NEWS
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the 132nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic has continued work on intra-system warp and a tweak to the credit system, while lordrex has made some changes to solar flare code. In an update to work we hinted at last week, we now have some official photos of the radar system update. Here you see all the points of interest in your local system arrayed out around the edge of your radar map. We might have to bump up the size of those icons yet, but the code behind it is complete and fully-functional.  With that work out of the way, it was time to dive back into the warp systems, which involved creating a toggle-able HUD to display available warp targets very much like the radar system, allow the user to select and target that location, similarly to the way fighters target enemy fighters, and then tie that into the warp system, allowing you to vroom across the stars at high speed to your next destination.  With lots of technical checks to make - like making sure you're on-target, out of the warp zone you were previously in, and not in a warp cooldown - a few tweaks needed to be made to the existing code, but nothing too substantial. The most complicated part was the custom intersection check, basically a raycast to make sure your ship is lined up with a valid warp sphere. While a regular old raycast would work in most situations, planets are larger than any sphere part can go, so there's nothing to intersect with. Sure, closestpoint would work, but with a max range of 1000 studs, a custom solution seemed like the better option.  Target selection is rather straightforward - you toggle on the HUD that highlights your options, from planets to stations to jumpgates to wormholes. A simple right-click and it's highlighted - then all you have to do is align your ship with your destination. For that, we plan on two systems - manual, where you turn your ship until it intersects the valid sphere, and automatic, where your ship auto-turns towards the center of your target. Manual, of course, offers the greater flexibility when it comes to picking where exactly your ship will land, while automatic leaves the pilot free to fight off any pursuers chasing after them. Each should have their useful scenarios.   The system is nearing completion, with successful jumps being made from spawn to planet, planet to planet, and planet to wormhole already. There are a few rough edges to clean up yet, but capital ships should be cruising the skies in no time. Another bit of code Idyllic worked in this week, was the thousands-separator for the credit bank. Nobody likes reading a bunch of zeroes trying to figure out just how much money they have, now you can tell in a single glance.  For some reason roblox doesn't support adding commas in their string.format function. A shame, really. Lordrex made some changes to his flare code, this time adding a smooth transition from on-screen to off-screen.  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 to the RoVerse Alpha Dogfight after the Capital Update Releases? A1: We plan on uploading the Capital Update as a separate place, keeping the dogfight around as a classic game that you can play whenever you'd like. It has that fun arcade-y feel that I'd hate to lose. Q2: Can we design different turret models for civilian and military craft to fit their themes better? A2: Sure, we'll set it up so civilian craft pull from a different folder, if you want their equipment to look less militaristic and more industrial. Q3: Will you be able to equip engines to unused turret slots? A3: Uhh, no? Q4: Will there be alternative modes of transportation between planets, like space guns? A4: No. Your options for planet-to-planet travel are limited to flying your own ship, hopping in with a friend, or hopping on a transport ship. I recommend hitchhiking, its a great way to see the wonders of the galaxy on a budget. Q5: Will the minimap use the new viewportframe system? A5: Our radar is powered entirely by math, so there's no need to use viewportframes there. Planets might be a different story, but we'll keep a lookout for good uses of the technology moving forward. 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 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 130th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you update on the progress we've made over the past week? Idyllic spent this week combining the two fighter systems, with excellent progress in the ship selection and loadout portions, while Lordrex and Skinny developed a graphics feature for billboardguis. First up is a feature that involves our carefully-crafted sunflares and the billboardgui that powers it. A while back Roblox released a feature that allows you to change the texture of the sun and moon in the skybox, as well as scale them up and down - a handy feature to be sure, and one that we will definitely be taking advantage of. Unfortunately, we had a particular vision of how we wanted stars to look at a distance, not just in the dogfight maps, but in star systems too, and the sun rays shader didn't quite cut it. So Skinny developed an awesome lense-flare effect to really bring out the brightness of the sun - the only problem was that its aspect ratio is a very wide rectangle. When the texture was applied to the skybox sun, even if we scaled it up as large as possible, it still appeared way too small, and wasn't nearly flexible enough to allow players to fly near or far away from it. So it needed to be a billboardgui.  There was one small problem - billboardguis are rendered parallel to the camera, when you turn and look away from it, especially with really large billboards, it has the tendency to swing around and hit you in the face. So a solution was devised - detect if the star was offscreen and remove the billboard, often called culling. Lordrex spent a bit of time this week coding this to work, as well as working on the possibility of having the flare decrease in intensity when it travels behind obstacles. The past two weeks, Idyllic has reported good progress on getting ships to spawn using his new menu system for ship selection and loadout editing. Last week, he was 99% of the way there by the time of the newsletter release, so we didn't have all that many pictures of the functioning system, but luckily this week we have both pictures, and even more progress. To give you some insight to how the system works at this point, here is a sample of the helpful comments left by prior developers describing what individual functions do, for future scripters to use to guide future additions and modifications.  After figuring out what the hell was going on there Idyllic was able to rig up the fighters, with only a few minor tweaks to layout, add the spawn function to his menu system, and spawn in any ship he wanted.  In a throwback to the first teaser video we released, here we have the VAK fighter flying through the darkness of space, firing the original lasers from before their replacement with plasma that you all know and love from the Dogfight Alpha. So he rigged the 26 fighters, extracted the weld script and modified it to work from the command bar instead of having to run whenever a ship is spawned, tweaked a few stats and ship centerpoints, renamed the engine points to "Thrust" so the system could recognize where the engine trails were supposed to come from (a feature that will be modified in the near future to support multiple engine parts), and set off for the skies.  A bit of testing was done, to make sure that every ship selected in the hangar menu spawned correctly, that also caught a few problems, like weapons facing the wrong way and welds not sticking properly, and it was time to move onto the last feature Idyllic developed this week. One of the first features that was requested when we released the Dogfight Alpha, second only to switching to a different ship, was switching weapons. Not happy to be stuck using just any old plasma bolt turrets, players wanted to play with a wider variety of your typical sci-fi weaponry. Lasers and missiles and railguns and machine guns were all highly-requested, and the time has finally come that we can add those features to the game. The shot of the vak fighter was the first test gone right, with manual entries into the weapons table for 'laser' that was then quickly and efficiently tied right into the code for the weapon selection system, meaning changing out weapons is a breeze.   There are a few bugs here and there to work out - somewhere along the line the code for gimbal turrets was modified and no longer faces the right way - but there should be no obstacles to keeping this feature set moving forward. Next up is code for the more unusual weapon types, like missiles and beams, as well as integrating capital combat into the system. A selection of ships that have been rigged and are ready for combat. 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 a clothing industry? A1: We've always planned on supporting full character customization in RoVerse, from clan uniforms to your back-alley nerf-herder vest. We even covered a method of UV mapping custom species meshes to support clothing from the roblox catalog. And since we can support that, might as well support selling your hard work in-game as well. Q2: Can a faction design a bunch of different uniforms? Armor? Limits? A2: Sure. Make as many uniforms as you have ranks, different squadrons and wings, different departments. We'll do our best to support giving the proper uniforms to your faction members. Armor is the same concept, but you won't just get it for free, you will have to build it. Just try and keep the numbers reasonable, trying to do custom uniforms per member is probably way to many to ask our devs to import. Q3: Will you get a warning when an unknown or hostile ship is warping in? A3: None from our end - you'll need to train your pilots to spot hostile forces early, and report unusual activity. Q4: Can we put light weapons on Freighters and Civilian ships? A4: It might be possible to support a few lightly-armed civilian designs, make a proposal and we'll consider it, though they won't be able to defend themselves very well, and should have an escort in hostile space. Q5: Can we get speed readouts in something other than studs/second? A5: That seems like something we could work on adding, though it will involve lots of math to calculate speed in different units and at different scales. 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 129th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic and Juszl collaborated on some big details for the new map, Idyllic continued coding the fighter spawning functions, aiming to fix the fighter spawning system so we can spawn whichever ship wherever we want to. We also have some clarifications regarding attribute points for ships. Juszl has continued to work on his map for the Capital Update, this week completing the iconic central station that is the landmark for the map, where most battles will take place around and through. While not a station of any specific type, it certainly is full of cool details.  Idyllic helped out, using blender to texture an energy beam mesh to spin around the top of the station, with beams used to create the pulsating effect. Pilots are warned against getting too close to this high-energy phenomena, as it may lead to malfunctions, ship destruction, and death.  We're still solving the problems created when a developer left the team after obfuscating the code - we appreciate the work he did, but the state he left the code in leaves a lot to be desired, and that's why it's taken Idyllic two weeks to finally accomplish the surprisingly daunting task of modifying the system to spawn any of the new fighters on command. But good news! He has accomplished his task! In the end, it took choosing the nuclear option to disable chunks of code that ran the old hangar system, delete a folder of facade ships that the old system was based off of, and hunting down all the errors from there to find where to hook up the deploy button for the new and entirely rational format of the new hangar system.  While this may seem like a minor and unimportant bit of progress, it is actually quite important to the completion of the game. As with any project picked up by a different coder down the line, things aren't exactly where they should be, and features have been added that weren't originally planned, but you still have to keep moving forward, hunt down what you need, and remove the excess, which we will keep doing. This week in the discord, a conversation brought up some questions about how 'attribute points' will work, which led to a discussion among a couple devs about their place in our plans. The problems involved dynamic attribute points making a tech tree redundant, or vice versa. Our decision on the matter proceeds thus: attribute points will be used exclusively by faction ship developers submitting ships, allowing them to tweak the stats of their ship from a baseline for the class, depending on their intended future use in their fleets. These points will be spent once and are not changeable by the end user. Further modification of ship stats, however, will still be possible through the purchase and installation of modules, unlocked by research that is available to both faction members and the solo player through station interfaces. Kitting is also a method available to modify stats - constructing a ship with a carrier kit selected will increase stats like hangar and cargo space, while decreasing armor and engine power - either as a selection during the building process, or as a rekit at a shipyard for added expense. Further details on these systems will be released in the future, but for now this is a rough guide on the current plans. 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 incentives are there for exploration? A1: We'd like to think that a sense of adventure would be all the incentive you'd need to explore the far corners of the galaxy we're carefully putting together for you to explore, but if that isn't enough then there might be other rewards, as well as the tactical bonus you get for extensive knowledge of various systems. And who knows, maybe you'll find a mysterious artifact somewhere out in space. Q2: How dark will space be? A2: At least 7 dark. Really, though, space has it's extremes - fly too close to the sun and prepare to be blinded, explore the furthest reaches or in the shadow of a planet, and it will be dark as night, or more. Q3: Will there be a coded limit on how many large ships a faction can have? A3: Nope, the limits are all down to how much money a faction can rake in, how many resources they can collect, and how many pilots they can find to pilot capital ships. There may be a limit to how many XXXL capitals can be in a system at once, since they are exceptionally huge, but not to how many you can build at once. Q4: Can we scuttle our ships? A4: I wouldn't recommend it. Using your ships to combat enemies is still the most effective use of them, otherwise don't even bring them out to battle. Q5: How does warp work? A5: Idyllic is still in the process of coding the various portions of intra-system warp, but we can go into a bit of an explanation here. Warp isn't an instantaneous jump system, instead your ship moves at high speed from one location to another, requiring line of sight and minimal obstructions. Triggering the sequence, you select a destination that is provided on your HUD calculated as the shortest distance between two points of interest. You can always fly there the old fashioned way, and see what gets missed by those just rushing about, find asteroid fields plentiful in ores and establish a station as a new jump location, even. The image below shows a variety of flight paths through a hypothetical system, with dashes showing intrasystem warp engaged.  Q6: Will there be warp bubbles or interdictors? A6: There won't be anything like that, no. Bring enough firepower, and you'll take down any target that gets in your way before they have a chance to flee, or be tactically-aware enough to know when to retreat without having to worry about the enemy having a magic bubble stopping you. Q7: Is there a cap on the number of factions allowed? A7: We originally planned on having a set number, but as we've been developing that has evolved - if you can carve out a niche in a far-flung corner of the galaxy, and stop any other factions from destroying your stuff, you deserve full faction status just as much as anyone else. Factions may rise and fall, there may be periods with lots of small factions, there may be times with only a few gigantic factions, fully dynamic.
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 |
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