NEWS
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the 141st 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 even more fighters meshed by Skinny, bringing the total up to 18 ships and a feature or two completed by Idyllic, including the long-awaited turret gimbal patch, and the completion of the camera offset code. First up is Skinny's next batch of meshed ships, starting with the Shuriken, which saw significant reduction, the Silencer, the Xerynite, the Vortex, the Defiant, the Gladius, and the Scutum.        Over the past few weeks, the bug causing problems with the gimbal code has been identified, potential solutions have been attempted, and finally this week, an actual, working solution has been found! After way too many hours spent debugging why the code absolutely refused to point at the cursor, and instead pointed either left, right, up, or down instead, the answer was found in the arrangement and setup of the turrets themselves. Instead of a bit of code rotating the turrets 90° to the right, as was initially supposed, the problem was instead that the welds that operate the turrets while attached to the ship were facing 90° to the right or left, causing all the problems. Turns out that rushing to rig the turret models a year ago caused a month of problems down the road - take it from us that doing it right the first time is a much better option than doing something quickly but incorrectly.  Here we have a gif of the Halbert equipped with gimbals, which will eventually be replaced by fixed so you can't shoot the front of your own ship off. An odd aspect of the bug was that turrets would work on certain ships - say the Excalibur - just fine, but when attached to the Cardinal or Halbert, would be pointing awry. The above gif shows the first successful test of the different weapons on different ships. We had another stream this Saturday, where Idyllic took a new fighter from the design phase all the way through rigging and testing within two hours. If you missed it, you can catch it here for a few days, or we'll upload it to our YouTube shortly. Introducing the Australis Transom!   But Idyllic didn't go building new ships and streaming for no good reason, it was instead developed with a specific aspect of the code in mind. A while back we demoed the proof of concept for offset cameras, pulling the camera away for the bigger ships like the Cardinal so you weren't embedded in the engines while trying to fly. This week, Idyllic has completed the implementation of this feature, with every ship having a shiny new cam_offset vector3 that can move the camera up and down, left and right, and forward and backward, supporting more unusual configurations of fighters. The Transom features an offset cockpit on the right wing, making use of this feature in a way that allows us to test it under normal conditions. While a bit unusual to fly when you're used to following the center of mass, it doesn't seem all that complicated to fly in tight maneuvers as long as you know what you're doing and are a practiced pilot. So build your unusual faction ships with cockpits off to one side, just remember that your pilots may need a bit more practice avoiding crashing into obstacles. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Will players be able to transport NPC's for money? A1: There was a writeup in a newsletter a while back that when over the planned system in detail - a class of ships specifically designated 'transport ships' are designed to move people from place to place more efficiently, and provide an alternate source of income where you transport NPCs from station to station or other destination. If this proves valuable enough, it would encourage the opportunity for players stuck on stations to hitch a ride on these transport ships to a distant part of the galaxy without having to fly there themselves. Q2: What do factions do with money, aside from stations and ships? A2: There're lots of things a rich faction could use its treasury for, from hiring private security, purchasing minerals from freelance miners, funding research and construction of stations and outposts and colonies. And of course building ships. There should be no end to what you can spend money on, though we recommend you manage your wealth well. Your enemies might even pay some pirates to disrupt your economy. Q3: Will taxes be manual or automatic? A3: The taxation system that we have planned will of course be automatic. Transactions occurring within your controlled territory will have a fee associated with them, but the details of the extent of this system are yet to be determined. Unincorporated areas, unclaimed or independent systems might not have an automatic taxation system, but security forces may stop passing ships and demand a cut of the profits for safe passage, which would be an ad hoc manual tax system. Q4: How many core systems are there? A4: We have a handy starmap page on the website to assist with any stellar questions you may have - there are 97 core systems, but it is a wide and varied area that may see unique names pop up, like Mid-Rim or Solari Cluster. Q5: How long will fleet battles last? A5: That is hard to say. Combat will vary significantly, depending on strategy, armament, supplies, and the size of the factions. Short conflicts may involve small groups getting outnumbered and retreating, evenly matched battle groups may have hours-long slug-fests where billions of credits end up in flames. Variety is the spice of the game. Q6: Will you be streaming more? A6: Certainly. Idyllic has fixed his OBS and Skinny is getting into it, look forward to more streams in the future. As always, they will be announced in the #announcements channel in the discord community. 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 140th 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 more ship meshing by Skinny, as well as pictures of the ships from last week. Lordrex has completed the addition of the fourth Capital Update map, as built by Juszl, and Idyllic has continued ironing out the last few bugs standing in the way of the update's release. This week Skinny was back on the grind, managing to mesh 5 more default ships this week, bringing the total to 13 ships meshed, with 9 remaining. This week, The Procyon was reduced from 28 parts to 6, the Red Wolf was reduced from 33 to 4, the Anubis was reduced from 41 to 6, the Comet was reduced from 39 to 8, and the Blue Komodo was reduced from 38 parts, down to just 5 meshparts. The meshing process will pay significant dividends in the long run, as ships that were way too complex to let fly are reduced into few enough pieces that they fly through the stars without stuttering, as complex ships before meshparts and CSG were wont to do.    Lordrex has completed the addition of Juszl's map that we've been showing off the past few weeks. The map is included in the random gamemode sort and a distribution of spawn points, but it doesn't yet have capture points for king of the hill and other similar gamemodes.  Looking fantastic and ready for some epic space battles. Idyllic has been hard at work ironing out bugs, including the turret gimbal code and some minor menu touch ups. On the gimbal front, the solution yet eludes him, though progress has been made. The turrets still have the problem of facing the incorrect direction, usually to the ships right. A possible solution involved just rotating that cframe 90°, which appeared to work for one weapon type, but did not work at all for the other weapon types. Idyllic is now delving into the format and layout of the individual turrets, making sure they are welded and set up properly, as that seems to be the most likely cause of this substantial problem. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Will there be any casual instances of RoVerse locations where players can more easily interact with each other? A1: Only the hubs and spawn areas will be combat-free zones, anywhere on your planets and in your systems will be live-fire all the time. If you're looking to hang out in a tavern, you could tie a personal place into the landmark system and have players teleport there, but there will be minimal areas where rp could reasonably take place out in the wilds. Perhaps you could secure a planet or system with security to deal with any trouble, for a time. Q2: How fast is warp in units of c? A2: You know how good our math was on ship scaling and planet dimensions, now you want us to calculate based on speed of light? Speed of light doesn't make all that much sense in a video game, nothing can go nearly that fast, and that's probably a good thing. I can think of two max speeds that are more important - and warp is under both of them in RoVerse's case - speed of collision detection, or how fast a part can be moving and still be detected by the physics engine as having collided with a part, and speed of render, how fast a part can be moving and still be rendered in a single frame. I expect with some scientific methods and some math of your own, you could figure out some values. Q3: Will there be any expansions post-release? A3: Definitely! Our website's roadmap provides a handy guide for the process of the development of the game, and includes an area for features added post-release, like the Planetary Expansion. Not all the content we want to add is necessary for the game to be released to the public - stuff like ship skins and effects can be added later. Planets got bumped to post- because of the ambitious nature of their development, and the amount of time required to develop those features. Q4: Will you be able to build custom buildings, or will they come pre-made? A4: There won't be any building in-game like minecraft, and factions will need to pre-build all the necessary structures for both space and ground combat. The only custom-assembled structures will be outposts, where different small modules can be assembled into sprawling complexes, given enough time and resources. Q5: How will landing gear work? A5: Worst-case scenario, landing gear on ships just appears and disappears whenever toggled, though this could cause flinging problems if not done correctly. Best-case scenario is multi-jointed unfurling of gear from stowage, but that requires significantly more effort. Expect somewhere in the middle, either a sliding animation or a single rotation joint. 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 139th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Skinny has meshed two more default ships, Lordrex has worked on the final touches of three maps and worked on adding a fifth, and Idyllic has worked on fighter weapon functions. Up first is Idyllic, who spent a lot of time this week in two different but related areas - gimbal turret movement and weapon firing mechanics. It has been a few weeks now since we debuted our first fighter firing all the various weaponry that could be mounted, but the mechanics going on under the hood needed a few more touch-ups before they are ready for full deployment. It was simple enough to copy the firing mechanics from the lasers over to work as plasma and as railguns, as the functions use a library of weapon data to determine how fast they should be firing and other info like that. This week saw the addition of a range value that determines the max distance the various weapons are viable, and the addition of the groundwork for a progressive raycast system that considers travel time for projectiles, rather than the original hit-scan system. The proof of concept for an incrementally-run raycast system was already successful back when Idyllic was working on the Capital Turrets, so the full transfer of that code to the fighters should be fairly straightforward. While it may be a little more resource intensive than a hit-scan system, it is vital to gameplay that projectiles with travel time actually hit what it looks like they're hitting. Not every weapon type looks good as a laser beam. The second area of work for Idyllic was to fix the turret gimbal movement system. Somewhere along the line, the functions that operated the turrets moving independently of the ship stopped functioning altogether, and has just been disabled throughout the development process. Testing of the weapons worked as planned, but in doing so it was found that using only fixed turrets, as they currently act, makes it quite hard to hit a moving target of such a small size. If you thought the dogfight alpha was difficult to aim, try playing with fixed turrets that require your ship align with your opponent, without the extra cushion of the gimbal angle. While he wasn't entirely successful in his efforts to fix the broken code, significant strides have been made in simplifying and understanding how the code works, and reconsidering how it should work. Skinny had a busy week, but managed to mesh another two default fighters for the Capital Update, but unfortunately he was unable to provide any beautiful pictures of his work, nor tell us which ships were meshed, nor any stats about how much optimization he got out of meshing them. So blame him for the near-pictureless newsletter. Instead, have a gif of a ninazu ship firing missiles.  Lordrex spent some time this week fixing a few details of the maps we have already added to the Capital Update, while also working on adding another. Improvements include fixing a few spawn locations, making adjustments to lighting, and modifying the map layout for easier use and additions in the future. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: What is 2 + 2? A1: "ask google, it will be faster" Q2: Will there be random encounters to spice up exploration? A2: Ideally, yes. But don't expect us to tell you about them ahead of time, they just might happen. Q3: Will there be dynamic weather on planets? A3: It would be a real shame if we didn't make the fullest of all the work we've put into planets to make them as cool as possible. Quite a few events are on Idyllic's wish list and are by no means confirmed, but sandstorms, meteor showers, rain, tornadoes, should all be possible. 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 138th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week was another code-intensive week, with lordrex patching up a few bugs and adding a few features, and Idyllic making sure weapons are working correctly before moving on to the next item on the list. Skinny got some work done meshing more fighters, and found time to stream a bit of the process today. First up, Skinny has continued to mesh the default fighters. This week he has increased his count by 6, with ships like the Hummingbird, seen below, being reduced from 37 parts all the way down to 6. There was a rocky start to his work, however - for some reason the Danube refused to be imported as a meshpart. Idyllic and Skinny spent quite a bit of time trying to solve the problem, from repeating the process independently to changing file types and export settings, but to no avail.  Wow, stream clip resolution is atrocious... The problem was eventually identified, and we hope the solution will help other mesh-importing developers in the community: the word 'Danube' is censored. Yes, the solution was something as simple as renaming the filename so it didn't get bounced back by an overzealous censor...   Another tidbit learned during the meshing process - importing meshparts from .obj allows scale to be properly maintained from studio export to re-import, without having to resize the mesh or meshes when you get back into studio. A few of the members of the community got the chance to tune into our latest development twitch stream, hosted by Skinny while he worked on meshing fighters. For his first stream it wasn't bad, but in the future we'll try and add background music or something, so it isn't just clicking and scrolling and the occasional exclamation. It was inspiring seeing the twitch channel back in use, especially since most of the original streams were heromaster building the ships skinny is meshing, and we hope to keep that going moving forward. Lordrex has been working on a loadout saving system for a week or two now, and is making some great progress. Loadouts are officially saved, so when you return to a ship you've purchased your kit is sitting there waiting for you to take it into battle. With the replication bug patched from last week, Idyllic set about with the next important update - correcting some coding missteps that had the clients using your own ship's weapon table lookup for every other ship loaded on screen. The problem is quite obvious - unless everyone is flying an Excalibur with dual-plasma loadout, the code won't work. It is unknown where in the code this problem originated, or who made it, but the good news is that it is fixed. As part of this correction, Idyllic and Lord got to dive into the game and test out every combination of weapons in an intense bug-finding-and-fixing session. Every ship from the Cardinal to the Blue Komodo was rigorously tested against both the loadout saving system, and the weaponry replication system. With a small loan of 1 billion dollars, Lord and Idyllic purchased and edited every currently-rigged ship to ensure the system is working correctly, and patched a few bugs that were found during the process.  Here we see Idyllic 1, in a fully-loaded Cardinal, firing warning shots at Idyllic2 - plasma-, laser-, auto-, missile-, and railgun-turrets all ablaze. Gameplay in this update will be much more complex and interesting than what was possible in the Dogfight Alpha, with a selection of weapon types suited for different players and different situations. We can't wait to see what sort of combos and loadouts players come up with to dominate on the battlefield. 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 ground vehicles have any complex damage mechanics? A1: The best answer to that is we don't know quite yet, as many aspects of ground combat are unplanned yet, though a system more complex than whats used in spaceships is unlikely. For the sake of clarity and not confusing players, the systems will most likely be nearly identical. Q2: Will far-off objects be rendered as sprites? A2: We actually coded a feature specifically for this, back when max render distance was 10,000 studs from the origin. Now that max render is at 100,000 studs, the system is unnecessary. There are other technical limitations restricting the size of the map now, so even creating sprites won't let us make real-scale systems. Q3: What will be the range for missiles/rockets/torpedoes? A3: Ideally, missiles will keep going on in whatever direction they were fired in indefinitely. Torpedoes might be useful at long-range on an unsuspecting and unprepared target, while homing missiles and guided rockets will be unable to give chase to their target when they run out of fuel, limiting their ranged effectiveness. Q4: Will there be any weird worlds? A4: Definitely. Q5: Will there be planets made of metal? A5: Not directly, but there will be planets with more metal resources than others. Q6: Can I just mindlessly attack people in RoVerse? A6: Yep. You are free to do whatever you want in-game, but you will have to live with the consequences. Kill too many ships and get put on a piracy list, marked as kill-on-sight? Consequences. One of the problems we identified with modern factions is how they can refuse a war, either by not defending their outpost, or not acknowledging your victories. To that end, RoVerse is full-combat outside of a few select neutral systems. What good are fleets of ships if you can't invade a system and take over, stealing its valuable resources for your own war efforts? On the player scale, systems may be governed by the faction in power, but you could potentially be a very successful pirate, maybe even get a sponsor from another faction that wants you wreaking havoc on their enemies. 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 137th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Lordrex spent a lot of time working on the code, with progress in ship and loadout saving, and wrapped up the coding aspect of multi-part engine effects; Idyllic kept on the hunt for the turret replication glitch, while skinny took to meshing the set of default fighters for the Capital Update, and Juszl is working hard on yet another map, this one code-named 'cataclysm'. Lordrex has taken on the important task of making ship selections and loadouts save between lives and on return visits, on a per ship basis. Currently, ship loadouts are entirely client-side operated from a gui - when you die or the round ends, the menu is reset and all your selections vanish. But not for long. Lord has laid the foundation work for a system to save the loadouts as you pay for them, attaching that table to that particular ship. He also put the finishing touches on the engine effects system we talked about last week. Engine particles are now supported across several emission points, for those multi-engine ships I am sure you're making, and to make the whole process easier on the developers, engine smoke effects scale dynamically with the size of the engine part. So instead of manually adjusting the numbersequences to match the engines, an automated bit of code does it for us.   Skinny has taken on the task of meshing all the default (and a few faction) fighters in preparation for the Capital Update. This process cuts down on the number of moving parts your computer has to move around at a distance significantly, which means smoother flight and no ships falling apart due to rounding errors. He was able to cut down the Halbert from 30 parts...  ...to a mere 8.  While we could have started on this task sooner, it was important to flesh out all the features we wanted fighters to have before we went through this process, and to make sure that meshparts were as performant as possible. And good thing we did wait, since the addition of Juszl's suggested 'shaders' feature would have thrown a wrench or two into our plans. Some of you may recognize the term 'shaders' from destiny, and the concept is quite similar. We debuted this feature a few newsletters back with Juszl's Snow-Camo Dervish. The idea is that decals are applied to one or two parts of the ship on all sides, rather than skins, which are painted on and asymmetrical. Shaders allow us to do something like this:  While Skins do something like this:  Earlier this week in the community discord, we posted our meshing process for those in the community that are thinking of meshing their faction ships, or just to help out any other roblox devs. It's a bit much to look at if you don't use blender, but we'd like to post it here as well. Process for meshing ships in Blender is as follows:
Ship Texturing:
We've already seen some successful tests, with ManikuCalex using this process to mesh and texture his ships.  Be sure to keep parts that need to be separate, separate. For instance, on these fighters the landing gear need to be able to appear and disappear, so they have to be re-imported as a meshpart separately from the hull. Any other questions about this process can be directed to Idyllic.  In another bit of exciting news, after hours and hours of pouring over code looking for the problem with weapon replication, Idyllic has finally managed to identify and correct the error that prevented you from seeing other ships firing, which is a pretty important feature to have, I think.  Weapons are now properly replicated and attached to other players ships when they spawn, allowing the system that shows their bullets to have something to shoot out of. Juszl has jumped to work on another map, this time going for a dense asteroid field theme. Code-named 'Cataclysm' the map is the scene of horrendous destruction. But what could possibly have caused such a mess?      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 the bar showing ship stats ever double back and keep going? A1: Right now, stats are calculated as a percentage of a max value, so there shouldn't be any instance of that value exceeding 100%. But that's not to say that there won't ever be the possibility, considering stat-boosting modules could come pre-installed. Q2: How will hull armor work? A2: Hull is set to a specific value, and as you are hit damage is subtracted. Much like the dogfight alpha, ships usually have shields to mitigate a lot of specific types of damage, but your hull may eventually wear down and require repair. En-route repairs can be undertaken, but with decreasing returns damage will pile up and require docking at a station for full restoration. Q3: How will factions update ship appearances over time? A3: If it's purely an aesthetic upgrade, we will just swap the models out. If it is different enough, though, a new ship will be added - a 'Mark II' so to speak, and will need to be purchased and built as normal.
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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