Hello everyone! Welcome to the 304th 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 a new tracking function using Highlights, another crack at a crafting tree, and the latest in boilerplate flight scripts. A new feature that a few helpful members of the community tested out in the Dogfight, is a target-selection highlight function. Using the new highlights feature (what else?) we've made it so that when you target-select any hostile, whether that's a ship or an outpost turret, it gets highlighted for you. No more fumbling around in the dark corners of an outpost strike trying to find the hitbox of the turret you were diving in on, now it'll be revealed even in the darkest parts of deep space. We're still discussing the exact visuals we want to use, so don't be surprised if it changes over time. There have been arguments made about the white outline and Frostland map in particular, and the red fill does wash out a lot of detail that we might be able to fade out as you get closer, or apply a pulsing effect. Overall, it makes target selection that much easier - the target boxes are nice, but rather large and non-specific in the grand scheme of things. With highlights, you can see exactly what you're aiming at. We're also excited to test out highlights as a method of warp-destination selection - allowing you to highlight a specific structure at a significant distance and watch as it grows bigger as you approach. Also, while we were messing around in the code, we found an explosion effect that wasn't parented properly to outpost turrets, so they'll now explode with a bit more gusto. We also added a feature similar to the capital wreck generation that messes up destroyed turrets, sending their pieces spinning into the void. Explosion delayed to show visual destruction. We took about the 6th stab at developing an intelligible crafting tree for the various resources we've had on our list. Every previous tree has been abandoned because it ends up unintelligibly complex, and no one but Idyllic can read it. This attempt is no different, and we'll be looking at alternative ways of conveying the steps needed to construct the most complex machinery in the galaxy. The crafting steps are very simple in concept - a higher-tier item is made of up to 4 different ingredients. But conveying that information has been very difficult. If any of you have any recommendations or references to how other games have done this, let us know and we'll check it out. This week wrapped up with spaceships. We've extracted everything flight-related from the dogfight, and boiled it down into the specific things that ships will need to fly in every other place we intend them to fly. That means that they have shed their gamemodes, their modification menus, and their various other fluff and fanfare - everything that doesn't make ships go vroom. All the new features that have been added to the Beta that haven't been available at the Hyperion ship hangar are now copied over into the boilerplate system - stuff like vector lock, the new target highlighting feature, and the latest keybinds. This also includes Capitals, that are just a little bit more work away from taking flight at Hyperion. With the boilerplate systems copied over, we got around to organizing and condensing the various folders of assets that have expanded over time, as well as adding in code that handles the variations of scale between Hyperion Station and Star Systems - all the fighters from the Hangar we put together were copied over and dropped into their respective folders, where they can be summoned up with a small amount of editing. From here, we'll be working out the kinks of scaled-up fighter combat, like turret attachment sizes, collisions, and being able to spawn capital ships on command. And last but not least - the ability to land your ship and return to your explorations of Hyperion. 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 do we trade material at stations? Do we have to touch a contact point, or just a close distance? A1: There are a wide variety of locations players will be able to exchange resources with each other or the system. At Hyperion, trades will take place at dedicated consoles in the Refinery Sector, between two different players. Players selling resources off their ship will be able to interact with the station from nearby or in the Tortuga Hangar. In Space, players piloting ships will be able to trade (or rob) ships in close proximity, while those close to faction stations will have to be in a pre-determined area. 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 303rd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we further developed the questing system, making it modular and easy to expand, and we took a stab at version 1 of the crafting and resources system. Last week we left of the questing system with a few simple crime interactions. Next up on the to-do list was making those individually functioning interactions into a modular quest system, complete with a quest board, the ability to pick up a mission, and exclusivity in completing that quest to the person with that specific mission. What this led to was quite a bit of code working behind the scenes to make all these features function. What they also allowed was the addition of a few new interactions - like the report crime button. Neutral players who have a quest to report criminal activity in the station, will get a popup button that appears if they were within range and had clear line of sight on crimes underway. While they won't pass out like in the gif above, they will do a short point animation, before the crime and its location is reported in chat. Using a fantastic modulescript called ZonePlus, the location of a crime is entirely accurate based on the location of the crime. We'll be able to preset the shape of each location ahead of time, and use that info to keep track of where players are, and report where they are when crimes happen. The crime board is quite simple for now, but quests will be sorted into locked and unlocked categories based on the level of the player who is looking at it. Clicking the arrow picks up the quest and removes it from the available quests list for other players, and triggers dialog instructing you on what to do to complete it. With all this complete, we present to you the first complete (and reported) crime using the new system. With crimes well underway, we thought it was time to take a look at another important area of the Station. Mining resources and turning them into useful stuff will be a key aspect of the game, far exceeding the limited reach of the Hyperion reputation system. And so, we made a list. A very comprehensive list of everything we have ever wanted players to be able to craft or collect. We even dug up some really old crafting tree ideas we'd written down but had set aside for their complexity. And we combined all that into the official list. This list, in Google Sheets format, is the official items list. It has item index values, credit values, and what items it takes to construct that item. This data is all compiled into a table that we can copy and paste directly into a modulescript, which can then be read from by the crafting system, the interface of which you can see below. Every item on the list is compiled into the scrolling frame on the left - a temporary feature, until we finish the crafting tree layout). Clicking an item brings up the other two panes - one showing the item, a description, the value per item, the maximum number you can afford to craft, and the time it'd take to craft the quantity you have selected. The right pane shows all the constituent parts you'd need/already have to build the quantity you've selected. We're still working on the scale of the textboxes, since those look quite terrible, so don't worry about that. The important part was that we can import an item list, and break every item down into its recipes. Now we just need an inventory system and a way to collect minerals, and we'll have players cranking out explosives, I mean structural frames, in no time. 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 we rig our stealable vehicles to explode when someone steals them? A1: There will be alarms on vehicles that can go off and alert you when someone's trying to steal your stuff. However, we don't have any plans to make your stuff explode if they do manage to steal it. Q2: Can we disarm explosives set to explode when you steal something? A2: I think it'd be a nice feature to have to be able to disable laid explosives if you notice them before triggering them, but we'd have to look at how that feature works when we get to making explosives in the first place. Q3: Can we rig explosives to explode when someone tries to disarm them while trying to steal a vehicle? A3: Uhhh... Q4: Can we disarm explosives set to explode when trying to disable them exploding when someone tries to steal a vehicle? A4: Ahhhh! *head explosion noise* 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 302nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we did crimes... …and by crimes, I mean we developed a range of criminal activities that players can undertake to ruin their reputation and join the ranks of the Hyperion Sect, a dangerous and profit-mongering mafia who have a strong grip on the businesses in the Entertainment District of Hyperion Station. Any enterprising young criminal is going to want to dive right into the most illegal aspects of the underworld - however, the crime boss isn't going to trust you with anything dangerous like theft or murder right off the bat. You'll need to work your way into his good graces by performing a variety of petty crimes first, to get your reputation low enough to take on the more difficult crimes. And what better way to start, than by throwing bricks through the windows of stores controlled by the boss's rivals? Just don't get caught by any officers patrolling around looking for hooligans. And a second petty crime you might get asked to do, is graffiti the walls of the entertainment district with various symbols and logos. Using a sci-fi digital applicator, even the least artistic of criminals can spray a flat surface with an incredible work of art. We intend for there to be plenty of variation in the graffiti images, so if you have a piece of faction artwork that'd work as graffiti, send it our way. Bonus points if there's lore behind it, like a subfaction of rebels trying to overthrow your faction. Next on the list of crimes is Surveillance. The Boss will ask you to keep an eye on a location or a person, and your job is to check it out. You'll want to get close enough to get a good view, but not so close that someone gets suspicious about what you're up to. With you developing a trust with the Boss, he might allow you to take on bigger jobs, like Theft and Smuggling. You'll go to a location, pick up an item, and deliver it to its destination. Just be careful - not every item you're stealing will be entirely unguarded. And don't get caught with any stolen items, or you'll get arrested and sent straight to jail. The next crime on the list is a fun but quite challenging one - Hacking. The Boss will have you find and obtain access to a console or junction box, and you'll have to complete a hacking minigame to obtain the cache of data contained within. In this minigame, you'll have several choices, with most of them being incorrect, and one option moving you forward. Don't make too many incorrect guesses, or the alarm will start to go off, and you'll need to quickly hotwire it to keep it silent. Too many failures, and it'll go off regardless. With this crime, practice will be important - the actions aren't impossible, but getting good takes a few tries. And to round off the whole thing, Cyrus has created a neat keyboard-typing animation that plays while you're standing at the keyboard. There are a few more crimes on our list, but they'll take quite a bit more work to get functional. In the meantime, we'll be working on the other side of the reputation system - the lawful quests that will raise your reputation, not lower it. 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 from the community this week - send them our way via #dev_questions in the 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 301st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week saw a little bit of work in a lot of different areas. Hoverquads have been improved on the coding side, with better resistance to spinning when they run into things, and improved performance when driving off of cliffs. Instead of plummeting immediately to the ground at the bottom of a fall, they now drift gracefully down. Here's a demonstration of the previous falling issue: We did a bit of testing at Hyperion, and found that they had another issue that was related - if you managed to fall out of the station, which hopefully won't often be an issue, you'd fall to world position 0, then hover there. While this was rather entertaining and led to some fun police-chases in space, it has been remedied with the new gliding code. The original porpoise of the testing was to try out our newest feature - Vehicle Hijacking. The Police Hoverquads we've added will serve quite well as a stand-in for testing out a system that lets players hack and steal vehicles given a bit of time, skill, and luck. Stealing a hoverbike will be a bit easier compared to stealing an entire untended ship, but the skills you pick up committing petty crime in the halls of Hyperion Station will do the enterprising criminal well in their illicit career. Added this week are two vehicle-requisitioning consoles for Deputies to call in their Hoverquads. It also includes an ownership system, that registers the vehicle to the person who summoned it. Anyone else who attempts to ride the hoverquad will find disabled controls, and a 'Hotwire' prompt. Be sure not to requisition too many hoverquads, or the Sheriff might fire you. The hotwiring system itself is quite simple - you must hold down a series of keys with the correct order and timing, and the vehicle will become hacked. The gif below shows the functionality of the system, however it has been significantly sped up to fit in the seven second gif format. The keys you'll need to hold will follow a common pattern, but be randomized, to encourage investment in the hacking skills you'll develop over time. A skilled thief will be able to complete even the most complex hacks in a single try, and make off with anything not bolted down. Testers described the mechanic as "difficult" which is what we were aiming for - difficult and slow, but possible if you're determined. While Idyllic was modifying the hoverquad code to glide gracefully to the ground, an idea appeared. The vehicle performs quite well at Hyperion, where the ground is flat and level - but what if it was somewhere that was neither? And so we set about making them work at Daedalus Rex, the planetary proof of concept. Using a variety of the new constraints and some simple code, we were able to modify the original hover function to work on a spherical planet. There are quite a few handy settings on the constraints that ended up working perfectly for our porpoises, like AngularVelocity's RelativeTo attachment setting making steering on the underside of a planet easier than figuring out the relative direction and rotation. AlignOrientation has a PrimaryAxisOnly setting that lets you make a part face perpendicular to the surface of a target. Among other changes made this week, was a first-pass at the Station's first restaurant. The Donald Bar has been renamed the Donald Café, after its proprietor, Donald P Sullivan. Serving a variety of snacks and meals that are replicated on demand, the café is the cheapest option available for the hungry traveler. Hungry for some rock candy or a plate of nachos? This is your next destination. Last up, is phase 1 of the new manufacturing wing of the Station - The Refinery where ores collected by the Tortuga or personal mining vessels will be melted down into the valuables they contain, using a high-powered magnetic resonance furnace to separate the gold from the space rock. Don't get your limbs caught in the grinder-feeder. 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 from the community this week - send them our way via #dev_questions in the 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 300th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, the security checkpoint has received both and upgrade, and a fatal flaw. In addition to more details added to the checkpoint, the scanners now have interaction when players walk through them, lighting up green when you're clear to pass. And the cameras can randomly choose to track you, even when you haven't done anything suspicious recently... But if you get caught smuggling any contraband through the scanners, they will hunt you down... If you're an enterprising individual that wants to make some money, and you don't care about anything as boring as getting caught going through security, keep in mind that every time you get caught, your bounty on the station will increase, and you'll soon have the law and any bounty hunters on your tail soon enough. But there is another option - find a hidden maintenance access tube that is poorly guarded and just off the beaten path: If you've found the randomized code of the day, you can punch it in and work your way down a tunnel guarded by poorly-powered forcefields. It may be a bit slower than making a run for it, but if you're careful you'll sneak entirely under the radar. I just hope your jedi master doesn't meet his untimely end while you're trapped on the other side. 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 we use asteroids as weapons? A1: They aren't the easiest melee weapon to wield, but I imagine they pack quite a punch. The Micrometeorite Boxing Gloves, coming soon to the Hyperion Arcade Prize Counter! 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 |