Hello everyone! Welcome to the 131st 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 been at work on the Capital update, implementing a universal credit system for the purchase of more powerful and higher tier ships, weaponry loadouts, and skins, while Lordrex has patched a few bugs with several of our gamemodes. Idyllic also put in some work on the intra-system warp system and radar, as well as refactored the menu guis to scale with the user's screen. First up, the new menus. A member of the RoVerse Discord community mentioned this past week that the images we were showing in the newsletters lacked the appropriate scaling features necessary for game guis to work on screens of all sizes, and that in a few studio testing gifs and pictures the UI was crowded and out of place. Taking this advice, Idyllic spent a little time this week setting up the UI to use UISizeConstraints and UIAspectRatioConstraints, to allow our hand-made guis to scale with the size of the user's screens. Going to show that even the most knowledgeable developers can still learn new tricks, the use of the Aspect Ratio Constraint was instrumental in the success of the gui modifications. Without it, any sort of design goes out the window when a player with a 4:3 square screen starts resizing gui elements defined by scale. Changes were also made to the top menu bar, where we opted for a more condensed icons-only version. Previously we had both icons and the menu name spelled out, and Idyllic developed a collapsible version to save screen space on smaller screens, but in the end it just didn't seem necessary. The icons themselves, if properly selected, should be able to tell the story of what they do, otherwise they're pointless. The Description panel and Stats panel were anchored appropriately to the bottom corners of the screen, with only a few tweaks needed to allow the stats panel to scale by its parent element. The centered arrows used in loadout editing and ship selection also scale, but keep their aspect ratio and are still anchored to the center of the screen. You may have noticed another feature tucked into the corner of the new menus. A mysterious number and symbol, but what could it mean? That's right! Players can now purchase ships and mount weapons to their ships for a fee, and the interface tells you right there how many energy credits, or €, you have remaining. Prices are still to be negotiated and calculated, don't expect to buy a Heavy Fighter for 10 credits. On the topic of credits - the fighter refactor did include the addition of credits, and functions to award the player credits for kills and other gamemode events, so tying into that system was straightforward. Lordrex spent the week patching bugs and making modifications to our existing gamemodes, and making preparations for any new ones we plan to add in the future. Currently there are three gamemodes - the Team Deathmatch you all know and love, a Free-for-all match, and a Team King of the Hill. A nice variety to get us started, while we work on the extensive list of gamemodes the members of the Community have voted for in the discord voting channel. Spending a bit of time on Capital features, Idyllic expanded the feature set of the radar system we debuted quite a while ago, adding in the ability to see important landmarks outside of the ships natural radar range. You'll only be able to pick up enemy fighters within a range of about 500 studs, but we want you to be able to find your way around a system easily too, so planets and wormholes/jumpgates will also appear on your minimap, giving you a heading to steer your way to wherever you want to go. Along with this update, Idyllic added the ability to toggle these icons on the player's HUD. No longer is there just your selected target, but also distant planets and other celestial bodies you might want to warp over to and take a closer look. Fortunately enough, the planet radar icon created by Mikey is an excellent fit for highlighting distant planets on the HUD, as it gracefully encircles the target, getting the information it is trying to convey across simply and elegantly. And I can't imagine trying to find a wormhole out of a system without any sort of guide, as you can see by comparing the photos above and below. These new features are still in their early stages and have a few bugs to be worked out, but working on them was a nice change of pace from working so hard on fighter mechanics. 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 are the benefits of using fixed vs gimbal weapons? A1: The difference between the two weapon types is fairly straight forward - fixed weapons are mounted directly to a ships air-frame, and cannot turn to lead your shots, whereas gimballed weapons require a mounting structure that can turn in place, with several angles of motion. Your fixed turrets will generally have better stats, like more damage and better accuracy, while gimbal weapons have more aiming freedom and don't require lining up your ship with your target. Q2: Missiles, how do they work? A2: We plan on having three types of missiles - the homing ones demonstrated a few newsletters ago, a guided version that tracks the cursor, temporarily called rockets, and an unguided version called torpedoes that fire in a straight line. Q3: What happens when you reach the edge of a system? A3: I think Juszl put is best - "The inherent subspace gravitational field of each solar system is minute in most forms, but when concerning the pull of the sublight drives relying on the ambient gravity signatures of celestials in the core of the systems, it renders them increasing inefficient the farther out a craft goes, to the point of it becoming dangerous to venture any further. Coupled with this the already present dangers due to the lack of proper equipment to deal with deep space operation, this can pose quite a threat to spacecraft." Sure, we have technical reasons for limiting the map size, but that doesn't mean we have to slap up a wall and say turn around. So go and write your own lore about it. Q4: Will Capitals ever get combo turrets? A4: Unlikely. Combo turrets are still on the board for vehicles and armor on the ground, because having an auto turret to support a main battle cannon is an important feature to have when you're limited to a single turret mount. Capitals, on the other hand, have plenty of mounts to allow players to select the proper assortment of weapon types, making combo turrets unnecessary. 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 127th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Lordrex has made excellent progress on the Capital Update, implementing the leaderboard gui we talked about last week, as well as varieties for a bunch of different gamemodes. Idyllic began implementation of his Capital functionality and main menu revisions, as well as created the most recent system mockup. We also discuss the implications of the new Roblox feature - automatic LOD. Last week we showed you the original graphics mockup for the game-end leaderboard. This week, Lordrex has spent a good chunk of time turning it into a functional board - better layout for coding, columns for stats we want to track, list layouts for the actual lists of players, and hooking all that up to the gamemode system so it actually shows valid data at the end of a match. With that out of the way, he jumped over to the in-game displays for important gamemode information - for instance in the KOTH gamemode, you'll be able to see the current top players, compared to team gamemodes that show the two team's stats that you are familiar with from the dogfight. Speaking of the dogfight - there is a relative simplicity and ease-of-use that came from the way information was displayed on-screen. The two teams are clearly defined, and the information is well-labeled, though the team identifier needs some work. But just plain numbers simply don't cut it for every situation - it's hard to tell how far you've come if you're heading for a goal as in koth, or fighting off destruction as in tdm. To that end we've been working on adding in a system of percentage bars, that you're all well-acquainted with from all over Roblox, most prominently in ammo displays. So far lordrex has the coding done, but the presentation is being worked on. We'll be sticking to the center display for this information moving forward, rather than sliding it off to the side of the screen where you have to actively go looking for it, which pulls you out of battle and could lead to disaster. Idyllic spent time this week working directly on the Capital Update code, removing the intro animation for the fighter hangar that had become severely broken over time, instead laying the groundwork for combining the work he has completed over the past few months with the dogfight alpha file. This meant trading the full-scale hangar for the space-scale fighter hangar that supports showing the player their ship options at native scale, rather than requiring a set of scaled-up ships rigged with a special format, among other code changes to better support the new menu systems. He also got a chance to work on the system mockup - a few weeks ago we determined our boundaries were going to be right around +- 50,000 studs from the origin, before floating point rounding errors caused significant warble among ship parts when moving. Since this limit was recently expanded to this size, and it doesn't look like there are any plans to move that any further in the near future, we're intent on developing an at-scale mockup of the layout of a typical system, from planets to asteroid fields to jumpgates to stars. Speaking of stars, this new limit will require us to reduce the actual size of stars in systems, but not their visual size. There are plenty of tricks up our sleeves when it comes to creating mirages, from billboard guis to fancy coding, that will let stars feel enormous, without taking up a significant portion of the system they reside in - made possible by the fact that of the objects in systems, the stars are pretty much the only things you won't be able to interact with up close (well, you can try, but I wouldn't recommend it). Roblox recently released a feature that we've been testing for its viability in making RoVerse Systems even better - Dynamic CSG LOD, or Level Of Detail. This feature takes parts that have been made using CSG, and at a distance greater than 500 studs, generates a lower-resolution model so save on rendering power. This is of particular interest to us in an application to the asteroid fields that will fill the 220 star systems available in the galaxy. While it doesn't function quite as intended, since RoVerse is scaled down significantly, it may work best for our needs in combination with a chunk system - rather than outright remove asteroids at significant distance from the player, we could thin them out, with a few low-res versions taking the place of an entire field of full-res asteroids. It is important to note that as of this newsletter, this feature only applies to CSG and there is no word on any future support for meshes, so its applications so far are rather limited, but luckily our csg asteroids built with such care by Heromaster and Domeboybeene should work for any immediate testing. It's actually hard to tell if it's working or not, so that either means it's doing a really good job, or it doesn't work at all. We'll keep testing and let you know. It's the holiday season again, and on behalf of the entire RoVerse Development team I'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas. We'd like to thank you all for sticking with us through thick and thin these past two years, and hope you'll stick around a bit longer as we keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible on Roblox, all to support a fantastic clan community that keeps us excited and optimistic about the future we're all building together. --Idyllic 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 land vehicles have limited fuel? A1: Fuel is a feature we're still on the fence about throughout the game, but I will say this - if capital ships have fuel, expect ground vehicles to have fuel of some kind. Q2: Will you be able to build extremely large ships that can carry other ships inside them? A2: Definitely. If your ship has the hangar capacity, you can stuff it full of whatever ships you want - fighters, civilian craft, mining teams, even small capitals. Q3: In the capital alpha will there be a first-person view? A3: No. The views you've seen in the dogfight alpha and the newsletter previews are what you'll get. Care was taken in the design and coding of the camera and its relationship to the ship you're piloting, throwing in a cockpit surface view would only be disorienting. We found that a third person camera view was the best balance of visibility and control for piloting both fighters and capitals. Q4: Will RoVerse use FiB? A4: Of course! We waited a whole year in anticipation for it to be released and make our games look as epic as veds pictures made them look, it'd have to be extremely broken for us not to. 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 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 109th 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 working on Capital ship systems and menus, with work this week in selecting ship skins, support for faction turret models, and an addition of turret identification while selecting different ships. Lordrex has continued work on asset loading systems, and hopes to have a working demonstration soon. Stratiz had surgery then broke his nose while doped up, so he's been otherwise occupied recently. Up first is Idyllic's progress in the world of Capital ship loadouts. Over the past few weeks, it became apparent when putting the default turret models on the wide variety of default ships, that one-design-fits-all isn't true. So we'll be developing lines of weapons for each line of default ships as we move forward, with the added bonus that the code will work for faction-created ships as well. Seen here with the faction-built blank slot models, instead of the default blanks shown last week. And this doesn't just include unmounted turret locations, but different turret types too. Here we have a rough prototype model for a Ninazu beam turret. So if you're in the middle of building faction ships, keep in mind you'll need to build the weapons that go along with it. And be creative! A few Ninazu turrets are spheres that discharge energy, not your usual transit turret type by a long shot. Next on the list was a minor tweak to ship selections, adding a way for players to easily identify all the turret locations on a ship at a glance. Eventually it will feature different icons for Light, Medium, and Heavy Turret Mount locations, for now it gives a nice overview from the static positioning of the camera while selecting a ship. A nice little quality-of-life feature. Continuing on, Idyllic took on the task of adding a way to interchange ship skins in the editor. While not a top-of-the-list feature by a longshot, he had a busy week and needed something flashy for this week's newsletter, and it was a logical extension from the rather mundane task he actually had to do. Before now, all the pictures and gifs of the Avenger have been of a brick-modeled ship, made of about 400 bricks of various colors and shapes. This was the model that was rigged up, and the model that every other feature has been tested with. But now, the body kit of the ship has been perfectly replaced with its meshed duplicate, that we demoed ages ago, but just haven't got around to replacing it with. And since Idyllic was already working with meshes and textures, creating a few new ones to spice things up wasn't all that much more work. We had a question this week about recoloring ships, and to answer that question directly, it won't be the same process you're used to in most other Roblox games. Since the ships are meshed for performance reasons, it's really only one part with a texture applied in a variety of colors. If factions want to recolor their designs, they can edit them via texturing, but you won't be able to pick different colors in-game. We'll put out a demo on Blender stencils in the future, for those aspiring fans that want to design their own skins for their own ships, or other player's ship designs. And yes, it does function with the turret loadout system... ...and the deployment system. We also recommend marking turret locations in your ship exports, as Idyllic learned the hard way, it's very easy to cover your designs with turret mounts. We'd like to note that these designs were quick 5-minute painting sessions, we're sure there'll be much more detailed and interesting designs in the future. And who knows, the people who play the Capital Update might get access to an exclusive skin come full release... One last change made to Capitals these past few weeks, and still an in-progress job, is the transition from planar capital ship combat, to true 3D combat. While the star systems may be of a more horizontal nature, it wouldn't be fair to restrict you to a perfectly flat playing field without good reason. And we haven't got a good reason, so unlimited rolls and turns and twists, for all your battle-strategy needs. A few bugs yet to work out, and the matter of a good following camera, but nothing insurmountable. Lordrex has had a very productive week on loading and saving, with basic functionality coded at this point on the server end, with some supporting code on the game side. We can't wait to see a station loaded into two parallel servers at the same time! The rest of our devs have been quite busy this week, from military service, to employment, to having dental surgery then smashing their face into the ground doing a backflip, and as we get back into the school year for some of us, it is important to know what to put first. But we can't wait to see what they come up with in their free 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: As a feature of the city population system, could we transfer in more people to boost production for a short period of time? A1: An excellent expansion of the population system, I think. Rewarding those with transport ships for shuttling people to different colonies, and rewarding the factions that don't shoot down transport ships with increased production and expansion. If you play your cards right, you could land a bunch of people at once for an even bigger boost right when you need it. Q2: How will missiles work? Limited range based on fuel? Hit other missiles? Hit objects on the way to their intended target? Will guided missiles follow the direct path to the target? A2: There will be a variety of missile types, each with slightly different functionality and purpose - homing missiles that track down a selected target, as seen in the newsletters prior; guided ones that go towards a designated position; tracking missiles that follow the aiming reticle; and a scattershot variety. They will most likely have a timed lifespan, which should be fairly substantial due to how big space is and how far targets could be. Our demos showed a few missiles colliding after the arming distance and exploding, and I don't see why they wouldn't. Yes, they'll explode if they hit anything in their way, so aim carefully. And the path they take is arc-based, not a straight line - unless you're pointing the turret right at the target. Q3: Scrap ships to recover value? A3: While I wouldn't expect you to get 100% of the materials back, you should get a percentage, and a better percentage than you would by scavenging a wreck. Credits spent to get the ship up and running, unfortunately, won't be refunded. Q4: What's the status on imprisoning people on stations? A4: An early idea was mentioned concerning player interactions on stations, and arresting people who break the law. Unfortunately, to make this happen, we'd either need universal laws about what was legal or not, or let factions establish arbitrary rules. Neither option is all that appealing, and would result in the general public avoiding stations at all costs, rather than be imprisoned for an arbitrary amount of time. On the bright side, though, it might be possible to capture people with a bounty on their head, and taken back to wherever the bounty is from, which would be a limited duration imprisonment. 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 101st RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week we've delved into system generation development, in connection with lordrex's work on back-end systems, and Idyllic has moved forward with more back-end code for the Capital Update. Up first is our work on star systems. Before now, we've been working with a table of pregenerated data that simulates the star systems at a small scale for the starmap available in the lobby, where everything is saved as a location and a style. This week we pushed beyond that, identifying the proper scale for the star at the center of the systems, while maintaining proper play area around it. The extension to 100k far-clip distance has greatly improved how systems appear to the player, allowing us to create a fairly large star that players will definitely want to avoid. With the high boundary set by the star, and the low boundary set by the physical assets like ships and outposts we've already created, we could find the proper middle-ground for sizing planetary meshes. Large enough that they are impressive to even the largest of pilotable ships, while still appearing small in comparison to system stars. Hidden in the original code for the game Lobby was this lovely script that takes the angles between star systems, and figures out where the wormholes should be placed in relation to the primary star. While this demo is not exactly to scale, it demonstrates the function quite well. Those of you in the community may have heard of the new guideline for Capital ships that was mentioned - ideally all classes of Capital, excluding the XXXL superweapons should be able to fit through the standard-sized jump gate. Ships that are within 190 studs wide and tall (at 15% real-scale) will have a higher chance of being accepted as a general purpose fleet ship. For reference, here is Sphaera, the iconic wreck from the Dogfight Alpha, travelling through a gate. While faction-designed gates won't have to look like the default one, they will have to adhere to the standard wormhole size, or else you could clog up the wormhole with ships that don't fit out the other end. We took the chance to compare all the available system assets with the newly developed system scale, to ensure that outposts and spacecraft looked and felt their appropriate size, both at a distance, and while in operation by the player. Tests of all kinds were conducted, including variations on planet scale to make sure that both large and small planet sizes could be supported (planets of all the same sizes would be fairly boring), test flights of Capital ships around and between planets in a system, as well as comparisons between Capitals and other earlier-constructed assets, like Outpost modules. Here we have the test grid of outpost modules, every class of Capital and Fighter, a Star, two Planets, and a localized asteroid field. There were two extreme possibilities with the design of star systems - we could exaggerate the scale of everything, moving planets closer together and shrinking them down, allowing ships to easily fly on over to adjacent heavenly bodies, or we could attempt realism, with large spacing, fully scaled objects, and alternate transportation between the two. For our completed design, we attempted to find an appropriate middle ground between the two. Our star is .00008% the size of the actual sun, which is a fairly small star all things considered, planet spacing is scaled up from the starmap values by 50,000, and enough space between heavenly bodies that it feels like proper space, but you can still see other objects off in the distance. At this point I would like to highlight a feature mentioned quite a while ago in the FAQ section - intra-system jumping. While separate star systems are isolated from each other by numerous wormholes and jump gates that function as a loading screen, moving around between points of interest within a star system will be much more direct. Ships will be able to engage jump drives to bypass the incredible distances between objects, the void space as we like to call it, and arrive where they intend to go. While those adventurous souls may venture out into the void to meet whatever strange occurrences that may be waiting out there, anywhere you need to go in a system will be within reach with a click of a button and a firing of an engine. To better help you appreciate the scale, here is a medium Capital on a flyby of a Pirate Factory module. Outpost shipyards will be highly restrictive in comparison to their full-scale Station brethren - outpost shipyards can only construct up to Medium-class Capitals, and only a few at a time, as well as not being faction-styled. So if gigantic ships are your thing, creating a faction, or employment with one, is highly recommended. This week we've had quite a few questions from faction leaders asking about Capitals, and just how big they are. Some have drastically overestimated the allowable size, while others have slightly underestimated, so this week we'll take some time to answer a few questions. While we aren't to the point of releasing locked-in limits, like part count or weapon mount limits, we can provide some general guidelines to help you build your early Capital ship designs. The size difference between fighters and XXXL Capitals is enormous, though it will be an extremely rare occurrence in the full game. Ship sizes should tend towards the smaller end, with most pilots operating fighters and strike craft, while being supported by one or two capital ships. The largest ships available will be for pretty specific occasions, and will be a pain when it comes to upkeep, but they may happen. To better help you understand scale, Idyllic has put together this handy description. Here we have the Excalibur light fighter you all know and love, astride the Bolitho, a Small-class Capital. The Excalibur is around 1 stud long at 15% real scale, while the Bolitho is around 44. Next up we have the Avenger, measuring in at 50 studs long, placing it on the smaller end of the Medium-class. Here we have the Protector, a Large-class Capital measuring 80 studs long. Next we have a yet-unnamed Cargo vessel falling into the XL category, and measuring 210 studs in length. We're getting to the point that it's hard to see the fighter, with the Daedalus XXL Capital, measuring 240 studs long. And lastly, we have the XXXL-class, measuring in at around 1000 studs long. We hope that helps you when you're sizing up your own fleet of 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: Any planned logistical/support roles for Capital ships? A1: Beyond the directly combat-related roles, we have no current plans for support ships. Carriers and repair ships, as well as ships designed for taking out shields or armor, as well as static-object ships, should provide enough variety early on. Further down the road, though, we may investigate supplying support roles if we find combat lacking. Q2: Any planned dedicated anti-capital weapons for fighters? A2: The larger classes of fighters should be able to be outfitted with anti-capital mines or bombs, that can be used extremely effectively against undefended capital ships, and you can always concentrate other weaponry on a target, while evading defensive squads or turrets. Q3: Will there be a speed difference for ships between space and in-atmosphere? A3: Yes, definitely. For capitals, controls will be much more sluggish, as well as a lower speed to compensate for pushing all that air out of the way. For fighters, we plan for much less control, especially when stationary or slow-moving, to compensate for the effectiveness of spacecraft on ground targets. Q4: Have the weaponry stats been locked in yet? Do we know which weapons will be most effective against which targets? A4: Final stats have yet to be determined, and we plan to tweak them throughout the Alpha stage. Energy weapons will primarily damage energy shields, yet still do significant damage once they break through. Kinetic weapons and their benefits and costs were described last week, but they should focus primarily on hard targets, armor plating and ground targets. Q5: Will there be AI civilians in cities? Vehicles? A5: Any AI is heavy on the server, and cuts down on how many players we can support at one time. We'd prefer to see players driving tanks and jeeps through city streets, rather than stuck in traffic on the I-5. 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 ninety-ninth 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 continued work from Idyllic on refining the turret systems, including a repaired aiming function, added details to missile turret firing, and begun work on menu UI coding. Lordrex has hit a milestone for the back-end and lobby integration, and on the building side Bradford has constructed a turret model for the beam weapons. The past few months the aiming mechanism for the capital ships has been a bit finicky, with several cases where they would not point exactly where the cursor was aimed. In the turret-scripting save file, this bug did not appear, so Idyllic spent some time this week tracking down the bug. Along the way, he also discovered that he had left the accuracy at 5° intervals, so as the player moved their mouse around, the turret would try to track to within 5° of the cursor. On top of the aiming glitches, this further reduced the accuracy with which a player could aim their turrets. With the previous types of turrets, like autocannons and lasers, accuracy was never intended to be high in the first place, but with the introduction of the beam turret, where one of its key features is accuracy at long distance, improvements to this code became necessary. Standard turret accuracy has been increased to 1° for now, and might be raised higher in the future, as well as the ability to vary the tracking accuracy on a per-type basis. Here you can see the increased performance of tracking. Previously, there was a 10° dead zone around the turrets current location, so fine adjustments to aiming at your target were nearly impossible. We'll continue tweaking this value until we find the perfect balance between accuracy and performance. In a fine addition to our arsenal of default ship turrets, the beam turret makes its mark on the battlefield - high transit and elevation speeds, coupled with near-perfect accuracy and exceptional range make it a dangerous weapon in the hands of a skilled tactical officer. The turret model, built this week by Bradford, makes clear its use with a slender barrel engulfed with the energies it pours forth, and the requisite neon so you know it's futuristic. In an update to the VLS missile mounts, the bay doors now open with each volley that launches. This detail had been planned since the mounts were first rigged, but its importance compared to other work was minor. But fortunately, the organizational scheme worked, and the doors blow open in time for the missiles to be launched, then close after firing stops. Delaying the closing of the bay doors until after firing had stopped completely was a deceptively complicated. If you were to just open them every time a missile fired, they'd open and close 8 times in rapid succession in the current setup. By attaching a separate function that tracks the time since the last missile was fired, the doors can be closed without any weird artifacts like missiles firing through shut bays. Beauty is in the details. NPC's have gotten an upgrade in the form of character skins. The demo last week had empty robots wandering around the void waving at each other and dancing - this week, the NPC's have stolen the looks of several famous, and several not-so-famous robloxians to use as their own. We'll be making a nice, large list of NPC character skins so your stations will be filled with life, but for now, Stratiz's demo uses a list of a few playerId's to show how well characters and their attachments load. A significant milestone today for lordrex, as he compiled all his tweaks and updates in the lobby and the back-end server's connected scripts, and performed a test that ran with a grand total of 0 errors. Those that code often know how hard such a feat is, especially cross-platform, but it marks a great step forward for the continued work on the full game. Last up is an update on the load-out-editing menu debuted last week, describing the back-end code that will make it work. Here we have the comparison bars showing 5 important turret stats that you'll want to compare when switching out the various turret types. With a single bar, doing a percentage of max stat values would be simple, but with 5-segmented bars, the math becomes a bit trickier, though not impossible. Using modulus and the percentage size and position properties of gui objects, scaling the dark 'current' bars in simple, the trick lies in scaling and moving the orange 'difference' bar dynamically. 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 minerals be refined into spaceships? A1: Right now we're leaning towards a simpler crafting tree than what we originally designed, focusing mostly on resources in, vehicles and weapons out with variation coming from which machines a layer uses. A refinery on a factory module at an outpost would be required for turning ore into base metals, that could then be taken to a workshop to be turned into a ship or other vehicle. Q2: Will players have access to system sensors that give you a readout of the players in your vicinity? A2: The server player list provided by roblox is always accessible, but as for telling you exactly who's there and what ship they're piloting, wouldn't that take some of the fun out of patrolling for ships and enemies? Q3: Will we be able to disguise military vessels as civilian? A3: If you're at war with someone, I'm not sure being a civilian cargo vessel would be any safer than looking like a military ship, in that a civilian ship would be an easy target for pillaging. You might be able to design a set of ships that look similar to each other as a faction theme, or use civilian cargo ships in a limited war-time capacity, but I don't think we'll be supporting any camo like that anytime soon. Q4: Can ships dock with other ships to improve them? A4: No, you will not be able to combine your ships into a giant robot, but smaller ships will be able to dock in a large enough ship's hangar area for refueling, repairs, or filling up with cargo or fighters. Q5: Will RoVerse be providing factions with battle songs to play in-game? A5: Unlikely. Due to copyright problems, and the cost of uploading stuff like that, we won't be doing it for you. You could always play your battle anthem in a group voice chat or another staging place, but it won't be in RoVerse directly. 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 ninety-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 got down and dirty on the programming side, with significant updates and additions to the Capital Update code, including turret assignment and gui integration - as well as some design work - and an expanded weapons list, adding beam turrets to the list of functioning weapon systems. On the backend, lordrex has continued his work merging the lobby and our server code. Early work this week on the Beam weapon type was pretty rough - we had several versions that didn't perform up to our standards. Seen below is one such version - the beams fire from the turret to the mouse, and update every heartbeat, but stutter significantly when there are several firing at the same time, or the ship is moving. Both cases are likely to appear in the Capital Update. So Idyllic went back to the drawing board. Rather than creating and destroying a 'bullet' for the beam each frame, he modified it to create one and the update it each frame. This, too, stuttered significantly. Where the other turret types fire off their projectiles and are free to leave them behind, the beam turret requires stability, the failure of that becomes immediately obvious. So how do you code them to keep up with the ship? Well, first of all you make them shoot straight from the barrel like every other weapon coded so far. But after that, you work on parenting the object anchoring the beam effect directly to the ship - that way you don't have to update their position every frame, and the move along smoothly. Now the only stuttering is the pulsing of energy traveling along the beam towards your enemies! Though quite simple in the end, this experience was quite entertaining to figure out how to code, if only because it was a departure from the modules used for the other weapons. It goes to show that a one-size-fits-all approach to weaponry isn't always the best solution, and that even if it is a little bit more work, taking the time to individualize and customize different weaponry types creates better, and probably more fun, results. You may remember the initial Capital combat demo video - the different weapon types were just edited rate of fire stats, with different colored neon projectiles launched out, so the steps we've been taking since then to expand on the weapon variants have been quite important to us. Some notes on the beam weapon type - it emits a constant stream of energy traveling incredibly fast in the direction you aim the turrets, with a high degree of accuracy, even at long distances. Unfortunately, it trades accuracy and range for damage - low individual hit damage, but if you manage to keep your target in your scope, the damage will add up. Also helps keep shields from cycling and recharging, so it offers some tactical benefits so it's not completely useless for all but the most accurate snipers. In the coming weeks, we'll be refining the weapon type further, including a short charge up delay, and overheating systems, all taken care of in the data tree. With several of the weapon types up and running, it was about time for Idyllic to dive into the turret switching menus and integrations for Capital ships. We released a demo of the fighter rekitting process quite a while ago, but since then we have further developed our aesthetic, and will probably be updating that soon. For the capital ships, though, we had a blank slate to work with. On fighters, only a few turrets were available to swap out, so a few hovering buttons were manageable to use. With the possibilities of hundreds of turrets kitted to an XXXL capital, we needed a more flexible solution. Enter the newest ship-editing interface! Improving on the original design, this newest ship editing screen has lots of important info to help you make your purchasing decisions - will you change your forward gun batteries to missiles, to chase down fleeing foes, or protect your flank with a spare flak gun to take care of those pesky fighters and missiles? It's up to you! Featuring stat comparisons between currently-kitted mounts, mount locator for easy identification of which mount you're switching out when zoomed in, overall ship stats and class names, all to improve the user experience. It's still in its early stages, so if you have any feedback, let Idyllic know. 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 limits to the number of ships a faction can produce at once? A1: There will be no hard limits instituted by us, but if a faction gathers the resources required to build an excessive number of large capital ships, good for them. Obviously if things get ridiculous, we'll start tweaking costs to keep things balanced, but other than that, we won't limit a fleet to, say, 20 Large capitals at once. If we tried doing that, they'd probably just start making alts to hold ships for them. Q2: What sort of interactions will there be with planets from space? A2: From the star system server, you'll be provided with, or have to scan for, basic information on the status of the planet. Planet name, environment, resources, who owns it, etc. To get a good look at a planet, you will have to send a landing party, as they have done many a time on Star Trek. Q3: Will there be giant railguns to shoot capital ships with? A3: By comparison, the small turrets we've been demoing the past few weeks are dwarfed by the ships they are attached to. Further down the line, we will be adding the different tiers of turrets, and tiers of mounts they can be attached to. For example, a ship may have 10 light turret mounts, 4 mediums, and one heavy mount for a large weapon, sorta like what you described. Q4: Will there be QA to ensure faction-submitted ships aren't weird or low quality? A4: There will be an approval process as part of the rigging process. We want as many factions as possible to submit their designs, but a faction not putting much effort into their ships breaks the whole thing down, ruining immersion, and reflecting the game poorly. The devs will try to help out in these circumstances, if only slight modifications are required. Q5: Is there a formula to generate ship stats, or is it faction- or developer-picked? A5: We have been working on a formula that considers a wide variety of factors to calculate different stats like turning speed and radius, and there will also be limited faction input on how they want their ships to perform. If a faction builds a heavy cruiser that the formula spits out as low-armored, no one would be happy. So a limited number of points will be able to be spent to determine base ship stats, by the ship creator when submitting. The nature of this platform requires things to be both fair, and functional. 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 ninety-seventh 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 progress on several fronts, with a demo of station NPCs, a progress update from Lordrex and his work on backend systems and the lobby updates, and Idyllic's work on the Capital Weapons systems and the Capital Update, and an in-progress ship from Sae'Tzar. Stratiz has made some excellent work on NPCs to give station interiors life. Able to perform a variety of interactions with each other and their environment. Actions from waving at each other to starting a dance party, as well as the usual wandering and pathfinding, and eventually a wide variety of appearances, crowds of these characters should be filling up the stations of RoVerse very soon. While we're currently developing these characters to fill Developer-created stations like the Tutorial and Neutral Stations, eventually we would like for faction stations to be filled with them as well, using custom faction species and uniforms, and having the number of characters be based upon the success of the faction in the area - a star system under attack would have its civilians and members evacuate to a safer location, realistically, so why not make our environments reflect that. Think of it as a subtle indicator of how well your systems are thriving under your rule. Lordrex has continued modifying and updating systems originally coded with a certain feature set in mind, removing ones that we've decided against in the interest of simplicity, like multiple characters, and fixing the holes removing those features created in the code. Along with these tweaks comes correlated work on the backend servers, pushing us closer and closer to completion with each step. Sae'Tzar has been working on a fleet of ships that he's keeping private for now, but here is an in-progress shot of a new public-line battleship classed as an XL. Coming soon will be several new ships in this line, as well as larger additions to the Garfish line of ships. We can't wait! Idyllic has continued to tweak the missile mechanics, reducing their launch speed to a more reasonable number, improving their aim, and working on pursuit curves to hit moving targets. The target is set independently of the missile type, allowing a non-homing standard missile to have its target set to the mouse location on firing, while a homing missile can update the location and adjust its trajectory. Along with the weapons work, he has continued work on integrating the fighter updates done by TheFurryFish and Boysun with the Capital ship coding. In the coming weeks, we should get our first glimpse of a large capital ship and fighters together in the same battlefield. The work that remains on the Capital update includes implementing the Capital ship controls and spawning, Capital ship weapons kitting, collisions between Capitals and Fighters, and implementing Capitals in the gamemodes. We're getting closer! 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 exactly would I go about building a city base for my faction in the generated cities on planets? A1: If you so choose, a faction can build their own higher-resolution versions of the cities they build on different planets, and connect them to RoVerse through teleports tied to landmark structures. On our end, the cities will all generate the same way, with differences between building skins to fit your faction. On your end, you could build whatever you want as long as it's similar to whats on the other end (no connecting RoVerse to your tycoon). We'd prefer if you built the city to be of a similar size, for example, a newly founded colony city would be fairly small, we'd prefer the connected place to be a small colony city or a portion of it, likewise for your capital or other metropolises. Closer to release we will be able to say if we will be able to release the current city growth stage as an API, that it could automatically update to your end. We'll just have to see how popular that would be. Q2: Will there be clothing that effects player stats? A2: There will be two types of additions to your character - clothing will be purely aesthetic, from your faction uniform to a suave brown trenchcoat, allowing your appearance to be however you choose. Character upgrades are still in the early planning phase, and would effect stats like movement speed, jump height, and other fun stuff like that. Q3: Will capitals be able to 'shelter' turrets within the hull for better protection while underway? A3: We have no plans for this feature at this time, though it could happen at some point in the future, if gameplay proves to be unbalanced. Good points were made both for and against this addition, that we will definitely consider before any final decision is made. Q4: How large will cities be able to grow? A4: Theoretically, an extremely profitable and well-kept city or cities could grow into an ecumenopolis and encompass the entire surface of a planet. If this starts to look possible, we may add features for city layers at some point in the future, to support Coruscant-like cityscapes that could be quite interesting to explore or battle your way through. Q5: What sorts of things will you be able to export? A5: For the cargo business to be profitable, there would have to be more than just raw, unprocessed minerals to ship around, so cargo that can be transported and resold should be quite extensive - from the aforementioned raw resources, to refined metals, to light equipment, to even vehicles and ships crated up for delivery. If a faction is stealthy enough, they might be able to ship an entire invasion fleet to the surface using the local couriers, so your security forces best be on the lookout for contraband. 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 ninety-fourth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. The end of the school year has finally come, meaning our Devs will now have much more time to devote to RoVerse Development. Leading the team this week is Idyllic, with advancements in the turret operation systems. Taking community feedback from a gif we posted a few weeks back, he has tweaked the first person turret movement to track the mouse with better accuracy than before, most notably a smaller deadzone. The initial iteration had a mostly uncontrollable deadzone, making aiming harder than it should be. With the new system, shooting down invading fleets of fighters should be easier than ever. Also notable in the gif above, though maybe a bit hard to see, is the alternating of barrels. Since we've taken on the task of allowing factions to build their own turrets, supporting a wide variety of numbers of barrels in exotic locations is an important feature, that not only makes the system more flexible, but better looking too. As long as faction developers follow the correct format (to be released later) when designing and building their turrets, we should be able to support as many creative designs as they can come up with. A discussion about ground base buildings has also come up. Some of the prototypes from quite a while ago were very small structures that you could theoretically build anywhere, but were more suited to a 'camp' than a ground base. Bases are intended to fill the middle ground between temporary structures and cities, much like modular outposts in space are a middle ground between ships and faction stations. If a subfaction was to set up their Headquarters on a planets surface, the structure should be comparable in size and usefulness to those set up by space-bound subfactions, right? With this in mind, Idyllic has been developing a new prototype of base structures at a larger scale. Seen above, these buildings aren't quite the size of a cities' towering skyscrapers, nor are they the size of a vehicle garage. Perhaps we'll support small, medium, and large variants, to better fit different uses. While we continue to work on this slight change in direction for ground bases, we will be making sure that other base buildings, like hangars and garages are at a functional size for their use, and that they won't cost more resources to build than they will be worth. Any feedback the community has, can be directed to Idyllic in the Discord. Lordrex took a week's vacation, but I'm sure the work he has been doing to the lobby was on his mind while he traveled. Stratiz had some Computer Science Exams to study for, we hope he does well. Airwarfare has continued to work on the gravity system, working out some control bugs that occur under very specific circumstances, but we believe he'll figure them all out eventually. It's been another short week with tests and other important things to do, but that will definitely improve in the coming weeks. We wish those of you with tests the best of luck, and we'll see you around! 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 flagships work? A1: A special ship only creatable and flyable by a faction leader or other high ranking member of a faction is an important feature on our list. If anybody could build any ship, it would be utter chaos. We should be able to lock certain submitted ships to specific factions, as well as specific ranks in groups, that doesn't seem too complicated. Q2: Will camera turning on fighters be improved? A2: We're sort of attached to the camera system that fighters currently use - its a balance between complete freecam, that takes you out of the ship altogether, and a locked first person camera that doesn't let you turn at all. This blended, custom version puts you in third person, but you are still tied to the direction your ship is facing. We are working on improving the radar and tracking systems, as well as a damage indicator system that can give you a general direction for incoming fire, but I don't think we'll change to a free camera for fighters - Capitals with their more limited maneuverability are the perfect candidate for something like that. Q3: How will group applications work? Can I reject members? A3: Accepting recruits into your faction should be a pretty similar process to accepting members on Roblox groups - if you want to be exclusive you set it to manual approval, and they can send you an application, or set the default rank to ensign or citizen, and don't give them any permissions. 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 ninety-third issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. With end-of-semester tests wrapping up, our devs are back at work on RoVerse, with Idyllic pushing Capital scripting further with turret features, and a new team member has taken on the challenge of planetary character gravity, and some progress on several other scripting fronts. First up is Idyllic's Capitals, which this week received a vital update in the form of weapon firing. You can't have spaceship battles without lasers firing off everywhere, so he's been working on scripting how the cool turrets will actually fire projectiles or energy bursts at your enemies. Two different turret types have been his major focus this week - a laser turret and an autoturret fire two of the main projectile types, and have different settings for rate of fire and range, and so are a good benchmark to compare. After some fun with gravity, Idyllic set to tweaking values to match what we want from each weapon type. The autoturret class of weapons fires physical light projectiles extremely efficiently at the cost of a low resulting damage to other ships. Great for finishing off hard to hit targets with low armor plating (fighters) a few of these in every ship complement is a must. Next up will be the more exotic turret types - missile launchers and plasma turrets, before finishing off with conventional and kinetic turrets. We can't wait to see further progress. We have a new member on our team who has valiantly taken on the task of planetary gravity scripts for characters. Many of you may remember the vehicle gravity demos that had excellent results, but when it came to the player, it wasn't as simple. Humanoids are hard-coded to want to stay upright - the same actions and reactions that make you stand up after tripping or getting hit with a giant block are working against us in our pursuit of round planets. But there is hope. A few of you might know about Blobbyblobs planetary gravity freemodel - though outdated, as a concept for smooth and nearly flawless character movement on spherical objects is unmatched - proof that round planets with a nearly original character model are entirely possible. In just a few short hours, airwarfare went from completely lost to a workable prototype. Where Blobby's scripts didn't work with R15, ours now do. And scaling the character is just a small step beyond that. Exciting work! Stratiz has continued his work on a more-complex-than-normal NPC system, so that these large stations factions will be building can be full of life and activity (based on the success of the faction hosting it) rather than a cold lifeless showcase. While he doesn't have any gifs of brain-dead automatons wandering around just yet, we're sure he'll have some great work to show in the coming weeks. Lordrex has dove into a rewrite of the original Lobby system, updating old scripts to function with our backend database, pulling and pushing the data it needs and collects properly; eliminating old features that have been edited or improved, and a few that have been removed since the first few scripters placed down the first lines of code all those weeks ago. The work of the ancients may be impressive, but a few updates here and there are necessary. 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 will happen when two nearby colonies expand at each other and meet? A1: With the procedural generation system expanding cities outward wherever there's room, two cities are bound to overlap. When this happens, the two cities should continue to expand in other areas, eventually forming a line between the two, similarly to how it works in real life. Its possible we may allow two cities to merge at some point in the future, like a real-life city would annex its neighbors to expand, but we'd need a good reason to. Q2: Will factions have a 'wallet' to purchase faction ships with, or will it be up to administrative players in the faction to hold onto a factions wealth? A2: Many of you might have heard of the horrors of EVE corporations being swindled by an untrustworthy administrator, and I'm not too sure the members of Roblox are either. With money coming in from territories and taxes, a faction bank account would balance the effort of administration with ease of play that should be the main focus. We want faction leaders planning battle strategy, not tied up keeping track of what money is where. Q3: Will there be safe places for neutral and beginning players to mine and practice? A3: We intend to create a few neutral systems that are not included in the faction conflict map where people don't have to worry about getting attacked by a war-bound faction. More on this to come at a later date. Q4: Will resources regenerate? A4: Definitely. While minecraft can get away with nonregenerating ores because the worlds are infinite, the planned systems we have are large, but finite. Resources should regenerate over a fairly long period of time, with considerations for rarity as well. Though now that I think about it, factions scrambling for limited resources sounds like it'd be fun to try at least once - maybe to stir things up if they go stale. 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 |