Hello everyone! Welcome to the 197th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made this week. This week, Idyllic has been hard at work implementing Capital ship weapons to the development version, with freshly-rigged turret models, code that makes turrets act like turrets instead of gimbals, and the first bits of code to make them go pew. Let's go! With the outpost turrets we developed as a guideline for how Capital turrets would need to work, the first step necessary was rigging them up with welds - Fighter turrets operate with a very specific layout of welds that make them point in the right direction. So we rigged up the military outpost turrets with a modified version of the fighter turret structure, and tested it out. However there was a flaw. Fighter gimbals pivot in their sockets, and don't remain upright from a ships point of view. This just wouldn't work for turrets that have to stay upright. So Idyllic did some math, and worked out a way to keep the turrets upright, no matter which direction the ship was facing. With that problem out of the way, the next problem was splitting the turret between the base, which moves left and right, and the elevator, which moves up and down. Fighter weapons don't have these constraints, so some new code needed to be worked out. Without splitting these two directions, the turret-tops would just point at the cursor, which doesn't look very good. So some more fancy math was devised. Horizontal was a piece of cake, ignoring the y axis of rotation, and only moving left and right. Egomoose then called us out on twitter, in a post with oddly coincidental timing. Because when it comes to CFrame rotations, plugging in different orders is the only way to do it. It must be, because Idyllic got the turret elevators working. Followed shortly by a lower boundary, so you couldn't aim below the horizon, and an upper boundary so you can't aim over 80° upwards. Skinny then took up the task of doing a final polish on turret effects like muzzle flashes and bolts, as we work towards the final implementation of these weapon types we've waited so long to see working. With one turret working, it was then to rig up the other turret types. Which all culminated in the most chaotic gif yet. There are a few more things that need to be polished on the turret front, and a few new weapon types available to capitals that aren't available to fighters that need to be finished up. Next on our list is a capital-based gamemode, which will finally mark the beginning of the Capital Update. We'll keep you posted on our progress. Don't forget about the RoVerse Community Egghunt Part 2, The Calexian's Strike Back - available for a limited time. An Emissary of the Calexian Imperium has been stationed on Hyperion Station to offer a new hunt to find a fabled Calexian Vault. In the Calexian Update, players can experience: - Four Brand new Eggs - An exploration on Nexus and beyond through locations both new and old - A brand new activity to do in Hyperion Station - A brand new Calexian Industries pinnacle reward ship named Sails of Cheer and many more... Talk to the Calexian Emissary at Hyperion Station to get started! The sixth week of our weekly Community Dogfight Event was held this week. Members of the Community and abroad got together to blast each other to bits in the chase towards the top of the leaderboard and the chance to win this cycle's exclusive reward ship, the Veptor. This week, we had a few dedicated pilots arrive for the fun - here are some action-shots for those who couldn't make it. If you have cool screenshots on your end, we'd love to add them to the collection. This week, there were 102 kills, 61 with laser, 16 with auto, 12 with beam, 10 with plasma, and 3 with railgun. The most dangerous ship was the Gladiator, with 27 kills, followed by the Excalibur and Iridium with 15. The most dangerous map was Frostland with 40 deaths, followed by The Great Hollow with 24. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were devOmegax, with 28 kills and 16 deaths and a 1.75 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 16 kills, 28 deaths and a 0.57 KDR; and FangABXY with 14 kills, 19 deaths, and a 0.73 KDR. Nice work pilots! This wraps up the 6th cycle, and was the last opportunity to unlock the Sonicor Veptor, but we'll have a brand new ship for players to earn in the coming cycle. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 41) Now, for the overall cycle stats! Pillarum was again the most dangerous map, with 311 kills, followed by Frostland with 297, and Ecumenopolis with 191. The top ship was the Excalibur, with 503 kills, followed by the Cardinal with 151, the Iridium with 136, and the Hex with 104. The top weapon was the Laser, with 578 kills, followed by Auto with 281, and Beam with 279. Plasma marked up to 109, Railgun with 51, and Torpedo with 15. An outstanding 73 pilots participated this cycle and earning at least one kill, while 100 players died at least once. The lowest KDR belongs to SconesGame and EmperorDoge, with a .07 KDR. The dogfight has seen 5,063 visits, with an 83% approval rating (118-23) and 257 favorites. This cycle there were 1,313 kills total, only 3% of which were by the Outpost. Topping off this cycle's leaderboard was IdyllicDestroyer, with 177 kills, 217 deaths, and a 0.81 KDR. He was followed closely by TheCandyVanMan with 167 kills, 133 deaths, and a 1.25 KDR, and Phaytox with 132 kills, 98 Deaths, and 1.34 KDR. These three pilots have unlocked the exclusive Golden Veptor Skin, coming soon to a dogfight near you. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Championship Series 6) Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: How will capitals store bombardment weapons? A1: Bombardment weapons are merely the turrets the capital has mounted, rather than a special turret for shooting downwards. In that case, it is important for the turrets to be arranged in such a way that allows them to be fired in the direction desired, so take care when designing Capitals. Q2: Will a heavily-damaged capital be cheaper to rekit? A2: I don't think that damaging something more should ever come out to a net gain, which seems to be the implication here. Expect rekitting prices to be the same for a ship, whether it is damaged or not. 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 196th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic knocked out a list of bugs and features we've had on the board for a while, while Skinny worked on some brand-new skyboxes for the dogfight maps. There is also a special message regarding the 2020 Egg Hunt, so stick around to the end. Work on warp effects has continued, this time on the side of someone watching another ship warp away. With a burst of speed and a pulse of energy, their ship vanishes into the ether. Work continues on the engine charge up effects, and we're working on making the ship leave a streak in its wake, so stay tuned. Next up is a zoom button, allowing you to make those extra-accurate shots when most needed. Designed to make precision shots with the slower-reloading weapons like railguns and missiles a little easier, zooming trades a bit of control over your ship movement for an increase in weapon accuracy. The third feature added this week is the much-anticipated Vector-lock. Unlike Plane-lock, which you are all well aware of in the current and classic dogfights, vector lock does not orient your ship upright. Instead, your ship continues on in a straight line in the direction you were heading, allowing you to freely aim ahead of you. Along with the new vector-lock mode, it was time to add in visualization for when your ship is locked in a direction. Thus, the new lock-mode HUD gui has been implemented. No more wondering why your ship won't turn where you're pointing. We also have this latest demo of the planned shield effects... As we complete the meshes for fighters, we'll be turning on this shield effect for them. As for the bugs we knocked out this week, the Hull and Shield HUD not updating correctly has been fixed, as well as the Outpost gamemode not updating the correct number of turrets until you destroy one. Also, the faction ship Harpy, which has been sitting incomplete for quite some time due to a huge number of parts has received its wings at last this week. All these features are live in Icarus 2 for final testing, before we implement them into the Dogfight Alpha proper. And last but not least, we have a sneak peek at Skinny's skybox work. Outstanding! The fifth week of our weekly Community Dogfight Event was held this week. Members of the Community and abroad got together to blast each other to bits in the chase towards the top of the leaderboard and the chance to win this cycle's exclusive reward ship, the Veptor. This week, we had a few dedicated pilots arrive for the fun. Here are some action-shots for those who couldn't make it. If you have cool screenshots on your end, we'd love to add them to the collection. This week, there were 215 kills, 85 with beam, 46 with auto, 38 with laser and plasma, 5 with missiles, and 3 with railgun. The outpost killed 11 ships. The most dangerous ship was the Cardinal, with 53 kills, followed by the Hex with 38, and the Iridium with 36. The most dangerous map was Classic with 158 deaths, followed by Citadel with 20. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were TheCandyVanMan, with 53 kills and 42 deaths and a 1.26 KDR; devOmegax with 45 kills, 22 deaths and a 2.04 KDR; and Phaytox with 38 kills, 31 deaths, and a 1.22 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 40) The first week of the RoVerse 2020 Egghunt is now complete! We saw a wide variety of people participate - some active members of the community and some new faces stopped by. Fun was had, and puzzles were solved, and a few people have managed to collect all the eggs. Be sure to keep hunting if you don't have all the eggs yet - this exclusive ship is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that won't be available for long! The two faction eggs also released early in the week, and were quite the challenge to collect. However... An Emissary of the Calexian Imperium has been stationed on Hyperion Station to offer a new hunt to find a fabled Calexian Vault. In the Calexian Update, players can experience: - Four Brand new Eggs - An exploration on Nexus and beyond through locations both new and old - A brand new activity to do in Hyperion Station - A brand new Calexian Industries pinnacle reward ship named Sails of Cheer and many more... As soon as the update goes live it will be announced sometime next week in the announcements channel by the Calexian King himself, once the update is live players may head to Hyperion Station, find the Calexian Emissary and continue the hunt. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: How long will the Egg Hunt last? A1: We haven't decided on a specific date yet, but at least a few more weeks. A month seems like a large enough window for everyone to get a chance. Q2: How do you calculate if a planet is captured or not if the defenders win one server and the attackers win another? A2: While attacking an installation on a planet is a good way to take over a planet, it's not the primary factor that goes directly into the calculation. Infrastructure on a planet, from the smallest of bases to the largest generated colony cities, all contribute to a faction's influence over that planet. Raiding a colony will damage that influence, but to really take over you'll need to tear their stuff down and build your own buildings in their place. Q3: What size is the RoVerse map in lightyears? A3: The exact number has not yet been deduced. While the 220 star systems do fit nicely onto the map, they aren't in exactly that spot in reality. The wormholes that connect these star systems leap vast distances across the galaxy. Some factions may take on the research of that exact number in the future, but for now it's unknown. 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 195th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we are happy to announce the opening of the second annual RoVerse Community Egg Hunt, with a slew of eggs for you to find and a brand-new ship to unlock. The lobby for the Egg Hunt this year is Hyperion Station - the third most wretched hive of scum and villainy and home to the introduction tutorial to RoVerse. In this station, players will have their first taste of the RoVerse experience, from character creation, to gearing up their character, to learning mechanics like bounties and quests, to joining their first faction, to taking to the stars in their first spaceship. For the Egg Hunt, however, 4 developer eggs are available to claim. By performing various tasks around the station. There are also two faction eggs, available at a faction map that will be accessible shortly by talking to the stranger in the hangar. Collecting all 6 eggs will unlock the Event-exclusive ship - Jubilation. We've also continued working on warp effects, with version #5 available below. Engine spooling effects are now an engine flare, rather than a camera field of view change, and the camera trails much closer to the ship while travelling at high speeds. We'll keep working on them, and keep you updated on our progress as we go. A particularly vexing bug cropped up last week after a Roblox update that broke our teams system, but Idyllic was on the case to suss out the cause of the problem. After some deep digging through the involved code, and tracing back up the stack to the source of the problem, it was determined that the way teams work was changed in the update, causing problems down the line. It used to work that setting a player's teamcolor would auto-assign them to the correct team, however, this no longer happens. It was a fairly simple fix, to set both the player's Team and their teamcolor at the same time, and frankly, we shouldn't have been relying on that behavior to start with. But in either case, the bug has been fixed and the dogfight is back up and running. The fourth week of our weekly Community Dogfight Event was held this week. Members of the Community and abroad got together to blast each other to bits in the chase towards the top of the leaderboard and the chance to win this cycle's exclusive reward ship, the Veptor. This week, we had a few dedicated pilots arrive for the fun. Here are some action-shots for those who couldn't make it. If you have cool screenshots on your end, we'd love to add them to the collection. And a "new" map made its debut tonight - the Classic RoVerse Dogfight map from the Alpha Dogfight has been transported over to Phase 1, and kitted out with new features for all the available gamemodes. Return to the historic map and fly amongst the wreckage in a fight to the death. This week, there were 90 kills, 33 with Laser, 28 with beam, 14 with auto, 12 with plasma, and 3 with railgun, and 10 with plasma. The outpost killed 13 ships. The most popular ship was the Iridium, with 28 kills, followed by the Gladiator with 20, and the Excalibur with 13. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 29 deaths, followed by Citadel with 18. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were IdyllicDestroyer, with 29 kills and 22 deaths and a 1.31 KDR; devOmegax with 24 kills, 17 deaths and a 1.41 KDR; and Onigo with 17 kills, 25 deaths, and a 0.68 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 39) 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 kinds of defenses will we be able to install on our planets? A1: Expect the same types of weapons you can put on ships to be able to be mounted to defense turrets, energy shields at a local scale, around a city or single units, and physical obstacles. Q2: Will things like nebulae be safe to fly through? A2: I'd like to think there's always a bit of danger around every corner, in RoVerse. Nothing that will instantly wipe you out without any input on your end, but stuff where if you make a poor decision, things can go poorly very quickly. Q3: Ship build ship? A3: Ship fly, shipyard build ship. Q4: Ship carrying ship carrying ship? A4: Possible, if not expensive. The largest class can potentially hold an L capital, which can hold a full complement of fighters itself. The strategy required to construct an entire fleets worth of ship, load them into a ship, then load that ship and more ships into an even bigger ship would be an impressive feat indeed. 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 194th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week we have continued working on warp mechanics for Fighters and Capitals, various bug fixes for various bugs, and Skinny has contributed the finishing touches to warp effects. A bug became apparent when we implemented the Avenger into the Outpost gamemode - turret shots were converging much closer to your ship than where you were aiming. However, the raycasts that drive damage were hitting the spot they were supposed to hit. A very unusual situation. After diving into the code to track down the source of this inaccuracy, and by adding tracers to the guns of a ship to see exactly where they were pointing at all times, the bug was found to be a problem with the bit of code that is supposed to constrain turrets to only shooting forward in a cone shape. Disabling this bit of code corrected the bug, and fighters now show visual shots in the absolute correct location rather than in the general location. This should fix a few aiming problems people had with bullets not hitting their targets. We will turn on the constraint for turrets in the future, but for now this feature is disabled. Over the past few weeks, the dev team and a few members of the community have been refining the warp mechanics and visuals. Today, we are proud to say that the visuals and mechanics have been implemented on the first fighter. It was only fitting that the ship used to demonstrate warp effects at such a long time ago, would be the first ship to receive the actual working effects. The proof-of-concept visuals, that used the only thing available at the time - particle emitters; and the latest effects that make use of beams. There was a bit of debate about which direction to take these effects - on the one hand keeping things simple and subdued is easy enough to do, and doesn't get in the way of activities you may be planning while warping across a star system. On the other, there are some really cool effects possible that make space games stand out from the common tropes of warp effects. Striking a balance between the two was imperative. The current effect started life as a wormhole effect designed by Ved. In his usual fashion, it consisted of far too many beams pushed to their limits, creating an interesting, if not pretty, moire effect on the screen. Many edits were made along the way - different colors were tried, different intensities tested, combinations of other effects were attempted. In the end, we went with a light energy pattern from the wormhole effect, with a high-velocity dust stream to strongly imply the speed the ship is traveling at. With the effects complete, it was time to rig it up to the warp mechanics we demonstrated last week, minus the failed stretching experiment. There does remain a bit of an issue with the camera stretching very far back when going at high speed, that we intend to resolve in the coming week, but overall we are happy with how the effects turned out. The third week of our very-likely-weekly Community Dogfight Event was held yet again this week, which is starting to trend towards a pattern. Members of the Community and abroad got together to blast each other to bits in the chase towards the top of the leaderboard and the chance to win this cycle's exclusive reward ship, the Veptor. This week, we had 17 dedicated pilots arrive for the fun. Here are some action-shots for those who couldn't make it. If you have cool screenshots on your end, we'd love to add them to the collection. This week, there were 545 kills, 171 with beam, 153 with beam, 98 with auto and plasma, 19 with missile and 6 with railgun, and 10 with plasma. The outpost killed 13 ships. The most popular ship was the Excalibur, with 353 kills, followed by the Hex with 59, and the Cardinal with 29. The most dangerous map was Frostland, with 135 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 106. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were Onigo, with 244 kills and 13 deaths and a 18.76 KDR; Phaytox with 44 kills, 31 deaths and a 1.41 KDR; and daftcube with 38 kills, 22 deaths, and a 1.72 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 38) 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 carpet-bomb colony cities? A1: We do intend to implement bomb weaponry as a variety of mine when planetary gameplay arrives, which could, in fact, allow players to carpet-bomb locations. There was a bit of discussion in the community about the differences between carpet-bombing and orbital bombardment, with the distinction eventually being that carpet-bombing would be undertaken by fighters or other large-small spacecraft flying close to a city and dropping ordnance, while orbital bombardment would imply a capital ship at a distance raining fire on a city from a high-atmospheric vantage point. Each could have their uses, as well. 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 |