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RoVerse Development Newsletter #289

1/30/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 289th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week Idyllic is deep in the trenches of the ship modification system, and has unfortunately come to the realization that the spaghetti code that it contains will not stand up to the requirements of the future, and will need to be cleaned up. Too many bugs have arisen from poor coding decisions made before expansions to the system were made make it unwieldy and a mess to try and debug, so we're going to take some time to cut it down to the essentials and make it work.

However, this newsletter will have at least some content:

A secret project is underway, and it has flashing lights. What could it be?

This week in the dogfight there were 118 kills, 58 with auto, 21 with beam, 12 with laser, 0 with plasma, 10 with railgun, and 17 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 33 kills, followed by the Iridium with 21. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 34 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 32.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 38 kills and 21 deaths and a 1.8 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 27 kills, 27 deaths and a 1 KDR; and PrabuRamadhan with 23 kills, 1 deaths, and a 23 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 131)

Calexian Community Challenge
The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories

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!

RoVerse Development Newsletter #288

1/23/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 288th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, Idyllic delved into a variety of bugs facing the hangar menus in the Beta and added a new feature to the killfeed.

First up, the killfeed - in the beta, when you get a kill with a weapon, that weapon type is now displayed on the killfeed using the turret icons from the ship menu. Seen here, the player has killed an outpost turret with lasers, and the square laser icon is displayed next to the feed. Now you'll have a better idea of what weapons enemies are using during engagements, without having to guess at what killed your teammates.

Idyllic is working diligently to fix the last few bugs up in the beta, so if you find any more let us know in the Discord #bug_reports. Among the ones found this week was an interesting one dealing with fighter turret mounts when selecting a Capital, seen below.

Not exactly in a functional state. We'll keep fixing bugs as they pop up, and hope to get the Beta out officially very soon.

This week in the dogfight there were 219 kills, 21 with auto, 3 with beam, 13 with laser, 13 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 169 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 168 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 41. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 93 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 63.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 187 kills and 3 deaths and a 62.33 KDR; Xepeus with 26 kills, 6 deaths and a 4.33 KDR; and DevKomodo with 3 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 130)

Calexian Community Challenge
The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories

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: Are ships made of one part meshed together, or several?

A1: Currently, ships are separated by material and color, and then unioned. Eventually they will be meshed but kept as these same parts, so if you'd like to keep pieces customizable down the road, change those parts' colors by one number in the color3 and they'll stay separate.

Q2: Will faction species have special abilities or immunities to environmental hazards?

A2: Unfortunately, balancing abilities and immunities would be nearly impossible. However, we do plan on there being gear available to everyone to unlock and purchase that could simulate a natural ability, if you make sure every member of your species has that gear.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #287

1/16/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 287th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

Up this week were some bug fixes to the Capital Update Beta, a shiny new effect for the deploy button, and further work on the planetary chunk terrain system.

First up, the deploy button has a shiny new hover animation to really emphasize what that big orange button does. No more confused new players not knowing how to launch their ship into the running gamemode.

Besides a simple new button effect, Idyllic worked on fixing up some broken code, from the radar pinging mechanic, to turret obscuring, to outpost turret health being reduced by half to speed up player-outpost engagements.

On the chunk terrain front, a new planet has been painted, but there are a few bugs to work out in the saving/loading system. Here we have chunks overwriting small parts of existing chunks with air, making the surface very bumpy and unusable.

We've narrowed it down to the part that reads whether there is an existing voxel of terrain where the new chunk is trying to write air, which appears to work correctly in most scenarios, but in a few, it doesn't recognize that there is terrain already there.

We will continue investigating this issue and continue on our way with this cool feature.

This week in the dogfight there were 119 kills, 1 with auto, 6 with beam, 7 with laser, 64 with plasma, 7 with railgun, and 34 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the SSA3-2_Ritojin_Kai_OH with 64 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 33. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 80 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 40.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were TheUnderseer, with 64 kills and 1 deaths and a 64 KDR; FangABXY with 33 kills, 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; and wegbhap with 11 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 129)

Calexian Community Challenge
The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories

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: If we have house sigils that are assigned to each player based on their ancestry, can we have them appear on the sides of our ships based on whos flying?

A1: It might be possible to customize ships if we are provided a list of icon ids and a corresponding rank in your Roblox groups, or possibly the possession of a badge. We'll keep you posted.

Q2: In the Juggernaut gamemode, will there only be one capital allowed? Or will we get to choose what capital we play as when we get chosen? Could there be major differences (stat allocations) between capitals that would pose similar differences in capability to that of fighters (per size class)?

A2: Currently, more than one player can be selected as a juggernaut with a 1-10 ratio. They are dropped into a modified Bolitho with better stats, but this could easily change in the future. Stats will definitely play a role in the performance of a juggernaut capital.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #286

1/9/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 286th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, RoboGojo has returned to assist with a refined planetary gravity system that doesn't use hamster balls to simulate physics, but instead recreates the player experience directly and accurately. Idyllic has spent some time this week working on the planetary generation system, with a few incredible breakthroughs that will vastly improve loading times and player experiences while on the surface.

Daedalus Rex, our planetary proof-of-concept, is getting old. When we first put it together to prove that it was possible to create planets on the scale we were envisioning and have gravity physics without breaking the clients, it was revolutionary. But the time has come to push the envelope even further, and to make it even more efficient in the process. Daedalus Rex taught us many things about how planets worked on Roblox, and now is the time to use those lessons to improve.

One of the biggest issues with Daedalus Rex was that it took about 10 minutes to load into the game. It has 10,200 wedges forming the surface, and each of those parts has to load in before you can join the game. Streaming was ineffective for our purposes, cutting away far too much of the horizon to make it worth it to have round planets at all, especially when loading in from high orbit. And the mostly-smooth surface wasn't even remotely close to the detail level we wanted to support, meaning even more wedges would be required. But there is a solution - a custom chunk loading system could give us the control we need to support the resolution we want, but it would be difficult, and would require a bit of outside-the-box thinking to make it serve our purposes.

Chunks and Smooth Terrain
It was always a part of the plan to eventually turn planets into smooth terrain, instead of triangle terrain. Anyone that has seen Idyllic's Avatar Icon or seen the original demos showing off ground vehicles has seen our intent. And as a bonus, the smooth terrain voxels provide a much more efficient process for storing lots of terrain, they just require a lot more math to make it work for your purposes. And they also needed a few important features to work, which the team investigated:

Client-side Terrain
Terrain loaded on the server has to be sent to every player that tries to join. This flaw had to be avoided, and the best way to do that was to load terrain chunks on the client instead of the server. There was a problem, however, since TerrainRegions, the easiest way to copy and paste bits of terrain, do not replicate. Saved chunks in ReplicatedStorage don't download to the client, and there's no way to send the bytecode contents over the wire, so a custom solution needed to be found.

Below are two of the most important pictures in the entirety of the planetary project. They may not look like much at first glance, but the feature displayed was the lynchpin of making planetary chunk loading work. They show the client side and the server side of the same place at the same time. The client, on the left, has loaded terrain on its own, while the server has none of its own. Without Client-side terrain loading, players could explore an entire planet to load all the chunks and make loading times to that server skyrocket. With everything loaded locally, this tactic will not work.

But this was not the end of the problems, nor the solutions. We still had to send this terrain data across to the client somehow, and paste it into the world.

Enter WriteVoxels. WriteVoxels is the workhorse of the terrain functions, taking several multi-dimensional arrays of terrain, material, and occupancy values and turning them into voxels of terrain. These tables can be converted into strings using the EncodeJSON function of the HTTPService, and strings can be sent to the client. But large chunks of terrain have extremely long strings, and we quickly hit the max string limit on these encoded tables. So we took the encoding one step further. After encoding the string into a JSON table, which is just a bunch of values in quotes and square brackets, we pushed that string through a compression system based on LZW that compressed the string to a fraction of its original size. Turns out that a bunch of repeating "Air" values, which the terrain chunks mostly are, can easily be compressed.

So we wrote our own code using WriteVoxels to write terrain chunks and...

Turns out WriteVoxels doesn't care about existing terrain voxels, and unlike PasteRegion, it doesn't have an option to ignore air when writing. Each new chunk written overwrote portions of their adjacent chunks, which looks pretty cool, but doesn't make for a very solid surface to walk on.

So we wrote some more code, did some more math, and merged existing voxels with the new chunks to be written, and voilà!

Now it was just a matter of loading the chunks closest to the player, which with a small number of chunks like the 300 here, was just a matter of checking all their centers, but will eventually involve some quadtrees and more math. And we have our first successfully chunk-loaded planet.

But this is only half the project. How do we get these chunks to send to the client to load? Are they procedurally generated? No, not entirely. The current plan for planets is for them to be procedurally generated using the system Idyllic developed a long time ago, to get realistic continents, mountain ranges, and biomes, and then for someone to go in and finish detailing them by hand. Carve interesting landmarks, place vegetation and points of interest. To really make the biomes unique and realistic. After they're hand-finished, we can use the automated system we developed this week to chop them up into chunks, and save them as compressed data.

To this end, Idyllic made a first planet, called Atlas, to test this out. After generating a sphere of sand, we painted on mountains and rivers and ice and forests, at a reduced scale. Then we chopped this planet up.

Faster than the eye can see, the system pastes the whole world, identifies the chunk it wants to save, chops off the rest of the planet, floodfills to determine the bounds of the remaining terrain, and saves that chunk.

This data is the same data that is send over to the client, and written as voxels. Unfortunately water is still a no-go because of the stair-stepping it does at 45° angles, but it was worth a shot.

Now, onto the second half of this extremely long newsletter.

RoboGojo took one look at Daedalus Rex's gravity system, and was horrified. While an interesting technical feat, it could be done better. Those of you who have tested Daedalus first-hand have no doubt experienced the weirdness that is the humanoid controller. While the gravity aspect is great, it has a lot of problems, mostly relating to sliding and momentum. And so, we set off on another gravity adventure.

Returning to our origins, of using EgoMoose tech demos in unique and original ways, Robo has been developing gravity mark II using his wallstick controller as a base. No more giant spheres rolling down any slope over 1°, but instead regular-shaped humanoidrootparts moving in normal humanoid ways.

Important features for this new gravity controller include the ability to stand in place without sliding around, the ability to climb ladders and do normal humanoid stuff, and only be able to jump once before landing. Each of these has been going well, including a maximum slope angle players can climb before the slide back down. We are considering including a climbing mechanic for the steeper slopes, but that remains to be developed.

And since this controller is as accurate as possible to the normal humanoid, walking is controlled by a force, and if you "accidentally" set the force too high, you enter into a semi-stable orbit around the planet you once stood upon.

So we shall return to our hero again, to see if he succeeds in falling from orbit and wresting control of the planetoid.

This week in the dogfight there were 351 kills, 0 with auto, 0 with beam, 0 with laser, 291 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 60 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Kokytos with 178 kills, followed by the SSA3-2_Ritojin_Kai_OH with 140. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 272 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 50.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were Doombomb1622, with 178 kills and 1 deaths and a 178 KDR; TheUnderseer with 140 kills, 4 deaths and a 35 KDR; and FangABXY with 25 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 128)

Calexian Community Challenge
The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories

RoVerse Development Newsletter #285

1/2/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 285th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past year.

This week, the dev team celebrated the end of 2021, and welcomed in a New Year full of optimism and hope. As such, the newsletter this week will just be your usual leaderboard updates, dev questions, and community challenge progress notes. Here's to a year of fun, adventure, and most importantly, community.

With a new cycle, a new reward ship. The Cycle 18 exclusive leaderboard ship is the Stormfront Armaments Centaur:

This week in the dogfight there were 100 kills, 0 with auto, 0 with beam, 3 with laser, 0 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 97 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Silencer with 74 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 22. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 41 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 38.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were PreadaterX51, with 74 kills and 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; FangABXY with 22 kills, 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; and AstralStrike with 3 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 127)

Calexian Community Challenge
The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories

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: If capital ships will have PD, will capital ship point defense take up slots for weapons? Or will it be a different category due to the fact the point defense will be only used against incoming munitions?

A1: Yes, flak turrets will take up turret mounts on Capital ships, so you'll have to choose wisely how many defensive vs offensive weapons you mount on your ships to best suit their purpose. If your ship is intended to defend or escort a group of cargo ships, you might then prefer to have mostly flak cannons, with a gun or two to take out any slow attacking ships, while a ship designed for destroying a Station might be exclusively offensive-armed. The choice of loadouts is yours, the turret limit is on the engine, so choose the turrets you have well.

Q2: Will the styles of ships ever be unified?

A2: Nope. To each faction goes their own design style. There isn't a RoVerse-standard style, as that'd be quite boring and constrictive. Instead, we encourage our factions to find their own style and stick with it, so their ships can be recognized anywhere, either for their reliability, or for their destructive power.

NEWS

RoVerse Development Newsletter #289

RoVerse Development Newsletter #288

RoVerse Development Newsletter #287

RoVerse Development Newsletter #286

RoVerse Development Newsletter #285

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