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RoVerse Development Newsletter #193

3/28/2020

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 193rd 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 developing the warp mechanics for Capital ships, adding the Capital Hangar to the game, as well as patching a few bugs that have been irksome in the Outpost development version. We've also decided to make the weekly community dogfight a weekly recurring event, since it has been so popular. More about that a bit later.

The first bug up to be fixed with Capitals in the Dogfight was the fact that the Avenger's hitbox was tiny, rather than the size of the ship. This was because at some point, code was modified to 'work' rather than do exactly what we wanted. This worked for small ships, where a 1x1x1 hitbox was close enough to the size of the ship to work for collisions, but as we add larger ships, more accurate hitboxes become necessary.

Don't worry about how your weapons have been working, the hitbox for weapons has been accurate since Phase 1 released, and is a different part entirely.

A bit of experimentation was undertaken when it came time to develop warp mechanics. Warp is such a vital part of the game experience that a quick and dirty solution just wouldn't do it justice. Ramping up ship speed to 1000 and launching you uncontrollably across the map is one thing, but doing that over and over again as you cross system after system would certainly get boring. With that in mind the effects of the warp, both how it works and how it is visually displayed, must be perfect. With that in mind, Idyllic tried out a few ideas.

The first version started with a picture.

How many movies have we seen where a ship jumping to warp speed stretches out to the horizon before snapping away with a woosh? And if we are going to so much effort to mesh all the ships, why couldn't we stretch them out in some way? So the experiments in code commenced.

Since warping is a mostly hands-off experience where you set a destination and the ship takes you there, we tested out a bit of code that leaves the players camera behind for a few seconds, to really experience that vroom as the ship flies off into the distance. A good start, but not snappy enough. Now to stretch the ship...

Lol that looks horrible - SkinnyThePimp

Hmm. Not good.

It was easy enough to stretch the ship out, but nearly impossible to match the stretching to the speed of the ship. Even if the speed was constant without any acceleration, the rear of the ship doesn't appear to remain in place while the front of the ship flies off at warp speed. Apparently the movies have access to technology we just don't have in Roblox Studio. If anyone has any ideas how the effect could be implemented, let the dev-team know, but until we find a solution for that, firing ships off at high speed may just have to look like a ship moving really fast.

In a late addition to the dogfight is something that had been bugging Idyllic for quite a while - the Avenger chilling out in the fighter hangar that it very clearly didn't fit inside. That is no longer a problem.

The Hangar has been in the game since the beginning, but it was tied up in a bunch of code with the old ship modification guis that had to be disconnected before it would work. A quick note, you won't be able to just select a Capital ship at any time in any gamemode, but rather only in specific gamemodes where anyone can, or you are specially selected to be a Capital ship, like a juggernaut round.

Another bug patched this week was the Frostland Asteroid hitboxes, which were returned to default collisions instead of box collisions. Now you'll only crash into the rocks half as often as you did before.

The second edition of our new probably-weekly Community Dogfight Event was held earlier today, where members of the RoVerse community come together in the dogfight to blast each other out of the sky in a hail of lasers. This week, 26 members participated in the event, and we had just as much fun as last time, so we're looking forward to making it a weekly event. Here are some pictures from the event for those that couldn't make it to enjoy.

This week, there were 205 kills, 98 with laser, 47 with beam, 26 with auto, 24 with railgun, and 10 with plasma. The outpost killed 12 ships. The most popular ship was the Excalibur, with 97 kills, followed by the Cardinal with 38, and the Jaltrius with 22. The most dangerous map was Frostland, with 53 deaths, followed by Pillarum and Blue Spaceway, with 40.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were TheCandyVanMan, with 38 kills and 24 deaths and a 1.58 KDR; CptJaller with 31 kills, 11 deaths and a 2.81 KDR; and Phaytox with 25 kills, 15 deaths, and a 1.66 KDR. 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 37)

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 #192

3/21/2020

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 192nd 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 some build progress on the military outpost interiors from SkinnyThePimp, a working version of shield flashes from Idyllic, and a lovely report on the potentially weekly community dogfight event, where a group of people from the community got together to blast each other out of the sky. Let's begin!

First up, Skinny was a bit sick this week, but managed to find time to give Maximus a hand with Military Outpost interiors. The portion of the project he chose was the holographic command table, where the stationmaster oversees the work of planning outpost development, controlling outpost modules, and strategizing outpost defense.

And when you're running a state-of-the-art military outpost, your first choice in military hardware is the Edris Defense Corporation.

Idyllic has begun re-implementing shield effects into the dogfight. While currently your screen flashes and sounds play, we're looking for better effects to relay the damage you're taking. To that end, we're working on implementing a shield system that used the super-secret forcefield shimmer effect, to give it that extra touch of detail for you to admire as you are taking significant incoming damage.

A quick reminder, if you forgot the secret effect we're talking about.

Hexagons!

A few hours ago, Idyllic hosted what has the potential to become a recurring weekly event in the Dogfight Alpha. 20 members of the community got together in the dogfight to enjoy a few rounds of combat, fighting on teams, capturing targets, and battling it out in a free-for-all.

Fun was had, and ships were destroyed. We'd like to thank everyone that came out for the event, it means a lot to us. Let us know in the community if you'd like to see such an event on a weekly basis, or if there is something you think would improve events like these.

The event also brought forward a few bugs that we are absolutely going to work on fixing. One such problem was a contrast problem between the cursor and the skybox, particularly on red backgrounds, and the yellow targeting indicators on the Frostland background. An easy fix to these problems is adding a drop shadow in a dark color, which we have already implemented.

This week marks the first trio of players to earn the cycle-exclusive ship for topping the weekly leaderboard. These three players proved themselves unrivaled in the face of many opponents, crushing their opponents in their race to the top. Their names will be etched upon the cosmos in the fiery wrecks in their wake. *ahem* I mean, these pilots have distinguished themselves in combat, and have earned the right to pilot the Sonicor Veptor across the galaxy, which only 21 total players may have the honor of doing.

This week, there were 340 kills, 184 with laser, 98 with auto, 41 with beam, 11 with railgun, and 6 with plasma. The outpost killed 3 ships. The most popular ship was the Excalibur, with 173 kills, followed by the Iridium with 49, and the Washi 0-1 with 42. The most dangerous map was Frostland, with 129 deaths, followed by Pillarum, with 101.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 55 kills and 37 deaths and a 1.48 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 41 kills, 36 deaths and a 1.13 KDR; and TheCandyVanMan with 27 kills, 19 deaths, and a 1.42 KDR. 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 36)

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 sort of lore is there behind the fact that pilots in the dogfight can survive excessive G-forces during combat?

A1: There are many potential solutions to this problem in soft science fiction - anything from a technical solution, like 'inertial stabilizers' to the fact that the pilots are potentially alien species or at least far-future space-faring humans. Being able to come up with answers for any question that sorta sound believable is one of the best aspects of soft science fiction over hard science fiction - if you can imagine it, it can become true.

Q2: Will fighters have warp drives?

A2: Fighters will be able to fast-travel across the 'empty' space between landmark structures in systems, if that's what you mean. Making solo players slog across giant empty spaces has already brought up several complaints in the dogfight, let alone making them cross every system that way. There may be differences between how a fighter travels and a capital ship travels, but they will both have access to high-speed travel.

Q3: Will there be different variations of hyperspace modules, with different effects or cooldowns?

A3: There is certainly the potential to set the system up in that way. Every ship will be able to travel at high speed, but there is room for research to unlock new and dangerous methods of traversing the stars.

Q4: Will there be banks where you can take out a load or loan money?

A4: We are leaving the option open for enterprising players to form a corporation in the banking industry, where they can load money or materials to other players, and expect interest in return. There won't be an NPC bank that does that at a large scale, though stranded players can borrow a mining ship from a neutral station and the stationmaster takes a cut of the profits, which would be the only similar system built-in.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #191

3/14/2020

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 191st 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 an update on how dogfight cycles are going to function, including the weekly leaderboard rewards and the cycle reward. Other progress work includes system development, with the first fully-flyable system demo available as a new map in the demo dogfight.

This week we've begun work another important milestone - setting up system layouts. For quite some time now we've had all the assets built, and the design of systems down on paper, but we haven't had a centralized place to put all the pieces together. That is a problem no longer. This week, Idyllic assembled an entire system as a map for the Dogfight Development.

Here, Idyllic will be developing all the mechanics necessary for Freeroam and Capital gameplay, from intra-system warp to fighter spawns on Capitals, as well as finishing out the Capital ship controls. The system is also fully-equipped with jumpgates, asteroid belts, and planets, as well as the system's star. These landmarks, as well as other temporary landmarks like spawned stations and outposts, will eventually be the subject of a gamemode designed specifically for this map. We'll have more info about that gamemode in the coming weeks.

We would like to discuss the latest details of how systems will be laid out with you, but as always we're open to feedback. The image below is a good basis for understanding system layout - a star in the center, with three bands of stuff 'orbiting' around it. The main, central band contains an asteroid belt with the most common of ores and a medium density, and is home to most planets, with jump gates being on the outer fringes. An inner asteroid belt would have a higher concentration of rarer ores, more densely populated asteroid fields, but would be much more dangerous because of its central location and easy access. An outer band of asteroids would be very sparse, but have rarer ore to find spread over it's wider area - relatively safer, but less productive. There will be variations to the different star systems, with lots of unique and interesting landmarks, different biomes of asteroids, different star types, but their underlying structure will be similar.

Some early feedback from the community touched on an important aspect of systems that is still in development - the size of planets relative to the central star. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Roblox, there is a real limit to how big we can make star systems before floating point errors pile up and make your ship vibrate all over the screen or make weapons miss their mark. On top of this, objects more than 100,000 studs away vanish from the screen at the far camera clipping boundary. While this is much better than the 10,000 stud limit we used to have when we began this project, it still limits the size we can make things - particularly the stars at the center of each system.

To make them a realistic size is an impossible task - as with scaling up, there is also a limit to how far you can scale things down. The goal, then, is to make things as big as possible, while they remain within the 100,000 boundary. As you can see in the pictures above and below, the scale of stars to the player's ship is not an issue - an Excalibur the size of a single stud is dwarfed by the size of the star. But for planets, there is a problem. Planets need to be small compared to the central star, but believably large compared to Capital ships. It just wouldn't work to have an XXXL Capital that is larger than a planet.

But we do have a trick up our sleeve! We are able to dynamically scale objects in the distance based on your distance away from them. That means that as you fly away from a planet, it will shrink into the distance faster than it should, but making the scale look much more appropriate when looking on from a long distance away.

Such a cute little planet.

This week marks the 35th week of the Dogfight Update, and a rather quiet one. The Outpost gamemode was offline for most of the week as Idyllic developed the System map, so not even the Outpost saw a lot of combat. Regardless, here is the leaderboard for this week.

A new challenger, restlesspell, earned the top spot in both Outpost and non-Outpost lists, with 14 kills, 7 deaths and a 2 KDR. Nice work pilot!

There were 43 total kills, 16 with laser, 9 with missiles, 8 with beam, 7 with auto, and 3 with railgun. The Excalibur was the most dangerous ship, with 30 kills. Pillarum was the most dangerous map, with 24 deaths.

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 35)

This cycle, there were 3,272 kills total, 46% of which were by the Outpost. Since the Outpost can't really pilot a ship very well, we'll have to drop down the list. Next up was Idyllic with 571 kills, 273 deaths, and a 2.09 KDR. But since most of those kills were in testing the Outpost, the title in the Outpost mode this cycle goes to CptJaller with an outstanding 471 kills, 137 deaths, and a 3.43 KDR. The title in the non-Outpost mode is less contested, with Idyllic taking the top spot with 105 kills, 9 deaths, and a 11.66 KDR. Since these actually came from honest gameplay, a developer taking the cycle is allowable. We can't wait to see what sort of ship skin he cooks up for himself.

Now for the stats! Pillarum was by far the most dangerous map, with 3007 kills. Followed by Ecumenopolis with 112. The Iridium was by far the favorite ship, with 335 kills, followed by the Avenger with 235. These two were followed by several closely matched ships - the Silencer with 140, Koguun with 133, Excalibur with 124, Cardinal with 120, and Hahlarn with 115. Very interesting statistics. The top weapon was unsurprisingly the Torpedoes, with 632 kills, mostly Outpost Turrets, 533 Plasma, 236 Beam, 127 Auto, 116 Laser, and 109 Railgun - a nice spread over weapon types.

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Championship Series 5)

And the usual stat graph updates:

After 5 cycles, it is now time to change up the rewards system for those topping the leaderboard each week. Earning an exclusive skin was all well and good, but it had no repeatability - once you topped the leaderboard and earned a skin for your favorite ship, there was no reason to keep trying. To that end, and with the assistance of community feedback, we will be changing the weekly and cycle leaderboard rewards system up a bit starting next week.

Each week, the top 3 players on the leaderboard will earn a brand new ship, unique to each cycle. The overall champion of the cycle will then earn a custom skin designed to their specifications for that ship, making it that much more exclusive. The ship for Cycle 6 is below, turned to glass in true RoVerse fashion.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #190

3/7/2020

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 190th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week saw a lot of work in the bug-fixes department after the significant number of features we added to the test version last week, modification of our code to support future features, and some new features-in-progress. Let's get started!

First up, a number of bugs cropped up after last week's update that Idyllic had to track down. We have added a rough-draft of Capital code to the game, which had some unfortunate side effects when you actually tried to pilot a Capital ship - each turret on any fighter was sending an individual cframe update remote event every time it moved, which works fine for ships with 2 or 3 turrets, but when players tried to deploy an 18-turret Avenger, we quickly hit the remote event cap and everything got bogged down. Guns wouldn't fire, locations wouldn't update, everything moved slowly and didn't replicate, and that just wouldn't do.

The solution was rather straightforward and simple - instead of updating each turret cframe on its own, package all their angles together in one table, then send a single table to the server to distribute to all the other players. After a few formatting problems were worked out, and the turret-aiming code was updated to handle the packaged data, things worked like a charm. The Avenger now cruises through the skies raining fire upon its enemies.

In what is essentially an update to some older code, this week we added the ability to customize keybindings for ship controls in the code. While players can't modify their own keybindings just yet, the ability is there for the future. This work was specifically to help test Capital movement controls, so that to modify which buttons do what, all we'd need to change is the keybind configuration file. This also allows code to be reused between fighters and Capitals - when a player deploys a Capital ship, the default keybindings flip over to the Capital keybindings, and vice versa.

We also worked with some members of the community to refine Capital controls. Where the mouse is used extensively to control the movement and turning of fighters, for capitals motion is much more deliberate. The pilot controls the pitch, yaw, roll, and speed of the capital ship independently from the direction their camera is facing, which requires a nearly completely different control scheme. We wanted the controls to share some similarities between fighters and capitals, so it doesn't require pilots to learn flight controls from scratch, but they are different enough to require some practice. It is particularly tricky to work out both steering and aiming weapons at the same time, so flying a capital ship will take some skill.

Progress continues on the military outpost interiors, with Maximus and Idyllic slowly working their way across the cargo bay and up to reactor control. We now have fuel storage tanks, and two staircases leading to the upper levels. Keep up the good work!

Work has also continued on another important piece of the project. Idyllic has undertaken the task of at long last bringing system assets into the game - below is a preview of their work on the starforge.

The time has finally come to hammer out the fine details of system layout, as we take more steps towards a freeroam demo. Stay tuned for more sneak peeks!

This week saw significant testing of Capital weaponry against the outpost, and frankly, the outpost was extremely outmatched. Even with Capitals having 18 light fighter weapons, they just tore through the defenses of the outpost, leaving it with a miserable .22 KDR - 286 deaths to 64 kills. Their damage output was just no match for the extreme armor and maneuverability of the Avenger. 159 of the outpost turret deaths came at the hands of the Avenger - a balance we will need to improve between mobile capitals and stationary defenses.

In the non-outpost category, serenasem emerged victorious with 5 kills and 0 deaths. Nice work.

There were 163 kills with plasma, 77 with railgun, 20 with torpedo, 14 with auto, 11 with beam, and 7 with laser. The most dangerous ship after the Avenger, was Koguun, with 77 kills.

There is only one week left in this cycle to claim the top spot and earn an exclusive custom skin for the ship of your choice. Next cycle we will be making some changes to the dogfight leaderboard system, so stay tuned for more info.

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 34)

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: Where will you spawn if you die and aren't affiliated with a faction?

A1: In that case, you'd spawn at the nearest neutral station. From there, you could arrange transport to another station where you've stored ships, or start gathering resources to build a replacement ship.

Q2: If you crash-land on a planet, will you have to survive on that planet's resources until you can be rescued?

A2: In a sense, yes. You won't starve to death or anything, but you will need to use the resources available to you to make it off-world. Either try flagging down a transport ship off world, or look around for a base or colony city where you could build or buy a new ship.

Q3: Is there going to be a system "border" in the far reaches you can't fly past?

A3: It is unlikely that there would be any sort of hard or obvious border stopping you from flying out into the abyss, but we'll try to subtly recommend not doing so. Who knows, maybe some brave soul might discover something strange and unique in the fringes beyond.

Q4: How will you defend space if people can just fly over anything you build?

A4: Considering how to defend a faction's territory will be an important decision to make, and there are countless options. You might not be able to area-deny large swaths of space for long periods of time without a permanent security force, but you could defend key locations like resource processing stations or shipyards. Mining fields may benefit from a hub outpost that can both defend and take in resources to be shuttled to a more centralized location by convoys of ships. Finding the balance between complete security, and securing what is important is vital to faction dominion.

NEWS

RoVerse Development Newsletter #193

RoVerse Development Newsletter #192

RoVerse Development Newsletter #191

RoVerse Development Newsletter #190

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