Hello everyone! Welcome to the 115th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you up to date on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic really dove into his work, with substantial progress in quite a few different areas, from HUD updates to ship explosions. Lordrex has also continued his work on replication data, with a status update on his progress. First up is a small but important feature added to ship loadout modification. The new addition, there at bottom center, is a list of the turrets you have exchanged, and the number of each type, giving you a total cost to rekit the current ship. This marks one of the first steps towards in-game purchasing by the player, meaning we get to mark that section in the roadmap as 'in-progress.' Please note, prices are for testing porpoises only, and may not reflect final in-game cost per turret. With that out of the way, Idyllic moved on to the next feature on his list. Integrating the health and shield HUD demoed quite a few newsletters back, with the new turret weapon systems. Last week, the bullet reflection demo didn't quite manage to show it, but bullets that don't reflect are marked as hits, triggering the damage function. This week involved fleshing out that system, including a small part that registers damage to a ship's health, and updates the player's hull health display. But how to test this system? Loading a test server takes so much time, and integrating every new feature into filtering-compatible takes too much time and effort... So how about the next best thing? The Automated Rapid-Fire Conventional Turret Weapons Platform, or ARFCTWP, for the linguistically flexible. Using the latest in target-seeking technology straight out of the Roblox wiki scripting cookbook chapter 2, to find and eliminate all threats in its vicinity with extreme prejudice. Serving both as a proof-of-concept for any future plans we might have for automated defense turrets, and a helpful tool in testing damage and combat systems, the automated turret does its job quite well, well enough that we're optimistic about future implementations of it. On a technical side, it functions on the same code as ship turrets, but with all the ship code trimmed out, meaning that any tech we develop for ships will also function for automated turrets, from missiles to fixed mounts. In the future, we would like to improve the targeting system to be a bit more complex and anticipate locations, as right now it shoots for center of mass, but that will come with time. Further work on details involving health and damage systems included the classic explosion effect finally brought forward again, with the beginning work on spawning in shipwrecks when ships are destroyed. One detail we'd like to specifically point out is the fact that the ship continues moving after sustaining critical damage. In the Capital Demo video, ships froze and exploded when they had taken too much damage, with led to some awkward transitions from high speed to dead stop. Now, the loss of helm control and the ships inertia mean it continues to travel forward, before being completely destroyed. While we acknowledge that the wreck should also continue to move, the fact that we aren't doing solar gravitation physics requires that it stop eventually. On the replication front, another week of intense coding has gone by, with more and more work being added onto the data replication scripts that make parallel servers possible. This week saw some early-stage data tables being sent from one server to the VPS, where it is compared with existing data, then distributed to other instances, to edit an object's 'health.' 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 different branches of a faction have different styles of ships? A1: Definitely! If you go through the effort of developing different branches, we'll support it. You can submit the different ship designs the same way a faction would, and we might be able to give you the power to restrict members to their specific branch of ships. Q2: Will there be faction ships in the Capital update? A2: I hope so, the rigging system was rather straightforward, the only barrier remaining would be restricting use to members of that faction, which doesn't seem all that hard to overcome. Q3: Can factions add more ships after the game releases? A3: Definitely, we plan to allow rolling submissions of ships for the entire duration of play, as new factions join up, plant their flag, and take on the galaxy, as well as the established factions improving their designs and updating their styles. Q4: Asteroid harpoons? A4: I sure hope so. Q5: If someone steals a ship model and tries to reupload it as theirs, what will happen? A5: We intend to have a moderation system to verify that ship designs aren't already in-game, but you should be pretty well off if you have a distinct theme of ships. It would be hard to pass a Vak fighter off as your own, in theory. Q6: How will time be calculated in RoVerse? Could a week be a year? A6: Our current plans for a RoVerse calendar include cycles of 7 days as the default unit, four cycles making a quad, 12 quads making an annum, and 7 annum making a septum. Of course, it's recommended that factions have their own calendar systems to fit their lore, while the RoVerse time system is there to help keep track of events happening in-game. Q7: Could factions build relics to have scattered around a few lore systems? A7: Sure, if you build some cool old stuff, we'll do our best to include them in the generation functions, either as ruins on planet surfaces, or wrecks and debris floating in space. Q8: To what extent can factions have moving parts on ships? Foldable wings, or just spinning turbines? A8: As of now we don't have very many plans involving details on ships that move, as most of the movement we currently have uses particles and beams. A few moving pieces may be possible, maybe as a landing gear function, but we'll have to see how things perform later down the line. 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 114th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic went back to work on Capital Ship mechanics, with an excellent expansion on projectile physics, while Lordrex continued to push live stat modification forward. A few newsletters back, in the midst of Idyllics work on turret scripting, a wonderful idea was brought forward, a combination of community suggestions and wild thinking. The idea was this - physical turrets should behave with a bit more realism than their purely sci-fi counterparts, and to do so, their physics should reflect their form. We have all this first-hand data about what happens when a solid projectile encounters an armored surface at high speed, everything from battleships to tanks are designed on the same principles, so why not make these weapons a bit more realistic, and a bit more interesting - have these projectiles bounce off in shallow-angle collisions, doing partial damage, while steep-angle hits penetrate and do significant damage. So using the low-res collision boxes we've been working on and combining them with the new raycast mechanics and a bit of math, we were able to create such effect. Here the projectile is slowed down to demonstrate the effect, and also at significantly reduced range, but in combat it should function the same. Large physical projectile turrets, like the conventional turret seen here and the railgun, will use this feature, and if testing shows it is efficient enough autoturrets may be able to occasionally reflect shots as well. Now this isn't to say that you should be rushing to redesign all your faction ships... This mechanic is rather minor in the grand scheme of combat, and not something you should plan on exploiting or defending against. A spherical ship design may be able to reflect many shots, but hits will still do damage, though slightly reduced, and if you're in any sort of fleet, the reflected shot may do more damage to your allies than you'd like. This function will also work in chain, being able to bounce off several times before losing momentum, though the chances of this happening in combat are pretty slim. Either way, the code is there to support such instances, increasing immersion. Throughout development, Idyllic made sure to put it through rigorous testing to ensure it functions correctly. When doing normal reflections, it's easy to lose a negative sign and have incorrect bounce angles, but fortunately we were able to avoid that. You may have noticed it in the first gif, but another important feature added this week is delayed raycast. Instead of a hitscan system that raycasts immediately to the target the mouse is pointing at, for physical projectiles it is a requirement that they have travel time. In FPS games you're at such a small scale that bullet speeds are instantaneous, but in space, everything is bigger, and fast things don't look that fast. But we can't physically simulate movement and call it a day. The physics engine is notorious for not handling physics updates between players well, and the .Touched event is spotty at best when any sort of speed is involved. The answer, of course, is segmented rays, that fire sequentially, and are only as long as the projectile should have traveled in that time. Balancing will of course involve adjusting that length of time to keep performance when casting a lot of rays up, and having enough resolution to hit small moving targets, like fighters. An update on lordrex's project, this week he has continued writing the code to modify and replicate object data across servers, all managed from the back-end server. Ugly temporary UI has been added, but it's not something he'd like to show off. The rest of our devs have been keeping busy, we hope to have more pretty pictures from them in the near future. 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 would happen to players who chose a species whose faction ceases to exist? A1: Excellent question. Selecting that species would be done at character creation, and would be permanent. If the unexpected occurs, and a faction no longer exists, the option at creation will cease to exist, but players who were former members will continue to be that species, creating interesting opportunities for exiles and renegades, even the last martian-esque occurrences. Q2: Will foreign communities within a factions territory be possible? A2: Anywhere a group of people band together can be a community. If a group of ex-Hylotl set up shop on some planet, and are diplomatic enough to not be considered a threat, they should be just fine. Q3: How do research stations work? A3: The research station type functions as a repository for blueprints, and a collector of research points. The as-of-yet undecided tech tree will allow factions to purchase different tech and upgrades, and some designs will be required to be stored on these stations scarif-style, to make them a strategic asset to have and a valuable target to attack during a long campaign. Q4: Are corporations and vendors a thing? Do they require infrastructure? A4: We've been working towards distinguishing between factions, subfactions, and organizations for a while now, and this question is highly reflective of that. While certain in-game organizations may require infrastructure, like a security firm or a cargo transport company, others may not. If you're just planning on submitting ship or clothing or weapon designs, you'll be able to sell those, but unless you're building your ships for a client, you won't need a specific base of operations. Q5: Will corporations require a host faction? Can they be standalone? A5: Corporations can absolutely be standalone. While having a faction to protect your enterprise may be beneficial to some, it does create problems for those that would sell goods to enemy factions, creating interesting diplomatic situations. It's recommended any organization with infrastructure have a host faction, so they don't have to protect their own stuff while worrying about performing their service, but it's not required.
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 113th 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 exciting news in the custom character department, with a working proof-of-concept for custom species models. We also have continued work on replication, with a system to send tagged data between servers now in progress. This week, Idyllic managed to create our first successful proof-of-concept for creating custom character models. Creating and texturing a custom species character model was fairly easy and straightforward, while one of the important features that needed to be implemented was supporting the default roblox clothing template. If people go through all the effort of designing uniforms and clothing to be sold in-game, it would be very important to let any new characters wear them. As long as the new models are low enough poly, mapping the uv to the roblox clothing template is a simple, if time consuming process. At this point, we'll recommend factions either figure out how to create their own meshes, or contact Idyllic for more information. Important details to consider when designing a new package are that the joints remain in the same place, to avoid requiring completely new animation sets, and that the pieces be roughly the same dimensions as the default character, or smaller. Creative license can be taken, as with this bird species' offset shins. As for hitboxes, the default character will be used to keep things fair, while allowing the most flexibility when it comes to species design. Above we see a few features made possible by our custom system - extending details like arm feathers or tail feathers, in addition to the 15 base parts, and flat double-sided pieces that are a bit more flexible for texturing. So overall, good news. Factions can be as creative as they want with their species lore - plant people, bird people, robots, or amorphous gelatin. All on the table. Any uniforms you might have should work regardless of mesh shape if properly set up, with only minor distortion, which also means the entire Roblox catalog is available for character clothing. Works with a variety of faction uniforms! (Courtesy of BSD, Inikan Legion and Ninazu Collective) Some might see this feature as extraneous, not worth the effort, and a waste of time. The way we see it, is that a little bit of effort on our part opens up a whole world of possibilities for the community. No longer are you stuck as identical and indistinguishable lego people, fighting each other in a red and black base over the same flag terminal every other base has. Packages are the unexplored frontier of character customization - what Roblox has now is fine if you're into the redcliff genre, or want to look like a penguin, but if we can open things up to the truly creative members of the wider community, we can do all sorts of amazing stuff. Factions distinguished by their lore, as well as their physical appearance, given a permanent battlefield on which to fight for glory and recognition. That's what RoVerse is all about. On the Capital Update front, this week was spent focusing on backend systems, making sure that replication of ships and fighters works in a coherent way. Beyond that, work has also progressed in the area of collisions, with the avenger getting its very own low-res hitbox. Used for colliding with objects, and bouncing conventional shots, this low-res bounding box makes physics calculations much simpler, and more importantly, faster. While having full-detail collisions would be nice, unfortunately it's not something the engine can support at this time. We can reduce the detail here, in exchange for better performance, and more players in the same server at once. I guess it's important to mention a developer tip - if you have objects that don't need to be solid, turning cancollide on helps improve physics performance, by reducing the number of objects that have to be calculated each step. Anything from background details around the map, to asteroids way off in the distance, can be turned off. Lordrex has moved forward, taking on the task of replicating live data across server boundaries, which has a variety of applications, most notably station health. Sending a station's location when the server checks is one thing, sending and receiving updated health information live, and comparing and adding several server updates at once, is a much more complicated process. We'll be seeing more progress from him in that area in the coming weeks. 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 NPCs in stations be able to spawn their own ships? Will they be able to move goods, sell to stations? A1: Right now, station NPCs are there to provide environment to the insides of stations, where there might not be a lot of players, but there should be a lot of people. The point of their existence is to assist in regular player gameplay, either as passengers on a transport ship, or quest givers in stations. For now, NPCs will be relegated to station environments, running around looking at things. Q2: Will Capitals be able to spawn at any faction station or just shipyards? A2: While shipyard stations will be able construct, repair, and rekit Capital ships, factions will be able to store them at stations of any type. It's still uncertain whether the ships will be contained within the station, and able to be destroyed in combat, or just anchored nearby, since they tend to be rather large. Further information to follow. Q3: Can factions make different types of station models for the same function? A3: Factions should at minimum have one of each type of station design, but if they feel the need to build more, or just that ambitious, they should be able to submit more designs. This goes by the same rules for ships, in that you shouldn't go overboard with the number of versions you're submitting. Q4: What is the scale of the ships in meters? A4: The Excalibur, for example, is 17.5 m long at full scale, but only 2.5 studs long miniaturized. As a guide, 1 stud = 7 meters, so when building your faction ships, keep that scale in mind. Planet scale will be different, but we'll take care of that for you. If you build to scale with a character that fits in the cockpit, you'll be fine. Q5: Will we be able to have a targeting system like phantom forces? A5: A cool concept that we'll definitely look into implementing in some way for planetary combat. Identifying vehicles and infantry crossing the field of battle, calling their locations out to other units, or even ships in orbit to coordinate strikes, would be pretty cool. It might not look or function exactly like it does in PF, but conceptually, it's a good idea. 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 112th 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 more work from Idyllic on various Capital systems, including newly updated effects and work on Capital-Fighter interactions. Legomadamada has continued work on asteroid field generation, with progress in differing biomes. Also, coding work from Idyllic on a feature that has been on hold for quite some time, and news about lordrex's mighty battle. In preparation for upcoming work involving the mixing of the two groups of ships into the chaos of combat, Idyllic began adding a few new features to capital ship builds. Namely, holographic displays highlighting hangar bay doors on Capital ships, for when fighters need to land and restock, or when the battle is won and it's time to return to base. Because of the modular nature of ship classing, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to marking out hangar doors on ships themselves, but by using a common display system that lights up when a fighter gets close to a friendly ship, new pilots will find it much easier to land on a carrier vessel. While working with graphics, Idyllic decided it was about time to update the default engine effects used on the Avenger. Since forever ago, they've been composed of two different particle emitters, and one was a weird triangle and circle decal that looked really weird. So that had to go. Now it's a much more refined and pleasing particle effect that most players will have to look at 90% of the time while cruising the stars and dodging asteroids. Speaking of asteroids, Legomadamada has continued with system asset generation, bringing in a variety of asteroid biome assets that were created by Danthein and Heromaster such a long time ago. Smaller tweaks include more ellipsoid than square now, and have a lovely clustering tendency to keep things interesting while you're out mining the starways. No more will asteroid fields be evenly distributed rocks that turn mining into a boring and tedious exercise - it's up to you to choose whether to clear the fringes completely, or dive into the center where maneuvering gets tough and you might not make it out alive. From dusty fragments of worlds to molten chunks of irradiated mass, these different types of asteroids will keep miners busy. Spawning all over the galaxy, and with exclusive minerals contained within, the perfect place to start a mining corporation. He also did some tests with spawning debris fields using the same code, but it'll need further tweaking to make it look right, right now it's spawning way too many aerial dishes to look realistic... But it should be a nice addition to main hull wrecks we'll be spawning in space. For quite a while now, there has been code in the Capital flight system that deals exclusively with collisions. With Capital ships the system needed to be a bit more complex - one stud fighters should bounce off of pretty much everything without leaving a mark, but when it comes to sometimes tremendous Capital ships, a bit more math was required, as usual. Things bigger than your ship have the traditional boing response to your collision, while objects like rocks and debris smaller than you don't. If possible we'd love to move the smaller things out of the way, but if that's reasonable remains to be seen. We know you've waited in anticipation all week, and we have good news about lordrex and that mighty bug he was facing down last week. Effecting the replication system, it was an important bug to both diagnose and fix, and he managed to quash it with great skill. With that challenge completed, he can now move forward with more exciting features. Since we debuted the RoVerse wiki to the public last week, we've had quite a few new pages popping up for all sorts of applicant factions, subfactions, and organizations. One page in particular we'd like to highlight is the Faction Politics page, where you can track the assumed status of faction to faction relations throughout the galaxy. All sorts of different groups are already set up, with variations in style from naturally hostile xenophobes to a web of alliances, with only room to expand into the future with all sorts of different political affiliations. No more do clans have to follow the same format with varying levels of aggression, now you can be whoever you want to be, and act however you want your faction to act. 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 players be able to purchase personal residences on planets or elsewhere? A1: An early newsletter mentioned rentable apartments on stations, but never saw any advancement beyond that since then. Personal spaces aren't at the top of our list of features, but it's definitely on there. If that means that we allow landmark teleports to personally-held places, or something more complex in-game, remains to be seen. Q2: Will there be any big role-play supporting mechanics early on? A2: With all the work that factions are going to developing their own style and personality, it would be a waste to lock players into ships permanently, where they can't get a chance to express themselves. I would expect that stations would be hubs of activity for roleplay purposes, as well as faction locations on planets later on. If you have any specific requests, we can try and work them in. Q3: What sort of options do ships have for fast travel? A3: There was some confusion in the community discord that I'd like to clarify - jumpgates are placed on wormholes, that allow near-instantaneous transport billions of kilometers from system to system. Within systems, a 'jump drive' type option will be available to move between landmark locations within a system. If a faction chooses to call this movement something else, like gravity drive or FTL, that is up to them, but the mechanics are the same. Q4: Will there be logistics ships? A4: A class like that is still up in the air. If we can find enough uses for them, or capital combat requires them, then we'll look to adding ships that boost stats of nearby vessels. It's possible that we might encourage fleet formations by applying these effects, without requiring non-combat role ships in already restrictive server counts. Q5: How will repairing work in-game? A5: Energy-driven shields are your first and most flexible line of defense against attacks, and recover from damage relatively quickly. Armor plating can be repaired with consumables like 'droid workers' and recover some hull health, but not 100%. Over time damage will accumulate, requiring a ship to return to a friendly station for full repair, encouraging effective placement of Shipyard stations for maintaining fleets. Q6: What ships can we store in Capital ships? A6: Our guess at this point, anything you can fit. A while ago when we put together our rough calculations spreadsheet, we factored in mid-range kitting for hangar space to see what sort of reasonable numbers we could come up with. Since our capacity calculations are based directly on ship volume, there is no way a ship larger than yours could pop out the hangar doors, which also means that XXXL ships could theoretically hold an L within them, itself with a fleet of fighters at its disposal. Is this the most viable combat strategy? We'll see. 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 111th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week Idyllic has continued work quashing bugs, dropped in the radar module, and experimented a bit with mining lasers. Lordrex fought an epic battle to the death with one bug in particular (stay tuned to hear if he survived or not) and a new member of the team made some important contributions to asteroid field generation. Let's go! Idyllic has had a list of bugs to work on this week, with varying success in tracking them down and fixing them. Switching Capitals from a direct rotation mode to an inertial system like the fighters use had a few kinks to work out, and a few test pilots died from the excessive g-forces that appeared in testing. Fine-tuning the inertia system will be an ongoing and intensive process. We'll continue tweaks until ships are flying just how we like them, which will be much slower than the nimble fighters of the Dogfight Alpha, but still recognizable as our own style. We have a new ship all rigged up, and though it isn't a military craft, being able to rig and test it is an important step for the future. We have here the WTT-017 Mining and Cargo vessel, with a pirate-modded laser turret mounted on top. We thought it interesting to show here because it shows the importance of turret transit speed - if your ship is fast and nimble and turns on a dime, a slow-transit turret may not be able to rotate to stay on the mouse fast enough. Consider spending some points boosting transit speed, rather than damage or fire rate, to ensure effective performance. "Was that a mining ship you added?" asks an inquisitive reader. "What led to you adding that specific type of ship to the game?" You may have heard the news this week about the release of the live CSG operation api - you can now code unions and negations to happen while a game is running. For those of us with mining lasers and giant asteroids in our game plan, the chance to cut a hole in real time is a really exciting opportunity. Unfortunately, the system isn't nearly robust enough to support real-time mining just yet - testing shows that even our low-poly unioned asteroids that heromaster made for us are too complex for the system to cut holes in. We'd have to reduce asteroids to cubes before it'd work, and at that point we might as well use smooth terrain. So we will wait on that feature, testing routinely, until it becomes possible to rely on, because cutting holes through rocks in space would be a really cool feature. For now, we'll stick to shooting mining lasers at veins of minerals lodged in the surfaces of the giant hunks of rock orbiting stars, planets, and other dense objects in the futuristic old-fashioned way. You may have noticed in the above images a few new features relating to Capital ship piloting - yes that's right, we have dropped in the radar module meaning talented ship captains can now home in on their quarry from beyond visual distance. Still works like a charm. When ships aren't spinning uncontrollably killing their crew, the full-range movement model really starts to shine. Attack from above, attack from below, from the side, from an angle, fly circles around your enemies - it's all possible. This isn't a 2D battlefield of naval ships, it's a battle for the stars in a completely wide open 3D world! This week lordrex faced down a bug of epic proportions, one that threatened to sink the entire project into years of debugging and re-coding. The stage was set - system asset loading and replication, the stakes outlined - 220 star systems in peril; it was a fight to the death. But who emerged victorious? Find out next week. We'd like to welcome a new member to our team - Legomadamada from over at CCS has taken on the fun and exciting task of star system generation. While we have the database of stars and planets, we've lacked any progress on generating fields of asteroids for players to mine for minerals, gas clouds to obscure and amaze, and all sorts of other fun environmental zones for the adventurous player to explore. He will be creating a system that is run by seed, but that creates a complex environment that is unique from system to system, so everywhere you turn there are new and exciting places to find. Early work is promising, such as this cluster of over a thousand asteroids of varying sizes. Each biome of asteroids is made from a set of about 8 meshes, so loading time for an entire field is not outrageous. Color changes and textures add flavor, while changing scale and rotation makes for an outstanding complexity. If you have any ideas for interesting environmental forms, send them by Idyllic and we'll see about adding them to the generation system. In the past week we finally publicly debuted the RoVerse wiki, a community-driven enterprise for players to fill out information they discover on their travels, search for important stuff to know before they head out into the black, or even discuss the various happenings of the galaxy. If you're a Faction hopeful, feel free to add a page about your faction, or look through the faction list page to find out what other players are planning. We plan to add information on planets, systems, minerals, and all sorts of other interesting fact pages as development progresses. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Do all the weapon types work so far? A1: All the ones shown in newsletters are passably working, but not completely polished. Mines are going to be added yet, and haven't been coded. Q2: How will shield regeneration work? A2: Similar to the way it works in the Dogfight Alpha - after a period of no damage, it starts regenerating. This exact time, and how fast it regenerates, will vary per ship. Q3: Will player-generated wormholes connect to a jump gate in an adjacent system, or pop out in a relative location? A3: The easy way would be to sync up with the closest wormhole in the adjacent system, but that sort of defies the point of making your own. So the other option is to either pick a random location in the system, or calculate the angle from where you started to where you are trying to go. With the inherent instability of wormhole travel, we'll leave that up to chance. Q4: Has the newsletter come out yet? A4: By the time you're reading this, yes. Q5: What sort of stats on turrets will be customizable? A5: While we don't have the official list done just yet, expect stats like rate of fire, transit speed, and power consumption to be on the table. Q6: Will anyone stop me from putting 50 beam turrets on the front of an XXL and firing them like the death star? A6: Layout and firing patterns will be based on ship shape, I don't think we'd try and stop you on that front - on the other hand 50 turrets is probably a little overboard for what will be possible. Q7: Will using headlights and beam turrets reduce fuel/power reserves? A7: The topic of fuel for ships has come up a few times. It would be neat to have refueling ships moving with convoys to ensure they have enough fuel to get where they're trying to go, but it does add the problem of getting stranded somewhere. We'll need a bit more time to think about it, but it's still on the table. As for weapons drawing power, we'll have to wait and see. Q8: What are the average dimensions of a star system? A8: I don't have any hard numbers for you, but we plan on using the full 100k render distance and beyond as best we can. Using our chunk system to load only assets near the player like asteroids and debris, while turning far away objects into surfaceguis will keep things manageable on the lag front. The full size of a star system will never be explored, with combat and construction focusing on a few landmark points throughout systems, like planets, gates, and asteroid fields, while mining may venture a bit further. In other words - very, very big. Q9: Will there be random wormholes that lead you to dark and dangerous places? A9: You might just have to wait and find out. Q10: Can you dock and despawn ships, or must they stay in-game all the time? A10: You'll be able to drop anchor at stations or use a feature called 'subspace parking' that shifts your vessel into another dimension while you're away. No need to worry about pirates stealing your ships at anchor. Q11: What factions do the devs enjoy the most? A11: The creative ones. Don't be afraid of gimmicks, sometimes a really cool feature makes a faction stand out. The Contagion idea that died a while back had one of the most original concepts I've seen, which was pretty much a gimmick. Any factions that go the extra mile to be unique and original are my favorites. 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! |
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |