Hello everyone! Welcome to the 296th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week was jam-packed with more bug fixes, focusing on the Juggernaut gamemode and its propensity for failing whenever the juggernaut dies, which turned out to be a problem with wreck generation. This has been fixed, thanks to help from the community with helping Idyllic debug. A new feature has appeared, after Idyllic saw an inspiring gif on twitter, and just had to have it - Beams now leave a burning trail of molten metal in their wake, instead of using the generic laser hitmarker effect. Using some simple but tricky to implement logic, the trail cuts out whenever the beam leaves a particular surface, so it doesn't just track across the empty void. And special thanks to devOmega for helping make the glowy bits extra glowy. Also, try not to get banned for drawing anything weird on the stations - remember some poor maintenance worker has to go on a several-hour-long spacewalk to patch up any marks you leave on his station. Next up is a special treat, with another weapon effect that has been refined - this time it is for the Railgun turrets that will grace the Station Strike gamemode. Picture it now - you're exploring a silent asteroid field, searching for the rarest ores and valuable veins of minerals, but you've unwittingly stumbled into the territory of the most reprehensible of enemy factions. Their station, on high alert since it picked you up on long-range scans is not interested in diplomacy, and as soon as you maneuver into range of its heavy railguns, it strikes: With a huge round so magnetically charged that it ionizes the scant particles of space dust into a glowing shockwave, the railgun bolt travels at incredible speed, slamming into your ship and leaving a hole straight through. It's also quite scary when the turrets lock on to a fighter, as seen below: And when you get stuck on a rock, and are entirely helpless to defend your ship: Next up in this Newsletter, we'd like to talk about our plans for Freeroam. With the Capital Update wrapping up, it has come time to discuss our plans for the first steps of Freeroam. Before now, we've left this step of the project pretty ambiguous, only describing it as having the basic features of the final game, and working up from there. But now, we've got some solid plans for you. Things are still flexible, so if you have any input be sure to discus it in the community. By now, you all should be well acquainted with Hyperion Station, home of the Egg Hunts, Christmas Drinks, and the occasional reactor meltdown. Right now, it is practically just a showcase you can visit occasionally, whenever you want to check out the latest Faction Stalls. But with Freeroam, Hyperion Station will become so much more. Hyperion is the heart of RoVerse, the first place new players will join, where they will receive their orientation to gameplay mechanics like piloting ships, collecting ore, and completing quests. But Hyperion isn't destined to just be a lobby for brand-new players, it will also be a central social space for all sorts of visitors to the RoVerse galaxy. To that end, as the first stage of Freeroam, we will be fully developing Hyperion Station into a full gameplay experience for all members of RoVerse, not just the new ones. Think of it as RoVerse, but distilled down to a single star system to begin with. It will have all the important gameplay features, like Quests, Currency, and Ship Combat. But we also want to embrace the roleplay aspects of the game early - we want to develop a functioning economy to match the credit-earning capabilities of the quests system with things to spend your hard earned credits on. Clothing and Weapons to equip your player, expanding out into entertainment, like an Arcade with fun minigames, a Hotel with rentable and customizable player cabins, and Restaurants to purchase exotic and faction foods. We want to have a Bounty System, to establish a bounty-hunting force to keep rulebreakers and havoc-causers in line, a Station Security Force to maintain order, and a thriving Black Market Quest system, to cause disorder. We also won't let the Faction Stalls area fall into disuse - we want to add more purpose to those beautiful creations, and allow factions to sell their uniforms, and if Roblox adds a group-join prompt in-game, actively use those stalls to recruit new members. In short, we want to create a fun game that players can spend their time in everyday, instead of continuing with our current process of large content updates to a Dogfight that everyone has played out. There will still be room for the Dogfight, however, with plans to turn it into a competitive VR simulation game that the best pilots in the galaxy come to Hyperion Station to compete in, as an in-universe explanation for its existence. These features will not all be completed when we intend to open Hyperion Station 2.0 up - they can and will be added on over time, as they are completed. Instead of waiting months for new content with nothing to do in the meantime, you'll be able to enjoy the gameplay experience the full time, with exciting updates keeping you engaged. Earn credits to purchase ships and customize them to your liking, including civilian mining ships and transports, customize your own cabin with decorations like a Cyrus Gold Bobblehead or a fancy couch, or try some sushi shaped like a capital ship - what you make of the game will be entirely up to you. And to wrap everything up, as system exploration systems are completed and the wider galaxy becomes ready for players to explore and conquer, a collaborative quest will begin. Players will be challenged to collect and deliver the required resources to construct the first galaxy's first Jumpgate, under the direction of the Professor and the Stationmaster, and unlock access to the rest of RoVerse in what we hope will be an exciting live event. We hope you'll stick with us as we finish up the Capital Update to the Dogfight, and as we begin this exciting work on the first stage of the "Full Game" of RoVerse. And be sure to drop by the Discord with any ideas you have, we love to hear them. We have the leaderboard stats from last week's leaderboard for you, which also involved bug fixes of its own sort - the extraction code we used incorrectly calculated whether a specific entry was on the correct day or not, so that led to it counting all kills after the week start date as kills from that week. With a little bit of code, we had that edge-case fixed: Last week in the dogfight there were 131 kills, 47 with auto, 13 with beam, 12 with laser, 0 with plasma, 24 with railgun, and 35 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 47 kills, followed by the Gladiator with 22. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 65 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 35. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were devOmegax, with 52 kills and 21 deaths and a 2.47 KDR; FangABXY with 31 kills, 21 deaths and a 1.47 KDR; and Niracih with 24 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Radiant Corps Moonray in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 136) This week in the dogfight there were 411 kills, 38 with auto, 40 with beam, 10 with laser, 31 with plasma, 9 with railgun, and 283 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Chariot with 228 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 58. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 162 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 119. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were devOmegax, with 269 kills and 13 deaths and a 20.69 KDR; FangABXY with 60 kills, 14 deaths and a 4.28 KDR; and cakespy123 with 41 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Radiant Corps Moonray in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 137) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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 Capitals be able to have Mining Turrets attached to them? A1: Unlikely, as they are two separate classes of ship. While they may overlap in size, Mining ships are specifically designed for their purposes, able to mount various mining devices on their turret mounts to collect and process ores from asteroids. A Capital ship is designed as a combat platform with various specialties from Carrier to Offensive intent, and would not be particularly effective at collecting ores. Mining ships will be able to get quite large, though they will lack the combat effectiveness of a dedicated combat ship. Q2: Can we have blast mining with rockets/missiles/torpedoes? A2: Those do sound quite cool. We'll look into it. 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 295th 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 continued crossing bugs off our list from the 3rd community playtest, with some exciting things solved like UI issues with the gamemode scoreboard, faction turret errors, fighters being able to fly straight through Capital ships, turret shot rendering, and turret descension. We've also snagged several other generic errors that were stopping things like respawning or dealing damage, particularly with Missiles. The community tests were also invaluable in helping us establish a baseline for how much health a Capital ship should have - the Bolitho would be considered a light Cruiser, and is in the very smallest Capital category of ships, so it should be able to hold its own against a limited number of fighters, especially with its complement of 7 flak cannons, but it shouldn't be an impenetrable wall if you sneak up behind it or outrange it's flaks. After the testing last week, we've doubled the health of the Bolitho, which gives it a bit more appropriate bulk for taking fighter hits. We've also taken the opportunity to tune Capital vs Capital damage - two Bolitho fighting each other with 3 Conventional turrets currently feels exactly like we'd want it to feel. Not too many hits to take one down, but it doesn't feel like it's made of glass either. A new feature requested last week and quickly added in are turret reticles. These small pips will always be directly in front of the turrets on your ship, showing you where your shots would go at that exact moment, while the turrets are still transiting towards your mouse. While they no longer get stopped by flak, this does give you a good idea of a ship's best firing angle, which on the Bolitho is directly ahead, with all guns to bear on the target. A feature that is making its return, but at a fully-improved level, are ship wrecks. Randomly generated from the Capital ship model that just died, these wrecks appear with a brilliant explosion. Now, they work with any Capital you happen to be flying, not just the Bolitho. We're to the point where we're testing the Capital Beta out every week - Join us next Sunday to help test out multiplayer aspects of the update. Your help is greatly appreciated. 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 add Hangar space to captured enemy Capitals? A1: Unfortunately a captured ship is very difficult to modify without the original schematics. They'll be stuck with the Hangar space they have, unless you build a version of your own and spec it as a Carrier. Q2: An annoying issue with capitals is that some small obstacles will stop the largest and strongest ships in their tracks. I can see this becoming a significant issue and/or exploitable strategy for many factions. Especially as larger ships get deployed. Will there be a mechanic to overcome this? A2: We're working on a way to deal with this - the first change is live that prevents your throttle from getting set to 0 when you run into something. In the future, we want to use the collectionservice to tag small debris that should be able to be moved out of the way of Capital ships. We tried out detecting the size of debris live when you run into it, but unfortunately the debris isn't uniformly set up, and would be a pain to detect that way. This will take some dedicated effort to group and tag items in the existing maps. Q3: Can we collect debris to turn into resources? A3: Sure, debris that is created by the destruction of ships will be a vital aspect of any faction's fleet maintenance scheme, since most of the resources that went into a ship should be recoverable from the wreck, if your particular side wins the battle. Now you wont be able to scoop this debris up with a net or anything, but you will be able to mine them like very valuable asteroid chunks. 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 294th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This weekend, the community helped test out one of the last pre-release versions of the Capital Update. Thanks to their help, we've now created a list of bugs that absolutely must be patched before we release, and can start crossing them off to make it over the final hurdle. We did manage to sneak a new feature or two into the Beta as well - Flak turrets are now grouped into a single weapon group that can be disabled with a single button, instead of one at a time, and disabled weapons show up as grey on the reloading indicators on the HUD. Weapon descension has been enabled, with turrets being able to angle down about 10 degrees. You may see shots fire through the hull of your ship if it protrudes from the turret far enough on a level plane, but unless there's a lot of demand for turrets to respect collisions there, we'll leave it as-is - it makes it much easier to hit targets directly in front of you, and there will be an exceptional amount of weirdly-shaped ships that make this difficult to control. The Bolitho now has a stronger Engine effect, and some trails, instead of using slightly scaled-up versions of fighter effects, and we've been slowly filling out the achievement icons on the rewards screen. Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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 No questions this week - drop by #dev_questions if you have any questions about the game. 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 |