like a watermelon. The opportunities are as endless as the universe. Keep in mind credit-purchased skins in the demo gamemode will not transfer to the official dogfight, since its full of free credits, but if you do happen to test out one of the Robux-purchased skins, we'll transfer those over for you. Next on the list is a combo feature that is a mixture of something we developed a few months ago, and something developed more recently. After a discussion with members of the community, it became clear that locking certain turrets to certain mounts was not the right way to structure weapon classes. Instead, a system that calculated a ship's maximum capacity, and allowed any sort of turret interchange among the available mounts to allow the most player freedom when building out their ship loadouts, was the better strategy. So we devised a system to convert a ships assigned armament value, do some fairly simple math, and output a capacity number, that limits the amount and weight of the turrets you can have equipped at once. Take, for instance, the mighty Excalibur, scourge of the dogfight. With two mounts and 5 armament points, it can, at most, load up two light turrets, like you're used to. Medium and heavy turrets are out of its reach, because it doesn't have nearly enough armament points to mount such powerful weapons. It would take 10 armament points for a light fighter to be able to mount a single medium turret, sacrificing points in agility, or speed, or armor. A tricky decision to make. This system is designed to balance the number of turrets on a ship, with a reasonable firepower per armament point spent. Phase 1 had a problem with 4 turret medium fighters dominating combat because of pure damage output, and this system is here to combat that. 3 turret mediums is the maximum now, and to get there would take a lot of armament points. In light of these changes, factions that have submitted their ships to the dogfight will be allowed to make stat changes, or remove mounts, to better take advantage of the armament system. The full armament tables can be found here. The second half of this feature is the actual mounting process. As you select turrets for a potential loadout, a total armament bar fills up. Hit the end, and you've mounted too many turrets for that ships capacity. Heavier weapons fill up the bar faster, meaning you have to carefully select which turrets and how strong you want them on each loadout. In addition to this new tiered armament system of weapon classes, another change has come to weapon purchases. Due to community feedback about the turret-mounting process, turret purchases are now permanent on a per-ship basis. Grinding your tail off to earn a missile turret on your favorite ship, will not be undone when you replace that mount with a laser turret for a particular gamemode. Unfortunately, there is no way to refund turrets that have already been purchased and replaced, but any mounts currently on your ships will be permanently unlocked when this change makes its way to the official dogfight. Thank you to those in the community that successfully argued for this change, your feedback is much appreciated. A selection of beam turrets of each class. Illuminate the starways with your light. The process of merging Capital flight systems with the dogfight code has begun. Early this week, Idyllic posted a gif to the discord of the humble beginnings of Capital movement. Everything has to start somewhere. The easiest way to get Capitals working in the dogfight is to re-use as much code as possible from the fighters. This include movement systems, replication, spawning. Trying to recreate these already-functional systems would be a waste of time, so implementing Capital movement as merely a fork in the fighter code, is a good direction to go. From a reskinned-Excalibur movement system, over the week many adjustments were made to get the Avenger moving more Capital-like. This started by turning off the ship turning based on cursor position that makes fighter movement so unique. Remapping controls to pitch and yaw were trivial, allowing the same control we showed in the Capital tests a while back. Removing the camera follow lock will be the next step, as piloting a capital is all about visibility, to make up for it's lack of agility. There are as yet a few bugs related to 18 turrets spamming serverevents and bogging everything down, but we're confident that they can be resolved in short order. Some other small updates include the correct operation of texture-based ship skins, which only applies to the Avenger at the moment; A few small tweaks to the code and skin library and textures are now properly applied to the ship. The best image we have, is of a capital ship protruding from the fighter hangar... but this will not be the standard for long. Also, the outpost gamemode now has radar-tracking capabilities, so an outpost's turrets now appear on radar and have icons on your HUD. No more running out of time looking for that last turret hiding on the bottom corner of the outpost. Thirdly, the Outpost turrets have recieved an upgrade that should reduce the effectiveness of a discovered vulnerability. Players found that they could hover in place and shoot the outpost with impunity, because it foreshortened its shots to account for movement. Now, turrets randomly spread their shortened shots over a range, which should make it a little easier to dodge while moving, but a lot harder to win standing still. Let us know what you think. With all of these features and their significant code changes, bugs are likely to appear. Should you happen upon a bug or something not working quite right, hop in the community discord and post any and all information about it to #bug_reports. It would be extra helpful to include the F9 console showing any red errors, and a description of what you were doing at the time. Thanks for the assistance! This week saw the first non-dev solo destruction of a 38-turret outpost reported in the community, by CptJaller. Very nice work, pilot! A new faction ship has been submitted and rigged, and is ready for battle in the dogfight - the Geostar Trading Corporation Convair. And last up, a small foray into the star system code that will be the backbone of Freeroam. It appears Lordrex was in the process of importing and cleaning up the code used to fly fighters, meaning it won't be long before you can start to explore the 220 star systems of RoVerse. We have succeeded, my dear community members! For the first week we have bested machine, laying waste to its weapons systems and crushing the automated monster under our bi-metallic boot-heels. With a resounding 394 kills to 645 deaths, and a .61 KDR, fighter pilots have at long last, bested the Outpost. The greatest contribution came from CptJaller, with a resounding 386 turret kills. Topping the leaderboard in the non-Outpost category is ManikuCalex, with 39 kills, 9 deaths, and a 4.33 KDR. The most dangerous ship this week was a close race between the Silencer, with 110 kills, and the Cardinal, with 106. There were 313 plasma, 195 torpedo, 91 beam, 86 laser, 49 auto, and 22 railgun kills this week, totaling 756. Nice work, pilots. The most dangerous map was the Citadel, with 35 kills. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 33) 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: Nicknames for your character in-game? A1: Maybe. It could be fun. We'll consider it. Q2: What can we make tracks on tanks look like when they move? A2: Our best guess currently is simulating track movement using beams connected to each wheel, with an animated texture moving along it to show movement. While it is theoretically possible to move real parts around a track, there are much more important details involving planets to consider, and we want to maintain the best possible gameplay. When we get to that point, we can give it a shot, but until then, expect beams to be the likely candidate. Q3: Will there be defenses against hovering vehicles? Magnetic traps? A3: Those sound like a cool idea. Rest assured that there will be a way to counter most things, if you have the resources and the time to set defenses up. Keep in mind that most things that slow up ground vehicles, would have the same effect on vehicles hovering a few feet off the ground too. 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 188th 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 two new features in the pipeline for the dogfight - filters for the ship lists, and turret cooldown indicators. When we first opened the dogfight with 20 default ships for players to choose from, we never imagined how our system would work with the explosion of ship submissions we received from faction members. The number of available ships quickly surpassed 100 in a matter of months - and scrolling through all of them quickly became a chore. Ship filters to the rescue! Now you will be able to set toggles for what sort of ships you're looking for, whether it all ships, to browse the possibilities, or perhaps only faction ships, which filters them down to only ships available from factions you're in, or even filtered down to owned ships, so you can quickly select a ship you've already purchased. In what turned out to be a relatively painless process of just modifying the list of ships every time the toggles are clicked, four filters were added that trim the full list down, and four filters that trim those filters down even more, by ship class. The next feature on the list is vital to shooting at a stationary outpost with missiles - a visual indicator showing you how long until your missiles are ready. This works for all weapon types, but is only really useful for torpedoes and railguns, with their extended delay. And here they are in an action shot: The system only shows the cool-downs for the number of weapons you currently have equipped, and in the case its unbalanced, creates a dead segment to even it out. Right now, it can support up to 12 weapon mounts, but we could add a second row in the case that more are necessary. We could potentially add icons for the weapon type, if that seems necessary, in the future. This week, the Outpost yet again snagged victory from us players, knocking down 351 pilots and only losing 329 turrets - a 1.06 KDR. IdyllicDestroyer came in second in the outpost category, with 87 turret kills and only 36 deaths - a 2.41 KDR. This weeks winner of the non-outpost dogfight was Angrybird, with 24 kills and 0 deaths. Second place, close behind, was P4thf1nder, with 22 and 3. Almost had it! The top ship was Excalibur, with 37 kills, followed by Gladius at 24. There were 61 total player kills, 26 with auto, 24 with beam, 7 with laser, and 4 with plasma. Ecumenopolis had the most kills, with 31. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 32) 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 the developers talk to each other? A1: All the time! We have our own discord server and everything to help foster communication amongst our team, where we post everything from progress updates to funny memes, to holding energetic discussions about the future of our game. It's great fun! Q2: Will skins transfer over from the dogfight to the main game? A2: We do plan on skins and other aesthetic purchases making the transition to the full game, while things like ships most likely will not. The two games will have such a different progression system that allowing the dogfight purchases into the final game would severely unbalance gameplay. Q3: Will researching an armor upgrade increase the value of the armor stat points? A3: Functionally increasing the value of the stat points is mathematically the same as increasing a ships total health number, so I guess yes? The true depths of research are still in development, so if you have any ideas relating to that area feel free to share them. 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 187th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, the finishing touches were put on the Outpost Strike gamemode, knocking out a few bugs and adding the last few important features of the mode. Last week, we had the outpost turrets locking on and obliterating any fighters that dared to get near. This week was a time for vengeance. Players can now fight back by using the weapons at their disposal to damage the turrets and knock them offline. Each turret has quite a bit more health than the average fighter, but that's only fair since they don't move or heal, and are large, mounted capital-class turrets. Idyllic manage to pull off the first unofficial striker-team victory, with the utter obliteration of all the outpost's defenses within the time limit. This feat was immeasurably close to failure, as seen in the screenshot above and below. That is correct - the missiles struck the last turret as the clock ticked down to 0, with Idyllic barely pulling off a victory. His experience during this test, which involved firing missiles in alternating volleys by toggling the different turrets on and off, was unpleasant at best. This led him to add the latest feature coming to the official dogfight soon - missile alternation. Rather than firing all missile turrets with one press of the F key, hitting the fire key fires one missile at a time - you can still spam all your turrets at once by spamming the F key, but it offers a bit more control when one missile would do the trick. Another community-voted item checked off the list! Other stuff wrapped up this week include the gamemode resetting after a round has ended, which didn't exactly work before. Luckily, the gamemode system was set up ages ago with a few lines of code specifically to set up gamemodes like Outpost Strike, so the addition was amazingly simple. Also, we fixed a problem with players being placed on the Outpost team instead of only on the Strikers team, which really broke things when it happened. Don't miss our third issue of DaftCube's Dividends, Issue #2 is available here. He talks about a variety of topics, from work he's doing on our databases to stuff he's doing in real life, check it out. Now that we have the ability to strike back at the outpost, we have come to a juncture in the road for the leaderboard. On the one side, we can report the kills and deaths sustained by or against the outpost as part of the official leaderboard, as they are a fair challenge to kill, while on the other hand we can separate those stats out and only count player-vs-player kills for the leaderboard. For this first week, we have chosen to report both, and we'll take community feedback to decide the future. The winner in the Outpost Category is the player that did the most testing of new features - IdyllicDestroyer - with 112 kills, 75 deaths, and a 1.49 KDR. That is, of course, not counting the 465 kills to 169 deaths that the outpost itself had - a 2.75 KDR, by the way. Maybe when the outpost wins the cycle, we'll give it a custom skin... In the non-Outpost Category, the winner was Imaboss2122, with 6 kills, 0 deaths. Nice work. The most commonly used weapon was the Torpedo, with 128 kills, followed by 40 beam, 7 railgun, 7 laser, and 5 auto. The most deadly ship was the Iridium, with 118 kills, followed by the Gladiator with 22. 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: How is the outpost gamemode going? A1: Fantastic! All of the features are there, and the major bugs have been dealt with. We'll give it a few weeks of testing, then release it to the Dogfight proper. Q2: Can a group change from a subfaction to a faction? A2: Of course! This is the primary way we will be adding new factions post-release. A group of people will claim some territory as an organization, and through some process that has yet to be determined, make the transition to full faction. Q3: Can a group change from a faction to a subfaction? A3: Now this would be a little bit more complex to work out. Factions are very involved, and organizations don't have access to a lot of the things Factions do. In the case that a Faction downsizes, I would expect them to just found their own organization and transfer their assets over, rather than a simple button or coded process.
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! This installment of Daftcube’s Dividends has three unrelated parts. They cover what I did this month, and during my brief hiatus in the beginning of January. This one’s quite a long one, so grab a snack and beverage! RoVerse Backend: Object-Relational MappingData, data, DATA! RoVerse deals with a lot of data. From a solar system database that is 200+ entries large, to realtime markets that must be able to handle potentially hundreds of transactions per second, structuring data in the right way can make the difference between a sluggish experience and a seamless one. One of the harder architectural challenges of any highly scalable cloud application is how to structure data such that it is both easy to persist and easy to operate upon when retrieved from its storage location. Today, we will discuss how we can solve this challenge in computer science by using object-oriented design principles and a technique called object-relational mapping. Why We Use Objects, and What They Are!Let’s start with the ‘object’ part of object-relational mapping. In computer science, we have many ways we can structure data and its associated behaviors. If you have done basic programming in Roblox Lua or another scripting language, you might be vaguely familiar with the “procedural” paradigm of programming. In functional programming, execution happens sequentially. In other words, the code runs each line in order, like an ordered procedure or list of tasks. Here’s an example image… As you can see, each line of code runs one after the other. For storing temporary values, we can store data “locally” in functions, or “globally” if outside of functions. Local data only exists in functions and is thrown out once the function ends. Global variables can be accessed from anywhere in the program. However, procedural programming can get organizational issues if we want to build programs that have behavior that is closely related to its data. As an example, let’s try to see what the classic game Pong would look like in a procedural format…
Cool, we pretty much have the overarching design of the game set up, and all we really must do is implement all of this. Procedural programming works well when either the project is simple, or the program’s data is more important than the behaviors we might give said data. However, in games, we often care about the behaviors more than just data. Consider the following example… Let’s say, we want to expand our pong game to have powerups! If the ball hits a powerup, the player who last hit the ball will get an effect. Let’s brainstorm a few…
So, with the first idea, it is painless to implement in our program design. All we must do is increase the ball’s velocity. However, for the second idea, we must add new balls to the game. We only have variables for a single ball, so we must declare additional variables to expand our functionality. In addition, we must give those extra balls behaviors, so let’s declare those too. Now, one more change! The spawning powerup is a hit, but the players want more! Now we want our ball spawning powerup to spawn one hundred balls! Welp, I’m not going to even try declaring that many variables and functions. Sure, we could use arrays, but the code would still be a bit messy. What we need is a way to organize our code such that the data and its behaviors are bundled into one package. And, guess what! We have the technology! Well, we’ve had the technology for more than 20 years. Introducing: Objects! Object-oriented programming organizes a program into ‘objects’ that combine both data and its associated behaviors. For example, an object for a single ball in our pong game might look like this… This has many benefits. First, when we organize our data this way, we can only work with data that is contained in our object. This separates the data and makes the entire codebase more organized and less confusing. Next, we can make (instantiate) as many instances of this object as we want at runtime. We could make a powerup that spawns 100,000 if we wanted to, and it wouldn’t be any extra work! Using class diagrams, we can also draw out what our entire game might look like if we made each part of it an object. In the RoVerse Testbench, we use objects for so many different things! Here’s an example of a class definition for a solar system! Now that we understand what objects are and why we use them, let’s discuss why adding a database to the equation makes things a bit more difficult. The “Relational Mapping” Part of ORMSo, what’s the “relational” part mean? Well, it refers to the type of database we are using. We chose to use a relational database to persist our backend data. In a relational database, entries are organized into tables. A table possesses a set number of unchanging columns that define what data types each entry has. Every row in the table represents a single entry. In other words, think of a fancy spreadsheet! Because relational databases have a fixed organization of data, they tend to be very fast to query. This is because our fixed organization allows us to make assumptions about how the database is organized and indexed. But, I’m not a database guy, so I don’t know how to explain much more than that. Below is a sample table from an iteration of our market code. This is great, but we have a problem: how do we convert between our objects in memory and our rows in our database? The simple solution would be to write a function for each object to convert it into a query that the database could accept. This would work, but we would have a lot of repeating – or ‘boilerplate’ – code that does the same thing. Plus, both are structured and predictable ways of storing data, so there must be some way to automate the object conversion code. And there is a way to automate the code: use an Object-Relational Mapping library! An object-relational mapping library does exactly what you think it would; it provides functionality that automates the process of converting our objects into database entries and back again. We’re using Sequelize, which also provides a bunch of extra helpful features like built-in transaction support. (Remember last Daftcube’s Dividends for why we need transactions!) If you’re interested in how Sequelize works, it’s an open source project. Feel free to look at the documentation and source code on their website. In short, using an object-oriented principle called inheritance, we can create objects that already have the object-relational mapping out of the box. And that’s pretty much it, really! We solved several problems in this edition of Daftcube’s Dividends, including how to structure data in memory and in long-term storage, and how to convert between the two. Now, because some were curious about where I was for the last month, let’s talk about that! Daft's Research!I was recently invited by my electrical engineering professor to join his hardware lab! I got my own permanent desk with a computer with more cores than I can count on my fingers and more RAM than one would ever need! Our lab is trying to train neural networks to identify human emotions from facial expressions. Our main problem is that training neural networks requires a lot of sample data, and it’s just not feasible to invite thousands of people into the lab, record videos of various facial expressions, and then tag and archive them. To solve this problem, I’m building a way to generate our own dataset by rendering the videos we need using cinema-grade CG characters and open-source professional motion and facial capture animations. We figure that, if our CG animations are close enough to reality, the neural network should be able to use the footage as a solid foundation to identify real human faces. Of course, there is a chance this won’t work. It’s research, and it can happen. If it doesn’t work, my project isn’t useless; we’re also going to use it as a foundation to research new ways to send and render facial expressions over the network. My software will integrate with the lab’s experimental low-profile facial camera setup and convert its camera data into facial blendshape positions that can be sent over the network. Cool stuff! A side note: my teachers always told me that guess-and-check was sloppy. But, if you do it fast enough, it suddenly becomes “machine learning” and you can make $500,000 annually for it! Or, in my case, an unpaid undergraduate research position. It’s still super awesome and exciting though; I can call myself a proper researcher now! Testbench Status and ConclusionWe’ve been hitting targets at a rapid pace! I’m shocked, honestly. I still can’t give a date of release, (classic RoVerse :P ) but it should be sooner rather than later. I will also try to increase the dividends for you folks. Thanks for reading, and take care!
Hello everyone! Welcome to the 186th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week we went right back to work on the list of features needed to get us to the Capital Update. Idyllic jumped back on the Outpost Strike gamemode, which the last we left it was nearly functional, with outpost randomized generation and limited target tracking. The first step was to make the Flak bursts damage the ships it was targeting. This was a fairly simple task to complete, but it exposed two severe problems with the tracking system. Previously, it only fired bolts to a preset range before they detonated, unfortunately these proved too easy to dodge around, or camp inside the range, and would make destroying turrets trivial, which wouldn't do. The second problem was targeting multiple ships at once - the original code targeted the closest ship to the station with every single turret. This work when it could hit its target, but when pilots were too ellusive, allowed people to sit right next to the station with impunity. The solution, then, was to target ships individually on a per-turret basis - it is definitely a more complex calculation, but it is well worth the effort. There is also lots of room for optimization. With those two problems out of the way, the game was opened to the community to test and see how it performed. The test went exceptionally well, with a significant number of fatalities among unprepared pilots. Damage and accuracy were tweaked to a more manageable level, and work continued. Next up was a bit of leaderboard work, making the menu look better and with fewer typos. Now it takes the standard team deathmatch layout, with the outpost's defenses arrayed against how many lives your team has left to defeat the station. The last important step of the process was being able to damage the turrets and knock them offline, giving them health values and letting the ship weapon system detect them. Current status is turrets that have health and can be destroyed, but don't yet stop firing at you. We also have another round of faction ships: The Vaction Grimlock... ...and a public variant of the Sentinel. Last up, we have a brand new map for the Dogfight Alpha, built by a member of our community. Citadel has access to the Team Deathmatch and Free-for-all gamemodes. Check it out this week in the dogfight! The winner this week by unanimous decision was the Outpost. 243 pilots stood against it, and one by one they were cut down. This, of course, took place in a test version that still had the output settings turned on, so it really doesn't count, but it certainly looks good on the accuracy of the automated turret system. The actual dogfight was surprisingly quiet this week, so there was no real winner this week. If you're looking to top the leaderboard for cycle 4 and earn your own exclusive skin, now's your chance. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 30) 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: What is the competition between factions and solo players? A1: The idea is that factions and solo players have two nearly entirely separate realms of gameplay - factions care about the big picture, galactic conquest, major infrastructure, and their members, while solo players are in it for exploration, upgrading their ship, having fun. The point where these overlap is in recruitment. Factions will always want more members, and solo players may want access to the bigger-picture features, so they strike a deal. A solo player in faction territory isn't likely to be a problem, unless it's in your faction lore to be highly xenophobic. Q2: What is dev questions coming to? A2: I'm glad you asked! Moderating a discord channel is a delicate balance between being too controlling of content and being too loose. Finding the level between the two is an important but entirely unpredictable process. Sometimes, it involves allowing absurd or ridiculous questions to be asked in the asking-questions channel. A little informality goes a long way in soothing the sharp edges of a moderated server. Q3: What is a man? A3: A featherless biped. Q4: Will organizations be able to build more than one outpost if they want to? A4: Definitely. Organizations can build as many outposts as they have the resources to build, there are no restrictions on our end, except for the limit to how many structures can be built in one system. 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 185th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic has continued to add more features to the planetary demo, while Maximus has worked on the military outpost interiors. Last week we showed our progress from an unlimited grid of buildings to a series of interconnected roadways with holes for parks or larger buildings. This week, we added back in the generation of buildings in these newly-created blocks, filling out the city grid with the structures that make a city a city. Our set of test buildings is unfortunately made entirely of skyscrapers of the same height, so cities don't look quite as good as they could... So a bit of quick math to adjust building heights as they approach the periphery was in order. Another update to the planet was a brand-new ring of debris kicked into orbit by Sphaera bombarding the surface. The community wanted a planet with a ring around it, so we obliged them by dropping our asteroid belt generator into the game. Two other features are in their early stages, including transcontinental roadways that connect different cities, which are interesting to code because of the math of a straight line arc on a spherical surface, and vehicle turret tracking. With this fun demonstration build of some important future mechanics coming along nicely, Idyllic plans to refocus entirely back on the Capital Update. Working for too long on one portion of a project without hitting many big checkpoints can grind coders down, but with a short break, they can hopefully get back on task and get the important features done. Maximus has continued to work on the interiors of the Military Outpost Main module, with extensive work in the cargo bay and landing area. Keep up the good work! Unfortunately, we had a problem this week with our stat tracking system until Saturday, so no earlier stats were recorded, except for a single lopsided bout between Idyllic and one of his friends. If you played the dogfight this week and would like your stats recorded for the 5th cycle, let Idyllic know and he can track things down individually in the datastore. There were some interesting numbers that did come out of the data this week, including an interesting percentage split between beam and laser. Idyllic's super secret loadout of two beams, one plasma, had a perfectly even split on kills between them, 35 - 70. There's nothing in the code to make this happen, as beams are hitscan and plasma is a projectile. Weird. The most dangerous map was Ecumenopolis, both because of the number of times it was chosen, and the round type that happened on it - KOTH can turn into a bloodbath if you don't try to capture the hill. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 29) 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: Can you destroy a warp gate between systems? A1: Yep! Gates built by factions on wormholes are a vital part of claiming control of a system, contributing significantly to a faction's development score. This won't destroy the wormhole entirely, but it won't work as well for travelling across the galaxy. Q2: Can I camp a gate to deny an enemy? A2: Definitely. Defending the entrances and exits to a system will be a pretty important task to manage when trying to control systems. Don't want saboteurs slipping past to destroy important infrastructure. Q3: Can I physically block a jump gate to prevent ships going through? A3: Ships entering the system by coming out of a wormhole or gate will not be able to be stopped physically by any ships, but a fleet of ships guarding the way will prevent an exit by the nature of their weaponry. Q4: Can you repair gates? A4: Like any other faction structure, gates can indeed be repaired by delivering raw materials to the structure. Q5: Will there be ringed planets? A5: Technically there is already a ringed planet, but there could possibly be more. There's something special about looking up into the evening sky and seeing a bunch of debris that could come raining down into the atmosphere at any moment and obliterate all you hold dear. Q6: What will there be to explore, if I wanted to make that my profession? A6: 220 star systems, over 835 planets, many secrets and hidden areas. Scouting resources could be valuable information to sell to factions, espionage or observation of different faction areas could be useful info. We plan on supporting as many occupations as we can, to give the game a nice variety rather than force everyone into faction soldier roles. 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 |