Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixty-seventh issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on all the progress we've made over the past week. This week we've been keeping on strong with the exceptional boost of productivity from the last few weeks, and have quite a lot to show you. We've got some nice new visuals from Ved showing capital ships in space; We've got some news on a ship skinning demo, a new capital ship from Skinny, a new scripter has joined the team to work on miniature characters, and some word from Animula, who we haven't talked about in a while. And off we go! Vedrakkerous has been spending quite a bit of time working on everything to do with spaceships, from their particle engine effects, to sun flares to finishing out the HUD players will use to fly them. When you are trying to make as awesome a game as we are, it doesn't help to cut corners. We want every aspect of the game to push the envelope for what a game can be on Roblox, which means catering to not just those of us with high end computers, but to everyone in between. While some of these in-game photos may look too good to be true, they were all taken in-engine, with a little help from 'the Future is Bright' Demo, and show the best the game can look. But I must restate, we will have detail level settings so nearly everyone will be able to participate. Here we have some lovely sun flares that Ved and Skinny worked on, combining the removal of the sun texture, the use of sunrays, and a scripted sun flare screengui with custom sun flare texture. Quite fancy indeed. We should have some more cool pictures in the coming weeks, as he further develops the aesthetics of RoVerse; we can't wait to see what he comes up with! Demo of these effects in-engine. On the shipbuilding front, Skinny has been working on a Capital ship design for this style of ships, and he has been working in a completely different style to what Ved does, that we talked about a while back. For Skinny, he starts in blender with a sphere or a cube, and starts moving vertices to where he wants them. From there, he separates out colors and imports them into studio. In studio is where he puts all the finer details in, like lighting neon, superstructures, and weapons systems, to finish out the design. And there you have it. While Skinny is still working on his design, the process is quite interesting, and could help out those of you who've wanted to start building your own capitals in anticipation of RoVerse. We'd like to welcome Sutic to the team on the scripting front. He's elected to take on the enormous task of developing our custom character systems, that will drive everything from the spherical gravity to handheld weapons, all at 15% scale. We wish him the best of luck in his endeavors, and can't wait to see what cool stuff he comes up with! IdyllicDestroyer had a bit of free time between lighting planets on fire and developing other core scripts, to test out a ship skinning process. He exported the Avenger, loaded it into blender, unwrapped all the faces, and baked some textures. The end result was a rough but workable first version of a ship skinned with custom decals. While the process was fairly straightforward on the blender side, importing the textures proved to be a little bit more rough around the edges, so to speak. The high res texture got scaled down automatically by Roblox, causing some of the edges to bleed over, creating these weird lines around the outside edges of faces. While not a huge problem, there should be ways to work around this in future tests. The important things we learned by this demo was that the texturing process was harder than first expected, text doesn't show up very well on the sides of ships, turning ships from bricks to meshes is a little harder than it should be, and blender stencils are the bomb. We look forward to the awesome skins we'll be able to create for all the ships in RoVerse, so you can make your ships your very own, flying across the sky in style. You may have been wondering where Animula has been hiding out all this time, but don't you worry, we've finally tracked him down. He's been working hard making more and more theme music tracks for RoVerse, and we can't wait for you all to hear what he's been making. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait just a bit longer to hear the 20 or so tracks he's created. They should bring just the right ambiance to RoVerse. ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: How will planetary garrisons work? A1: A military force would be instructed by their faction commander to guard a given planet's surface or star system, and it would be up to them to protect that area. They could construct fortifications to help defend a location, or just protect it by their presence. If you don't have the members to protect something important 24/7, consider hiring a mercenary group to take over while you're away! Q2: Will there be electronic warfare ships, to slow down or disable ship systems? A2: We've considered this a few times, and we'd really like to include it in the game, though it will need extensive testing to make sure it's not overpowered. While there wouldn't be a ship specifically designed to be an 'electronic warfare' ship, it would probably come as a ship kit that you could add on to a specific sized ship. Q3: Will starfighters have repulsor lifts to move vertically? A3: This great suggestion came from our Community channel this week. And I'll admit I hadn't thought of how ships would fly off of planets. Being able to hover vertically would be an important feature for any fighters that land on the surface, and it could be a useful tool in evasive maneuvers in space combat, along with the strafing we've already added. We'll definitely be adding a vertical movement aspect. 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 sixty-sixth 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 quite a few treats for you, with lots of progress made this week in a variety of departments. We have some more progress on making planets a reality from Idyllic, we have some new ships from Skinny, we have some atmospheric work from Vedrakkerous, and a sneak peek at the third realm of combat, that we should have more information about in the coming weeks. Idyllic has continued to work hard on planet generation, making quite a few improvements to the import and detail generation system over the past few weeks. We ran into a few memory problems generating the 8 step planet last week, with only 2 of 3 tables exporting successfully. He's spent this week setting up a system to patch the holes in the data, and he is optimistic that any future problems can be resolved when they pop up. SkinnyThePimp has returned from his time away, and has been creating quite a few ships at a rather impressive rate. Some of you may have seen some of his in-progress shots in the community discord channel, but we have here below some cool final versions. First up is the Pilum, named after the Roman foot soldiers' handheld spear - with its sharp appearance and undoubted effectiveness in combat, it is a light fighter meant to be used for immediate area defense in any situation. From the run of the mill mercenary paid to escort a cargo ship, to the first line of offense in a faction battle for control. This stylish fighter doesn't just look good on the outside, but has been designed to show off its interior fusion drive and power converters as well, covered by a thick sheet of ballistic and energy repellent material to protect its vitals. Next up is the Gladius, named after the Roman soldiers' sword - meant to resemble a sharp sword cutting and weaving its way through the perils of combat. A Very Heavy Fighter meant to be used for major offensive campaigns or defensive positions, with the heavy weapons complement to support any need. Imagine the fear of your rivals when you launch squads of these from a carrier. If the demon-like wings aren't enough to scare your enemies, the weapons loadout will. We welcome Vedrakkerous back from his sabbatical, and he spent no time waiting to get back to work creating cool atmospheric effects for planets. This week, he's taken to developing the general cloud cover that can be seen from the planet's surface. In no time at all, he went from a barely functioning prototype particle emitter system to an astounding system. Not only the normal planets you can encounter, but the more alien and hostile environments you might run into out in space. Now you all know by now about the primary area of combat - space is the most common field of battle in the RoVerse Universe. The secondary field, planet surfaces, pit infantry against ground vehicles and space fighters. The newest field, which we hope to develop further in the future, would be the oceans. There will be a lot of water on a lot of planets, so it makes sense that factions seeking full control of a planet, would need to control the waters too. We look forward to including naval and underwater combat, as well as the opportunity for underwater cities and bases. 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 any planets with odd weather? A1: Creative weather is a distinct possibility for the game. There might be one planet out there with something truly unusual that makes it unique, but you might just have to go exploring to find out just what exactly is out there. With the work Vedrakkerous has been doing, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some truly awesome things going on somewhere in the galaxy. Q2: Will planets have different gravity? A2: Planets vary in size from small moons to the largest of solid planets to even larger gas giants. Each of these planetary bodies in real life have their own different gravity, so why shouldn't we try to do that as well? We'll try our best to make small moons have very bouncy low gravity, and giant rocky worlds have a very high gravity that makes moving strenuous, just to keep the galaxy interesting. We don't want people to get tired of fighting over the same terrain on the same planet as they move from system to system. Q3: Will early players get special features? A3: While we don't want to award anything game-breaking that gives anyone too much of an advantage, there may be certain rewards for sticking with us through the development phase. Whether its a special nametag or a limited edition ship skin, we'll just have to 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 sixty-fifth 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, we've got some more news about planet generation, some more news from lordrex, and some new ships from Idyllic. First up, we have the demo of a transport ship from Idyllic. Custom-built to carry quite a few passengers and a bit of cargo, the transport ship class works well for shuttling people long distances, where flying personal fighters would be too slow. It also has a decent cargo capacity, enough to make it worth your while on those long trips, when passenger fare isn't meeting costs. That about covers the space vessels that we plan on including in the initial release of the game - small fighter to large capitals, cargo ships to carry goods, mining ships to do the mining, and transport ships to move people around. These are the classes of ships that ships will be categorized as, but these are not the limits of the ship types - things like carrier mods will be able to be applied, to tweak the stats of ships to better fit your needs. Lordrex has continued working on the backend systems, with good progress in updating and laying the foundations for future work. He has also been testing out the new pathfinding system, and checking how it works with smooth terrain surfaces. The results are quite promising, and we do see a way we could implement it in the scaled servers, if it works efficiently. Here we have a group of the near-extinct guest attempting to climb a mountain, set to trip randomly. It's quite entertaining to watch them repeatedly attempt the climb, only to fail and fall all the way down. On the planet side of things, the 8-step generation has completed its initial generation phase at about 7 weeks total, and after fixing a few manual entry errors, successfully loaded back into the game. Now all there is left is to wait for the 9-step generation to complete, and the full range of planet detail levels will be complete and ready for Idyllic to twist to his own nefarious ends. Studio doesn't quite like showing that many triangles, so here's just a small selection of the triangles of the full planet. 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 it be hard to manage a large faction that owns and controls a large amount of territory and has a lot of members? A1: It will be just as hard as you'd expect. To control the galaxy, you'll need a loyal team of the best people to help govern and command the territories under your control. With 220 star systems, and 800 planets, it'll be more than one person can handle alone. I suggest a general or two to command military forces, an economic adviser to organize mining and resource gathering and sales, in addition to the usual group member management positions that every clan has. Q2: Will we be able to vandalize and graffiti stuff? A2: We haven't really considered the possibility of implementing a graffiti system, though I have seen some neat concepts on that topic. It really doesn't fit the scope of the project, and it would be an excessive amount of work to implement it, make sure it doesn't have any bugs, as well as moderate it. It may be a possibility somewhere down the road. Q3: What sort of Galactic events are we looking at? A3: We are open to the idea of both sponsored and unsponsored events, as long as they don't influence the galaxy of RoVerse, its economics, or faction strength or territory. If we do sponsored events, they will be isolated to a secret new system that pops up for a while, while unsponsored events put on by the devs may have a wider reaching scope - from a resource shortage to strange events, anything's possible. Q4: Will you be able to organize a planet from the 'command view'? A4: The command view is still in development, but right now it looks like it will be used mainly for commanding troop movements on the surface, surveying controlled and in conflict territory, and a few other smaller functions. Things like building cities and structures and bases will take place with at the character level, since the command view doesn't have the full resolution of the planet to work with - or at least it doesn't as we have it planned now.
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 sixty-fourth 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 some more work to show on the lobby menus, with Mikey creating a nice mockup of the character select screen. We've also got some good news from Idyllic on the planet generating front, and the completion of a feature we showed off last week. Here we have a mockup of what we intend the character select screen to look like, where you can see what your character looks like, its faction alignment, its credit balance, and its location in the galaxy. The images above are placeholders for the characters, which we intend to replace with the actual character models, so you can rotate your character in 3D. We'll be working on the implementation of lobby menus over the next few weeks, stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes info. Idyllic has been hard at work generating high-resolution planets. This week, he's got an update on the 9-step generation that he has been running for a month and a half now. With over 2,600,000 vertices, that level of detail will put us very close to the final detail level of planet surfaces. With that many triangles, each triangle will be about 12 studs long on each edge. From there, we can either subdivide one or two more times, with an excessive growth in file size and generation time, or we can generate most of the details at that resolution, and fill in the gaps live during chunk loading. We'll just have to see how long the rest of the 9-step generation takes, before moving forward. Something we don't have to wait to move forward on, though, is the importing of the previously generated planets. Idyllic spent all week working on the code that imports the data, which is in the form of 3 tables - the points, their locations, and their nearest neighbors. From these three tables, it should have been a breeze to reconstruct a planet. But it wasn't. Curiously enough, the second table was short 8 values, causing weird things to generate during reconstruction. A chaotic web of lines and points, that form a not-quite-random pattern, but no pattern that we can understand... But a cool enough structure to run into in outer space, so of course we sent an expendable dev on a mission to try and fly through the mysterious structure. Miraculously, the heroic pilot survived the trip! After a bit more furious typing, Idyllic managed to find the error that led to the problem, and managed to successfully import the first planet into the game. Drawn from only a text file, this planet is the first of its kind, and looks to be the beginning of a really cool experiment made real. In the coming weeks, we should be able to load in the higher-detail planets, and have the import system ready by the time the 9-step generation completes! Lordrex has completed implementation of the Trello updates feature we showed off last week into the Lobby. Details about the system can be found in last weeks newsletter, if you're interested. He also spent some time increasing the security of back-end systems so that user data is less corruptible, which will be a very important feature for the game we're making. 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 factions be able to create drone fighters for capital ships to deploy? A1: This question came up in the community, and stirred up quite the conversation. Sure, it would be cool to be able to launch ships to do the fighting for you, but in the long run, automating ships in any way really draws attention away from player participation. If you want to fly into a battle zone with a carrier, you should definitely take a squadron of fighter pilots along with you. Q2: Will you use the new pathfinding system in-game? A2: The new pathfinding system looks incredibly cool and very useful, and there are quite a few applications we can see applying it to in RoVerse, but before we make any promises about using it, we will have to put it through rigorous testing, and wait for the first few bug patches that usually come with any new feature. But, it should make our stations much livelier, if it does work out. Q3: Will ships have jump ranges? A3: Ships jumping from system to system will either have to use the jump gates they've constructed, the open wormholes where they should be constructing a jump gate, or by attaching a warp core to a capital ship. Each of these methods will produce the same results, jumping one system over. There won't be any bypassing systems by pointing your ship into the abyss. Q4: Will factions be able to create science vessels? A4: We have considered the inclusion of ships designed purely for scientific porpoises, but in the larger game plan, they really served no unique purpose. Any traveling could be accomplished with other craft, and it would require the development of many new unique systems to make them worthwhile and fun. They may be possible in an expansion at some point, or we may decide to include them closer to release!
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 |