Hello everyone! Welcome to the 149th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic and Lordrex continued the last few rounds of bug testing and patching as we march ever closer to the Capital Update Phase 1 public release. Now ticked off the list are the deploy button only working while a round is active, and disabled when during an intermission, several graphical fixes, a few errors involving weapons being replicated, and weapons not operating correctly. Stats for every ship and weapon type have been copied over from our spreadsheet to the actual server files, so weapons do the damage they're supposed to, and ships have the health and shield they are designed to have. These stats represent an initial spread of combinations - some have more hull and less shields, a few more shield power than hull strength - and are liable to change with balancing both before and after Phase 1. The baseline for these stats is the Excalibur you know and love from the dogfight alpha - its stats are locked in and used to determine the stats of comparable ships. The same is true for weapons - the plasma turret from the dogfight will not change, but the others will in relation to it. A feature or two was removed from the dogfight - specifically team-colored energy bolts, which were only marginally useful in the first place but worked for the arcade-style game of the original dogfight but as we move forward will become more of a hindrance. For identifying friendly vs enemy fire from now on, the best method will be custom faction weapon effects, either colors or particles. Idyllic also experimented a bit more with the forcefield material, to create this interesting laser firing effect. It still has the uncontrollable breathing effect, but all things considered it adds life to an otherwise static image. The method is the same as last week's explanation, with a cyan to red gradient being applied to a specific strip heading away from the ship's turrets. The shader takes care of the glow effect automatically, which is a plus. 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 asteroid belts have a limited supply of minerals? A1: Asteroid fields will have a limited supply of ores to be mined per unit of time - they will slowly recharge over a long period of time, to both keep up with long-term demand and allow areas to be 'mined out.' To the solo player, there will be ores anywhere they look, but for a faction setting up a mining station and strip mining the surrounding fields, they may have to push further and further over time. Q2: What resources will cities need to have access to? Water? Air? A2: We don't plan on cities requiring pipelines to the ocean or anything like that, mainly growth and repair through hard resources - metals, concrete, etc. used to construct buildings. The final resources list has yet to be compiled, so there may be other resources a faction needs to deliver to see colonies flourish. Air domes will probably be a part of underwater and moon-based cities, we'll let you know. Q3: Could we have events that occur in 'pocket' systems on occasion throughout the galaxy? A3: We set up the galaxy system to support the creation of temporary pocket systems to provide a space for any possible Roblox-sponsored events, but we all know how that went. Now, they'll see their use as neutral systems, and there is a very good chance that short-term events, like an invasion, could occur in these off-map areas, with the potential for exclusive rewards. Q4: Is the water in RoVerse drinkable? A4: I wouldn't feel confident speaking about all water in the galaxy, as there is certainly a lot of it, but I can personally vouch for the water available at the neutral system drinking fountains... Q5: Will there be a self-destruct button on ships, to try and take out others nearby? A5: Unlikely. Your best option will always be shooting at the enemy ships - if you end up in a situation where that doesn't work, better plan a new strategy that doesn't involve wasting weeks of faction efforts. Q6: Is skinny still putting all the questions ever asked into one book? A6: He's been really busy with life recently, but it's still in progress. So keep asking questions to give his future self more work. Q7: How quickly can we fly into space? A7: We'll perform accurate measurements when the time comes, and let you know. You could drive to space in an hour, if your car could drive vertically. Q8: Will there be any special weapons, like bows, beam rifles, or grenade launchers? A8: Ground combat is still quite a ways off, when that system is being developed we'll have official confirmation. Until then, we are planning on adding a wide variety of common sci-fi weaponry to satisfy every faction's desires and play-style and to keep combat interesting. Unofficially, if destiny has it, we'll probably do a version of it. Q9: Can we rob people at laser-gun point? A9: Potentially, your security forces could demand a portion of a cargo ship's cargo as payment for safe passage through faction-controlled space, which could be construed as robbery with threat of violence. Q10: Do we need to build a larger shipyard or upgrade them to build larger ships? A10: Shipyards are tiered by their host structure - outposts are smaller and can construct ships up to L at best, if you need bigger ships, make the investment in a full faction station, which can construct the largest classes either directly in a shipyard, or adjacent. 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 148th 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 work on both the experimental side, and the bug-fixing side. Idyllic and Lord have started up the first round of full-on testing of Phase 1, finding any and all bugs that need to be addressed before it makes it to release. Idyllic and the community did some experimentation with the forcefield material, and cracked its secrets. It all started with a tweet from CloneTrooper1019 linking this texture... ...which led to this glimmer effect debuted last week as a potential candidate for ship shield hit indication. But we weren't satisfied just accepting the animation as something magical and beyond our control, we needed to control it, to exploit it for our own glorious ends! So Idyllic did his research - starting with a custom texture created from colors picked out of the glimmer texture, to see how it functioned in a controlled environment. With this texture, he noticed that only one or two colors were illuminated simultaneously, starting with the green and blue, working its way through yellow and magenta, and ending in red. The next step was to arrange them in an order... However with this pattern, the blues, magenta, and green illuminated first, which may have implied a texture-coordinate variation, but that was not the case. The next texture to test was a color selection wheel, wherein all colors could be tested simultaneously. A pattern was found! Drawing a line from the left to the right, from cyan to red, revealed on common factor with other lines drawn across the circle - an increase in the R component of RGB was the determining factor in when those portions of the texture were illuminated, which was confirmed with the very next test. Armed with the handy gradient tool provided by paint.net, Idyllic drew up his first successful custom texture. The scanning effect may find its use somewhere in RoVerse, and it doesn't have any artifacts, so the quality is up to our standards. But a scanning line is one thing, to really go sci-fi there's only one design - hexagons! Using a simple magic wand selection and underlaying a gradient, this texture was rather easy to make, and the results look pretty good. The centers of the hexagons were just deleted to 100% transparency, and you may notice they still flash in the gif, so we recommend using black, as it doesn't appear to ever flash. With the secret discovered and the process defined, Idyllic set to sharing this magic with the world, guiding members of the RoVerse Community and other development communities in the creation of their own unique effects, some of which can be seen below. We've also discovered a few other tricks, like vertexcolor editing to change the forcefield colors. There are a lot of possibilities for this feature, so we thought it best to spread the word and see what creative stuff the development community could come up with, and so far they haven't disappointed. We expect to see armor overshields and barriers and flashy billboards covering clan bases in no time. On the Phase 1 front, we have a status update and a few bugs we found in testing. We officially have all the features we're going to add before Phase 1 is released to the public for testing, with hangar localization and weapon damage being the last things added. The first official kill with a torpedo has been recorded, as they now do damage (quite a bit of it, if you actually manage to hit anything) though they won't be extremely useful until Capitals are added giving you a big enough target to shoot at. There were a few bugs with gamemodes that hadn't been tested with multiple players in a FE environment yet, but mainly just problems with the leaderboard not displaying the stats correctly, which should be a simple fix. The hull and shield gui wasn't properly tied into the ship stats values, so it didn't update your health, but a fix is in progress. There was a slight problem with loading the turrets on the ship you start with, which was fixed pretty quickly, and solved a bunch more problems that popped up down the line. This last fix was particularly momentous because it involved Idyllic's code, and a collaborative fix between both Idyllic and lordrex to solve the problem, rather than one person giving it a go. We'll keep you updated on the status of Phase 1, but things are looking good - just like these torpedo explosions! 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's to stop powerful factions from gatecamping the neutral systems? A1: There isn't really. If a faction becomes powerful enough to surround and block access to a neutral system, they can. I'm not sure that they'll find it all that profitable, but we aren't going to stop them. The key feature of neutral systems, though, is that there are 21 of them scattered all over the galaxy, so there will always be an open path. Q2: Will there be a system capture limit? A2: Factions are free to claim as many systems as they have the power to defend. There is a lot of space in the galaxy, 220 star systems and 800-some planets, which no faction will be able to defend a majority of it. It might be possible to blitz in a coordinated attack and gain the upper hand in a majority of systems, but you'll end up facing the combined might of the rest of the galaxy. Q3: How easy will joining factions in RoVerse be? A3: As easy or as hard as the individual factions want to make it. There will be advertising boards and links all over the galaxy, as getting people interested in clans is one of our goals, and we would like it to be an easy jump from joining in-game to joining the official Roblox groups. But of course, factions may want filter groups to weed out the spies and the nincompoops. Q4: How will factions interact with the low-skilled public, will they have too much power? A4: We plan on adding a plethora of permissions settings so factions can specify exactly what different ranks and grade levels can do, all the way down to does this rank have permission to withdraw faction ships from a hangar, do they have permission to sell ore, can they fire on their allies, and more. Q5: Will ships in warp crash into things? A5: Unlikely. The warp system as currently planned will be a way from jumping from landmark to landmark and bypassing endless debris and asteroid fields that fill the void between planets and stations. To calculate a path necessary to avoid any oncoming rocks would be an arduous task, so the current answer is phasing. Warps won't just teleport you to your destination, you'll still experience travel at high speeds, but you won't have to worry about running into anything along the way. 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 147th 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 some time to mock up a potential use for the recently-released forcefield material, added damage to torpedoes, and worked on localizing the ship-modification hangar. Stratiz also made an appearance, to show off his work with bezier curves for dropship animations. While we don't exactly know what mysterious powers we're messing with, the new forcefield material has some... unusual... properties that make it do weird things under specific situations. So we're going to exploit them for whatever they're worth. Idyllic put together a little demo of what shield effects could potentially look like for fighters. Using a special texture and a specialmesh, not a meshpart, a forcefield part produces this charming warble noise effects, though it is rather limited in its controllable properties, that may limit its use. On the plus side, no scripting or particle spam is required to create moving and breathing environments. We'll be exploring this further in the coming weeks, so let us know if you have any ideas or see any cool uses of the feature elsewhere. On the coding front, the miss... torpedoes shown last week now do the proper damage missiles are supposed to when they hit something, but more work is required to make them do area-of-effect damage with their explosion. This feature wasn't coded into the original Dogfight or it's refactor, so will be new territory. But we don't foresee this stalling a release - if needed we can update them later, as torpedoes are pretty unwieldy against small moving targets in the first place. Stratiz has been quite busy with his own game, Dedoxxed, but he is working on a feature that may find some application in the Planetary Update - Dropships. CFramed from the skies to the ground following an acceleration curve that sees them speed up, then slow down just before collision, combined with a bunch of cool visual effects all working together, these dropships are pretty cool, and we'd love to see them as a feature in RoVerse. The above gif also gave us a few ideas of how we want atmospheric planetary bombardment to look from the ground as well. One of the last few steps before the Capital Update Phase 1 is released is localizing the new hangar. When the dogfight was refactored, a hangar at player-scale was created with a walking animation and a weird interface, that was later scrapped for something a bit more functional. Instead of requiring ship models at yet another scale, the new hangar is at the scale of the ships - it just needs to be loaded and unloaded only on the client. Here we have a view of a ship being modified in the depths of space... Some unlucky pilot had to crawl out of his cockpit and bolt new turrets on in the middle of nowhere - just like changing a tire on the side of the highway. Just a reminder, you have one day left to collect all the eggs from the inaugural RoVerse Community Egghunt, get them while you still can! 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 broadside weapons and how will they work? A1: Yes, and exactly how you'd expect. Broadsides will be a subclass of fixed weapons, where they are mounted on your ship and locked into a single orientation, requiring you to maneuver your ship to fire them. Then, like any other turret, you can fire them. We may add customization allowing you to fire them with a hotkey rather than the default firing mechanic. Q2: Can a planet be split among several factions? A2: Definitely. Much like system, every faction can have a stake somewhere, but it is up to them to fight for majority control and 'ownership' of that system or planet. Q3: Can independent individuals control regions? A3: They may be able to control them, but they won't ever 'own' it in the eyes of the system. If people want to remain independent and prevent any infrastructure from factions from taking hold, they are welcome to defend their land. Pirates I expect will use this feature to their advantage. Q4: Will you have to take planets region by region, or will it fall at once? A4: Land invasions will need to move across the entire planet to uproot an owning faction, destroying or capturing whatever infrastructure they can. If their infrastructure is centralized in one city, they may fall in one decisive battle, but if not then you may have a campaign on your hands. Q5: Will planet type influence resources? A5: Yep. We'll be taking a whole bunch of factors into consideration for resources to keep it interesting. Rare planet types in the core worlds with rare resources may make it a strategic location. Q6: Will ships have a combat log timer? A6: Most likely, yes. Q7: Can ships stop in between locations in systems, say mid-warp? A7: Yes. Systems will be fully open world, so go out there and explore. Most will be empty or full of asteroids, so you might find a good place to build an outpost near rich mineral deposits. Q8: Can wrecks be stolen by other players? A8: Yep. Scavenging dead ships after a battle will be a viable occupation for those not into the relative safety of mining, hunting for a big reward for recovering valuable resources for capital construction. Q9: Will you take damage from asteroid particles or other small damage sources? A9: We prefer damage that comes from something you can see - a laser bolt from a hostile ship or a big rock you crash into, not a mathematical system generating random numbers and telling you you took damage. Q10: How do Capital turret sizes work? A10: There are 4-ish classes, Light, Medium, Heavy, Very Heavy, and each size increase is basically a multiple of the level below it - say a ship has 10 light turrets, rather than adding more and more until the game dies under the load, we replace, say, 4 light turrets with a medium on larger classes of ships. Exact numbers are still being worked on, stay tuned. Their physical size can be anything within reason, but we would prefer a slight size difference between the different classes in faction lines. Stats will be predetermined by some excellent math, but if faction builders have preferences let us know. 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 146th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic wrapped up his egg hunting from the first RoVerse Community Egg Hunt, collecting the grand prize, Sails of Joy, and got back to work on the Capital Update working out the kinks of torpedo firing and hit detection, and adding the progressive raycast function to the other weapon types still running on hitscan. An important step in the process of converting between the two is determining the velocity of the visual projectiles. Since everyone has been playing the Alpha Dogfight for years at this point, the speed of the plasma projectiles are locked in. To change that now would require great effort and cause many complaints. To that end, Idyllic buckled down, did some hard math, and determined the rate at which the various projectiles travel. The laser projectiles traveled at a*.75 each frame, which, when embedded in a for loop, caused it to accelerate over time. This was undesirable, so was averaged out to provide constant travel speed. Each frame, if moved 1.5 studs, and at about 60 fps, means it travels about 100 studs every second. This can be plugged into the progressive raycast function, visualized below, to check that the raycast keeps up with the projectile as it travels. Here, significantly slowed down, you can see the projectile reaching the end of the raycast as the next scan is fired. We are able to change whether the ray is fired after the projectile passes through, or before it gets there, but at dogfight speeds the difference should be smaller than regular network latency. This was repeated for the other weapon types, like railguns, plasma, auto, and conventional turrets. The last barrier to surmount was torpedoes. Unlike the other constant-velocity projectiles, they accelerate over time. Finding specific values for speed and acceleration was a difficult task, but in the end an approximate answer was found. And now for the most important part: the torpedo explosions working better than last newsletter. There was a bit of a problem connecting the projectile that was fired in the fake shot to the raycast that detects any hits, but in the end the code prevailed, even if the solutions are a bit hacky. Keep on hunting those community eggs, don't miss your chance at an exclusive ship in RoVerse. For those who collect all 30 eggs first, an exclusive skin is also included! You have until the official Roblox egg hunt ends to collect them all. For those of you keeping an eye on the roadmap, it has been updated to the latest. Capital Mechanics are on hold for the time being, but every other major feature is just getting the bugs worked out as we head towards initial Capital Update release. 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: Most enjoyable thing to make in RoVerse thus far? A1: For Idyllic, he had the most fun working on planet generation, from the tesselation and continent collisions, to figuring out gravity for vehicles. Pushing the limits of the platform is always fun. For Juszl, building things, from the size of stations to tiny dervishes, was astounding. Making maps allowed him to really imagine a scene and what could happen there, so everything had to be touched upon. For Lordrex, working with the VPS and databases was a worthy challenge. Working on the creation of the framework that supports the inner workings of the game can be challenging, but very rewarding when you see it come together seamlessly. Skinny likes turtles. Q2: Can my ship be made of wood? A2: Only if the wood grain is correct. I'd hate to have WoodReviewer rise from his grave to chastise us. Q3: Can nations program AI to automatically develop a city or something based off of commands? A3: Unlikely. You may be able to hit a setting on colony cities to determine how it grows, but any commands would have to be given to faction members working in your absence. Q4: Can my ship use sails, powered by solar wind? A4: If that is the in-lore description you want to go with, and the building style you like, go for it. We'll avoid specifying a specific propulsion system so factions can come up with whatever they like. 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 |