NEWS
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the 267th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've got a sneak peek at a brand new gamemode in-progress for the beta: Tucked away in a secluded nebula, lies a sleeping giant. Built ages ago for a purpose unknown, it has rested peacefully, undisturbed. But no longer - Janus Terminal has been attacked by a hostile force, and is powering up its defensive systems.  Join the battle among the stars, and use Fighters and Capitals to destroy the station before backup can arrive. This new gamemode is an upgraded version of Outpost Strike, and will use the new Capital ships and Fighters working together to not just disable the weapons systems of a Station, but also destroy it proper. Fighters are tasked with destroying the defenses, while Capitals have to steer clear of the high-powered Railgun turrets that will make quick work of an unsuspecting ship. Once the weapons are down, its time to turn your attention to the Station itself - take out its shields with energy weapons, and destroy it's hull with physical ones, and you'll have the station destroyed long before backup can arrive on scene.   This week in the dogfight there were 268 kills, 104 with auto, 58 with beam, 30 with laser, 39 with plasma, 25 with railgun, and 12 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 107 kills, followed by the SSA-3-2_Ritojin_Kai with 59. The most dangerous map was Blue_Spaceway with 149 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 73. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 77 kills and 11 deaths and a 7 KDR; DevKomodo with 60 kills, 43 deaths and a 1.39 KDR; and Onigo with 56 kills, 5 deaths, and a 11.2 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov 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 111)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills  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 There were no questions in the discord this week, if you have anything you'd like explained in more detail ask away in the #dev_questions channel! 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 266th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we updated the Outpost code to make use of a very cool new Roblox feature that released with pivot points, and we have quite a few new Akatanan ships. Recently, Roblox released the pivot points feature, which allows you to select a specific position to rotate a model. While not the most useful feature ever added, the Api that they added along with it was the real treasure - PivotTo. Previously, the turrets on the outpost all used the SetPrimaryPartCFrame to move the different parts of the turrets based on nested models and an anchor point that it pivots around. Unfortunately, this function has never been a great option for one particular reason - floating point errors.  When repeatedly setting the cframe of a model, over time very small errors build up, and with Outpost turrets sinning around and aiming at ships circling overhead, this was inevitable. We even had to cap the duration of the Outpost Strike gamemode based around how quickly the errors started appearing, as you can see in the above photo, the barrels have already started drifting out of their sockets, and twisting away from being level. This was also the downfall of one of our earliest Capital ship tests, since the ships themselves would pull apart in as little as 15 minutes, even when stationary. A good visual for the problem can be found in this devforum post, from 4 years ago:
This wasn't a bug, SetPrimaryPartCFrame just wasn't designed to do the things we made it do. It was designed to teleport a model once or twice, not thousands of times. But at long last, there is a solution. Since people kept using code for things they weren't supposed to, Roblox built into the Pivot Api the PivotTo function, that can easily replace its predecessor, and has the added bonus of not tearing models apart with rapid position changes. And we don't have to take their word for it - we left this test running overnight, and so far it has rotated over a hundred thousand times, without even the slightest of gaps between the individual parts.  So now the Outpost shouldn't tear itself apart after a long round of combat, and in the future Station defenses will not have the same problem when they're defending a system 24/7. The Akatanan's have released the Ritojin-kai line of ships, themed to several different factions:       This week in the dogfight there were 182 kills, 33 with auto, 0 with beam, 8 with laser, 44 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 97 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 132 kills, followed by the SSA-3-2_Ritojin_Kai with 33. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 134 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 129 kills and 3 deaths and a 43 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 36 kills, 0 deaths and a 36 KDR; and doombomb1655 with 16 kills, 6 deaths, and a 2.66 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov 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 110)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills  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 star systems look as cool as the capital shots in the old newsletters? A1: That is certainly our goal. Ved made some great pictures with FiB and lighting settings, and while some of them only work from one point of view like a picture, we'll do our best to make them work for entire systems. Q2: Are you going to implement voice chat? A2: We might. We're not opposed to the idea that someone might be able to use it, but the number of people willing to go through the whole verification process right now is fairly small. If they want to annoy each other, we'll let them. 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 265th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic dove head-first into making the dogfight mobile compatible, while Jamber created gits for the rest of the stages of the project, from the alpha to freeroam. With Jamber's experiments the past few weeks regarding scaling UI, it became apparent that making the dogfight mobile-compatible was an achievable goal. While it would have a few drawbacks that mouse and keyboard wouldn't, making the game compatible opens up the game to a huge number of potential players, who might get a taste for the game and want to try out the real thing. With this in mind, Idyllic got to work.
The state of menus in the game was not great for mobile. Nearly everything is set to an exact pixel dimension, rather than a scale, causing the screen to be overrun by menus far larger than they should be. Fortunately, a bit of math is all it took to shrink them down to the proper size.  Health, the top-bar menus, and radar were a cinch to scale down, while still remaining functional. Next up, Idyllic slightly modified the mouse-tracking functions to work with dynamic thumbstick input, allowing the player to steer the ship with the thumbstick on the bottom left corner of the screen instead of the center.   Then, we hooked up the throttle to detect whether the player is steering or not, and accelerating while the player has their left thumb down, and slowing down when it is released. While not the easiest control scheme to use, we need to reserve a lot of real estate for a bunch of other keybinds, like firing missiles, target selection, and boosting. We also set up the radar system to move to the top right, out of the way of the new "firing" button. We've repurposed the jump button (and will be re-texturing it soon) to serve as the firing button for your ships weapons. And here we have the first (simulated) outpost clear with mobile controls! This week in the dogfight there were 210 kills, 14 with auto, 0 with beam, 75 with laser, 13 with plasma, 10 with railgun, and 98 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 54 kills, followed by the Z-19_Falcon with 53. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 103 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 92. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were codyspace31, with 53 kills and 28 deaths and a 1.89 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 52 kills, 17 deaths and a 3.05 KDR; and FangABXY with 50 kills, 1 deaths, and a 50 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov 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 109)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills  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 custom ammo for guns? Having to buy more for a certain weapon, or will weapons have unlimited ammo? A1: We like the concept of needing to supply invading armies with ammo, but it probably wouldn't be any more specific than that. We don't anticipate there being a special ammo type for each weapon, just that you'd need to visit an ammo crate or shop to collect or purchase the missing ammo. Heavy weapons could possibly receive their own class of ammo, but we have not yet decided. 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 264th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Jamber got the team all set up with a github for the Beta and modified some UI to work with different sized screens, Idyllic patched some errors, and improved the Outpost Strike target selection code. Jamber started off the week working on making our UI mobile-compliant, by making sure everything scales with screen size, instead of defaulting to the specific size set by Ved when he first drew the guis by hand. Starting with the Loading screen, we'll be working on the rest of the UI in the future, as its an important feature not just for mobile support, but also for general appearances on PC as well.  His second project this week was setting up a RoVerse Github Project, so we can commit changes and merge different branches much more easier than we have been. So far it has been quite the change to our normal process, but we'll get the hang of it in no time, and be collaborating on the Dogfight in no time. As part of this process, a few things in-game had to change - unfortunately some of the ship names had to be edited so they can be exported, since they contained illegal symbols for file names. Instead of quotation marks, we'll have single quotes, and instead of forward slashes, we'll have hyphens. We'll make sure no one loses their purchases because of this change, so dont you worry.  The biggest announcement of the week is upon us - the Dogfight Alpha has a new system for targeting Outpost Turrets in Outpost Strike. This feature has been on our wishlist since the gamemode debuted, but it was a difficult puzzle to unravel. But good news, we've pulled it off and it looks fantastic!  What's that, off in the distance? A cluster of enemy ships? No, those are outpost turrets! That's right, instead of a giant intrusive diamond shape obscuring the thing you're shooting at and in general not doing much at all in the way of locating enemy turrets to destroy, we've integrated the target selection system so that you can easily locate, track, and destroy every target in your way.  Being fully integrated, the tracking system will show you when the selected turret is off-screen, and which direction it is, as well as its current distance away from you while on-screen. Eventually, it'll also be able to show you what type of turret you're approaching, when there are more than just flak turrets shooting in your direction. Give it a try today! This week in the dogfight there were 291 kills, 15 with auto, 0 with beam, 58 with laser, 71 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 147 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 175 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 54. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 140 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 115. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 121 kills and 2 deaths and a 60.5 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 81 kills, 15 deaths and a 5.4 KDR; and redknight378 with 46 kills, 15 deaths, and a 3.06 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov 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 108)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills.  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: Can we have quarries on planets that don't effect terrain, and are just drill-like structures that produce resources? A1: We had considered passive resource generation a long time ago, and while it didn't fit into our plans for the game at the time, things have changed quite a bit. We might consider making this a reality, if the platform allows us to - check back closer to Planetary release and we'll let you know. Q2: Can factions customize the sounds their guns make? Can they make them silent? A2: Yes, and no. Yes, factions should be able to customize the sounds their guns make if they'd like to, no they can't make them all silent. We'll consider adding a stealth weapon that might be a bit quieter than a heavy machine gun firing. 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 263rd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've got a new hire, Idyllic has fully implemented achievements, and we're looking for ideas for a brand-new state-of-the-art website to match our shiny new domain. Not many of you probably remember JamberPilot from the first time around, but he has rejoined the team, and has a short introduction for you: Heya RoVerse citizens! My name is JamberPilot, Jamber for short. I'm super excited to have the opportunity to work on RoVerse again! I was apart of the backend team many years ago, but due to a myriad of reasons I had left Roblox and worked in the professional life. I always loved the aspiring goals of RoVerse and knew it can be achieved on the Roblox platform, and I'm really impressed with the current progress thus far. I'm coming back to the team now with real-world experience working as a Full Stack Software Engineer, running my own B2B IT Business, and having worked for startups. The first programming language I've ever worked with was Roblox Lua way back in 2008 when I was only 9 years old. Now the age of 22 I have worked with several different stacks and architectures, and I'm coming back into Roblox game development to make the landmark game RoVerse a reality. I'm thrilled to be apart of this team and community again. Let's make this happen together. We look forward to working with Jamber to get Freeroam rolling, glad to have you back! Idyllic had a few bugs to patch after last weeks Beta update. They patched ship selection, which was looking for ship stats that didn't exist in the beta, solving one of many errors Fang submitted this past week. They also finished up a bit of datastore problems that remained with achievements, which was saving data to a player instance, instead of a player userid. Also on the updates list were two things on the Alpha Dogfight - the Asimov has now received its full number of mounts and can now tear up the sky with a vengeance, and a new feature catering to new players is being tested. We've had a problem with new player retention for quite some time, with new players joining, launching into Outpost Strike, getting blown up by flak, then quitting. To assuage this, we've tweaked the Outpost a bit to give them a better shot at snagging those first few kills without getting blown out of the sky.  We're now the proud owners of the RoVerse.com domain, and we're looking for ideas on what to add to it to make it fancy and functional. It will already have a lot in common with our weebly page, but what cool stuff would you like to see? We're planning on having a fully-interactive starmap, with live-updating data based on activities going on directly in the galaxy, and possibly gameplay guides to help new players pick a profession - what else would you like to see?  This week in the dogfight there were 205 kills, 25 with auto, 21 with beam, 0 with laser, 11 with plasma, 28 with railgun, and 120 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 93 kills, followed by the Koguun with 39. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 111 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 70. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 103 kills and 4 deaths and a 25.75 KDR; CptJaller with 39 kills, 1 deaths and a 39 KDR; and redknight378 with 33 kills, 22 deaths, and a 1.5 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov 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 107)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills.  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 faction guns have their own animations? A1: Faction handheld weaponry should function the same as every other faction-custom feature in the game - the aesthetics can be swapped out, while the underlying mechanics function the same. In terms of gun animations, there will likely be a default option, and factions that want to go the extra mile can swap them out with their own. 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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