Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifty-eighth 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 some cool new information about planets and cities from Idyllic, a new ship by RexPatriot, and some information about how RoVerse will be moving forward in the coming months. This time last week, we told you all about how Idyllic planned to optimized planet generation. Good news is, the little bits of code he's written have been able to successfully export a planet, starting from the smaller, 2 step subdivision ones, all the way up to the 5 step subdivision stage. Since they have proven effective at these smaller levels, he's optimistic about setting it up to run at full-resolution. This optimization, of course, only affects the repeated generation of planets, so it will still take several days to generate, but once it has completed once, there will be no need to generate it again. Until Roblox supports the creation of text files as an output from studio, we've been forced to find a more creative solution to exporting the lists of points and values from the generator. Using a handy HTTPPost function, we've been sending the data out to an external server, one snippet of 500,000 characters at a time. Then, the files are reassembled in order, to create a single text file containing all the information needed to recreate the planet! I must say, it is very humbling to hold something so big and beautiful, in such a small, easily handled format. Idyllic has also been hard at work experimenting with city generation more. While he hasn't quite got road network generation figured out, he does have a new demonstration to show. Here we see a city generated fairly randomly on an island location, but this time, Idyllic's added a variety of building structures, to better simulate what a faction city would look like. This city was generated using only 5 different structures, and still looks pretty respectable. So when they are officially released, and factions choose to use their own models and styles for structures, even with just a few different buildings, cities can definitely look unique, and better fit their owning faction. RexPatriot has been working on some new fighter 'Interceptor' models and a capital ship, of which we have a few pictures to show off. A swift light fighter. And a small frigate to explore the stars. No sneak previews of Animula's work this week, we want to keep his beautiful work special, but I've sampled a few tracks, and I must say, they are quite impressive. Not many games go through the effort of implementing their own custom soundtrack, and if they do it's usually just a mishmash of popular songs cut down to 30 seconds. The soundscape in-game is a very easy aspect of a game to forget to include, but it ends up making quite a bit of difference. It takes a giant empty box, and turns it into a mysterious and endless void where you don't know what wonders or horrors await around the next asteroid or after the next lightspeed jump. As many of you may know, the ideas behind RoVerse are extremely complex. This isn't a simple tycoon game that can be put together in an afternoon, nor is there any room for failure on initial release. To get this game off the ground will require a dedicated application of talent that I don't think Roblox has ever seen before. I'm not saying it's impossible, actually, I'm saying the exact opposite. I signed on to this project a year ago not only because of how high it's developers set their goals, but because I saw in this project something entirely possible. I've seen numerous projects come and go, foiled by their ambitions, their lack of motivation, and their poor teamwork. But I saw in this game a group of developers, as well as a community, dedicated to creating one of the coolest projects Roblox has ever seen. So to those who doubted we'd still be around a year later, I say look how far we've come. From a simple spaceship shooting simulator not much more than a 3D version of Galaga, to an enormous galaxy full of stars and asteroids and planets, all within our grasp. I say thank you to those devoted fans that have followed us from day one, and thanks to those new members who may have just found us. Without the support of our community, this project would not be where it is today, and I look forward to what the coming weeks and months will become. For those new members, who want to catch up on our progress without having to read through all our newsletters, and for those old fans that haven't looked through the archives recently, we have a new page here on our website. It contains every image and gif that we've shown in our newsletters, in chronological order, so you can look through them and see just how far we've progressed. 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 will ground and space locations for bases be handled, and how will they be loaded and destroyed? A1: We want the game to be as realistic as we can possibly make it, so stations popping in and out of existence would really break that immersion. The plan for outposts and bases is that they become permanent elements of that location, in the same way cities are, and are loaded in every time a server starts. The destruction of bases and outposts will be the more complicated part, as we want to balance things out with offline-raiding, since we know not everyone can be on 24-7, and in every server. We'll have more information closer to release. Q2: Will you be able to make custom skins and emblems? A2: As soon as we have the proof-of-concept down for the character models we're looking for, we'll have more information about character customization, but you should be able to look forward to advanced ship customization, from coloring to emblems, and possibly even skin textures. Q3: Will electric/tesla weapons be included? A3: Now that's a cool category of weapon that we haven't mentioned before. As long as it can be coded efficiently enough to not effect performance significantly, I don't see why it couldn't eventually be included as a weapon type. 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifty-seventh issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week! This week has been a little slower than average, with several devs returning to school, and all that entails. We should see quite a bit more progress once we release the Capital Dogfight Update, and they get settled in. This week, we do have some more news on the planet front, and we should be seeing quite a bit more about them as Idyllic gets back to work. We also have another sneak peek at the Capital Dogfight Update, that I managed to sneakily take a screenshot of! Also this week, we have another preview of a music track that Animula has been working on. We left you several months ago with updates on how planets were progressing. About that time, Idyllic found a glaring efficiency problem, and dove into it trying to reduce the time planets take to generate. Several days was an exorbitant time cost, and with 220 star systems, each with multiple planets, an unacceptable one. With his optimizations he has been making, generation time has improved by a significant percentage, and he has also identified further avenues for improving the system - most notably, the pre-generation of a high-poly icosphere generated and saved before the application of continents, wind patterns, and elevation changes, could be loaded and re-used by the generation system for each planet, with only variations in size. This should cut loading times by upwards of 40%, making the generation of planets in time for release a much more realistic goal. We would include photos of the script in action, but that wouldn't be very interesting... So we'll show you an older picture, to refresh your interest in imagining just how cool these planets will be! Animula has been working on many more music tracks for RoVerse, but we've been keeping them under wraps so that everyone has the chance to experience them as they were intended to be experienced - in game. But this week, we've got another preview to help tide you over until we release! soundcloud.com/animula_musicdev/full-speed-preview We can't wait to show you everything else he's been working on, so stay tuned for a few more sneak previews, and for the full release! The Capital Dogfight Update is coming soon, and we don't want to show off too much of it too soon, so this week we only have a little bit more to show than last week. You may remember the gif of the ship selection screen - this week, we have a view of the menu itself, nearly completed! Here we have one of the biggest ships that will be available in the Update, the Kobune-Yoi Cardinal. While not very fast, it has the armor and the armament to more than makeup for its slow pace and handling. All those cool ships we watched HeroMaster build, are finally getting the attention they deserve. Also coming up in this update will be several unique gamemodes to participate in. You've all played the Dogfight Alpha, and we all know how boring it gets after one or two rounds. We've listened to your feedback, and have prioritized several features to keep things interesting for weeks and months on end. You can look forward to a variety of unlockable ships, several gamemodes including team and free-for-all modes, as well as the most important part - the Capital ships! 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 buildings in cities that you can enter and have apartments? A1: There will be a wide variety of faction structures making up each city, and while allowing players to enter every one of them would be pretty cool, the limits of the system would put a limit on that. So we are looking at finding the middle ground on that - factions can build city landmarks around their cities that may or may not provide a function of some kind, which can have interiors and everything. The procedural cities will then grow around them. Q2: How would you go around traveling with other people? A2: Players will be able to form 'squads' with a few other close friends, and will receive server priority when travelling between servers. For in-server travel, we are working on supporting multiplayer ships, from the simple transport ships where they are just passengers, to military vessels, where they can control turrets to defend the ship they're in. Q3: Is it possible to not be affiliated with any nation, but not submit any custom assets for my sub-faction? A3: It is very much possible for you to form your own subfaction without any assets, that would only make sense for corporations that sell ships or weapons. For the mining clans and trade syndicates, just their name and fleet would be needed. Q4: Will RoVerse be in Experimental mode? A4: RoVerse will be developed with Experimental Mode off and/or Filtering Enabled on. Developing this way is not only more professional, it's also more secure by design. Limiting the interactions between clients and servers limits the vulnerabilities to the basic trolling and exploiting. That doesn't mean it's completely secure, just that it's a step in the right direction, that everyone should be taking. Q5: Ringworlds? Dyson Spheres? A5: These sci-fi staples are definitely a possibility, somewhere down the line. The best chance for one of these would be if you could convince Idyllic to make them an official planet, rather than a faction-built structure. Q6: Does RoVerse supply the standard turrets and cannons? A6: We will be supplying the turret models that attach to the faction-submitted ships, all you will have to do is mark the locations you want them to be. This is both for fairness, less work for submission moderators, and ease of coding. Players will be able to see what sort of weaponry you have equipped, and there won't be any tricky business between different factions, plus there's less setup in the long run to get your ships off the ground. Q7: Do Space Station interiors need to fit into the stations or can they be made separately. A7: Faction space stations will need to have interiors, and they should approximately be the same size. They will use a similar system to outpost stations, with their interiors in separate servers, so they don't have to actually be inside them, but their layout should roughly be the right size. We'll be releasing more information once we finalize the submission guidelines closer to launch.
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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifty-sixth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week! Lots of cool new stuff was worked on this week, with progress from planets, ships, an update on the ground vehicle coding, and a sneak peek at some upcoming updates to the Dogfight Alpha! Unfortunately, its also getting to that point in the year where we start to lose developers to school, but hopefully they settle into their schedules and can rejoin us soon. IdyllicDestroyer has been hard at work on planets for several months, but most of it has been behind-the-scenes coding, optimizations, and other mundane aspects, but this week he's been working on something we've had a lot of questions about. Cities! You may remember the various questions we've answered about cities and planets over quite a few different newsletters, but I think its time we condense that into the actual newsletter, along with some cool pictures. Cities have been promised since the first RoVerse Trailer, showing an interesting cityscape on a river,with ships flying around. Since then, the planets around them have changed in scale and scope, to become something even cooler than was originally imagined, and the ideas behind cities has changed as well. Initially, they were to be static structures built at a much larger scale, akin to Faction stations. This, of course, would have led to a lot of repetitive, boring city layouts. But we can do better. Our ideas for cities has evolved from plug-and-play city models, to dynamic, growing, evolving cityscapes that can grow or shrink with a Faction's success and failures. Idyllic has been at work creating the system that grows cities from a single initial founding point selected by faction or planet leadership, into a bustling metropolis. Now cities don't just grow outward ignoring everything in its way. It avoids and passes around obstacles like steep slopes or rivers, it slows down when expanding into dense forests or other biomes, and its central core grows more dense than the outer reaches. This system incorporates most of these features, and there are quite a few more features still in the works to create truly unique places for clans to call home. No longer stuck to just defending a remote outpost, clan members can take part in the defense of their own capital city, where failure means destruction. You can see here an early version of a city growing procedurally, much faster than they will in real time. When generating cities quickly the system slows down, but the cities in RoVerse will grow quite slowly, relieving much of the strain on the server. While this demo shows the placement of single block structures, the eventual goal is to support a variety of different shaped and sized structures fit to each clans architectural style, to create truly unique cities on each planet. In the case where factions wish to include lore-specific buildings or landmarks in their cities, those would be placed manually in a similar way to the foundation of the city itself, demolishing as many automated structures as it need to make space for the new structure. Landmarks like a Senate Building or Temple or Palace, whatever sort of structure fits your clans needs, we hope to be able to support! Nearly the entire building team has been temporarily retasked to work on large capital ships for the upcoming updates, so there isn't much to show from that department this week. Now for some sneak-peeks at the updates coming in the next few weeks to the Dogfight Alpha! IdyllicDestroyer has been working on coding the new HUD for fighters and capitals that KidVeggito designed, making it work to show hull health, shield strength, as well as your ship's speed. Here's a demo of a ship taking Shield Damage. Creating guis in greyscale allows us to change any colors we want at a later point, letting us make the guis reflect teamcolor, or any other color combination we want. Two new additions to our team, SmellyPencil and TheFurryFish, have been hard at work creating all the extra features we've always wanted to add to the Dogfight Alpha, including a cool new ship selection screen! I can't wait to see and share everything else they come up with, the work they've already done is astounding! Stay tuned for more updates and an official release date for the newest updates! 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 cities have meters measuring happiness and faith which could decrease or improve productivity? A1: What a fitting question for this newsletter! We are looking into ways to dynamically vary the output and expansion of cities based on real factors, not just random numbers, and happiness might be an interesting idea to look into. If your faction fails in battle, losing several systems to opponents, it would make sense that your citizens would be a bit more wary of their situation, and their productivity would reflect that. Q2: If factions can provide original theme tracks, will they be implemented? A2: We will try to support as many assets that clans wish to submit as possible, if you'd like to create a faction-controlled space background theme or battle theme, we'll try our best to make it happen. I wouldn't go spending too much money on it until you're accepted, though. Q3: Will I be able to plant, grow and sell potatoes? A3: That's a very interesting suggestion. While initially we only plan on players mining and collecting naturally generated substances, there is the possibility we could support resource farming of not just potatoes, but crystals or ores as well, somewhere down the line. Q4: Will there be naval ships for naval or sea engagements? A4: While it's not on our immediate feature list, somewhere down the line we'd like to support a wider variety of combat situations, to keep combat interesting. Battles over a planets surface would get quite interesting if water-based vehicles were involved, but we'd have to figure out how to implement them in a way that isn't immediately outclassed by flying and space vehicles. 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifty-fifth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week! It's been another busy week as we get closer to some cool new updates for the Dogfight Alpha! After releasing the Capital ship demo video, we've been working diligently to figure out just about everything to do with Capital ships, both for an update to the Dogfight Alpha, as well as for the full game. We've begun documenting every ship we've made, scaling it to the appropriate size, and assigning it a class and various other baseline stats. In that spirit, this week's newsletter will focus heavily on everything you'll need to know to design your own faction Capitals in the future, with plenty of cool pictures to boot. First up, we'd like to welcome SkinnyThePimp to the development team - he was admitted to the team and had an astounding turnaround to delivering his first frigate. A lovely work of art - it's not just a deadly military vessel cruising the skies, its also a stylish one. Most of our builders have been tasked with designing ships of all sizes over the past week, in order for the Capital Update to have as many cool options as possible, and inspire those who play to create their own cool ships. Some of the other ships created this week include these two by Vedrakkerous: Sae'Tzar has also been hard at work, with several new Capitals either under construction or completed: We've received several questions about the scale of these ships, from several requests for star-destroying superweapons to planetary rings. While we won't be accepting ships quite that large yet, we will be allowing some truly massive ships, with exorbitant costs to match. The chart below shows most of the ships we've constructed, as well as a few early submissions of faction ships that have been donated: These ships include everything from the XXXL class superships, the XXLs, the XLs, the Larges, the Mediums, and the Small Capital ships, as well as a selection of mining ships, and heavy and light fighters. You may notice that the smallest ships are barely visible next to the largest ships. See if you can find them! While working on cataloging and scaling ships, we also worked on hammering out the details on class designations and cost calculations. While some suggestions were made that just the straight dimensions of ships would work, there's an inherent flaw in that system. A small ship with a decorative extension or ring would be sized a lot larger than the ship really is, causing it to be classed higher than it should be. The eventual solution to this problem was to consider the ship's volume. When grouped, Roblox helpfully includes a neat little function that lets you calculate the ship's volume based on its bounding box. While not exact, and with a few of the same problems of dimension calculations, it works for our needs. If you happen to be building a Capital ship for your faction already, you can scale it to the approximate size you want, based on a 1x1x1 stud fighter as a baseline, then run the following command in the Studio command line. It will print your ships volume in the output window, and that will give you a basic idea of which class that sized ship would belong to. M = game.Selection:Get() M = M[1]:GetExtentsSize() print(M.x*M.y*M.z) Our rough estimates of volumes and classes are as follows, and are subject to change: S -1,000-10,000 M -10,000-30,000 L -30,000-100,000 XL -100,000-1,000,000 XXL -1,000,000-50,000,000 XXXL -50,000,000-100,000,000 For example, the second largest ship in the chart, a version of a UEE ship, would have a volume of approximately 88,700,600 units, making it an XXXL class Capital. Further work we did this week included some rough weapons, cargo, and ship speed calculations, and we will be releasing a calculator for you to use soon, with the results for the UEE ship and the S class Bolitho shown. Keep in mind that these calculations are very rough, and were just designed to give us an idea of the differences between classes, as well as show us any problems with our classing ideas at this point, rather than further into the future. The ships volume is broken down into thirds, a rough guess for how much space would be allotted for the ships engines, the structure, and cargo space. This, of course, could change depending on how each individual Capital ship is kitted out at its creation. If you were to add a bigger, faster engine, that would cut into the space you'd have for storage or armor. Hangar space would be an even smaller portion of total cargo space, influencing the number of ships that a Capital could carry with it into battle. You may have noticed a few updates to the Dogfight Alpha, including a fresh new thumbnail and game icon: Also included as an update to the actual game, was the addition of a notification bot connected to the Community Discord, letting you know when there's a new challenger playing. We understand that the game is rarely full of players, and we are working hard to make the Capital Update much more fun both for quick games, and long-term gameplay. 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 will setting up turrets work? Turret kits perhaps? (This is in regards to bases) A1: Setting up turrets for ground bases will be fairly similar to building any ground structure - you choose a location and orientation, then bring it materials until construction is completed. Q2: Will clans be able to assign certain VIP ships to High Ranks? A2: If you want your faction to have specific ships designed as 'command ships' that only high-ranking members of your faction can own and operate, we will try to make that happen. We wouldn't want a new recruit taking command of the largest ship in the fleet, now would we? Q3: What are the limits to "Cargo?" A3: Cargo will take all shapes and sizes - everything from simple ore-carts full of raw ore, to gas canisters full of atmospheric gasses or air, to rare gems and minerals. We will be releasing more details about what minerals will be out there in the future, once we finalize all the details. 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! |
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |