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Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixty-third 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 some exciting work on the planet front, with some in-depth information from Idyllic on how planetary engagements will work. We also have some updates from lordrex on the backend systems, and a new feature awaiting implementation to the lobby.  Here we have the command view of a planet's surface, as seen by the ranking officers of a given faction. The surface is divided into a number of cells determining the ownership of the planet, the more cells you control, the stronger your faction's foothold on that planet. Each cell can be claimed by building a structure of some kind, from a simple comm tower for those out-of-the-way cells that aren't too important, a ground base for those locations you want to have some sort of base to work out of, either with ground vehicles or aerial ships, up to founding a city. To claim control of a cell from an enemy, factions will need to attack and destroy their opponent's claiming structures. This could be as simple as bombing a radio station, to attacking an entire city. These structures will form the focal points for territory conquest - when a faction claims the star system above, they must be sure to root out any local resistance from their opposing faction, or they may find a well-supplied counterattack the following cycle. From this view, a battle commander can view the units on the ground, in the air, and in the water, being able to direct their movements from afar. Similar to a real-time strategy game, but with actual users manning the units. Properly trained battle commanders, and troops that follow orders are a must for a successful ground campaign. "Squad Bravo, redirect course north to comm tower defense in cell 155." "We just lost a cargo ship in the area, expect engagement." "Squad Bravo here, orders received." In this view, factions can take stock of which areas of the planet are under their control, with their claimed cells highlighted, as well as viewing opponent territory. If no factions build any sort of structures on the ground, the cell remains neutral, a place for Pirates to set up a base to trade without having to worry about the contraband or taxes of a faction. At this time, the number of cells per planet has been set at about 300 per planet, providing enough cells to create interesting borders, without creating too many cells to claim that factions have to build a structure every mile. This, of course, means that for a faction to gain absolute control of the entire galaxy, from each of the 220 star systems to the surfaces of every habitable planet, they will have to capture about 330,000 cells of terrain. I'll definitely be impressed if anyone manages to pull that off, though the goal of capturing 220 star systems seems like the more likely victory strategy. Idyllic had quite a bit of fun this week developing the cell division strategy - while it may seem simple at first, it actually was pretty complicated. Rather than going with the easy route, and dividing the planet into triangular cells, which would be really simple, he went with the hexagon approach. The planets are built from a list of each point, its location, and its 3 neighbors, so to divide the surface into cells, he had to develop a system to trace out both pentagons and hexagons, without repeating or forming deformed shapes. After many, many errors and planet generations, he finally managed to get the system working late this week. Expect to see some more cool planet-related stuff in the coming weeks. Lordrex has some good news to report on the server backend front - all the important data has been transferred from the old VPS to the new one, and work has begun on some of the important systems. He has also been toying with an interesting feature that will make it easy for the developers to post update logs that become visible in the lobby menus, using trello to create cards and descriptions, and using HTTPGet calls and the trello api to gather the information about the update, the authors, the version, pretty much anything we want to show up in game.   Over the past few weeks, we've been picking up some work on updating the Lobby server that was set up all those months ago, so look forward to a fresh set of guis, and lots more feature updates moving forward. 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 are the Vaktovians to play in RoVerse? Will they be some type of galactic event? Or simply a large faction residing in RoVerse? A1: Vaktovia will be one of the factions applying to enter RoVerse, and will more than definitely be a foe to contend with in the game. The game is community driven, and we are determined to create a fair battlefield free from the problems of the current clan world, so you can count on us to not give them any advantages, even though Vaktus is leading the project. They will be a faction just like everybody else, fighting for control of star systems, invading planets, and having fun. Q2: What possible options will there be for grenade-like weapons? A2: While we haven't gotten that far on alternate weapons, we should be able to support a variety of the best scifi explosives out there, hopefully with cool effects to match. This isn't the 20th century, after all - if you're going to blow something up, might as well make it exciting. Q3: Will giant asteroid-devouring ships be a thing for miners? A3: That's one of our goals for the game. It remains to be seen how we'd go about building a ship that large... Might have to make smaller asteroids. 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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Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixty-second 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 been working extensively on back-end stuff - the servers that run behind the scenes storing and retrieving data for players and factions to use. Planets are still going strong, with higher and higher resolutions achieved each day. They aren't quite stable at high detail yet, requiring a proper chunk loader to load such high detail, which should be coming pretty soon. Our new UI/GFX artist Mikey has been developing some neat logos for the default corporations that HeroMaster created all those months ago. Now, these corporations won't be represented by any in-game faction, instead serving only as the entities that sell the default versions of ships, the ones we've been showing off on this blog, excluding a few faction ships. These corporations will supply a variety of similar ships, with some differences in ideal places to better fit your play style or occupation.   While these logos haven't been matched up to a corporation yet, they are a great representation of where we are planning to go with their design. Lordrex has been hard at work transferring and setting up our VPS server, and looking into how to best manage a database as extensive as the one we're looking at with this project. Google Sheets with its api access, as well as Roblox's inbuilt Datastores, are viable options, if used efficiently and effectively. I won't bore you with a picture of that. Idyllic's planets have been generating the higher-level subdivisions that will bring the detail level of planets down to a player's eye level. Despite an early-week hiccup involving the Roblox studio updater trying to close all open sessions, we should have some cool progress to show off next week. Currently, he's generating both the 8-step subdivision level and the 9-step concurrently - that's 163,842 points and 655,362 points respectively. While not quite to the resolution we'll want, they're definitely an important step in making high-detail planets a reality. Unfortunately, most of our builders were quite busy this week, with real-life events getting in the way of making significant progress, but we should have more cool pictures for next week's newsletter. 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 you be able to invest in-game currency into corporations within RoVerse? A1: Having a lot of money will buy you a great many things - say you donate it to a private corporation. They take that money, spend it outfitting their ships with the fastest engines and strongest weapons, and start reaping in profits from hijacking cargo vessels. The corporation would become wealthier, and I'd expect you would too, provided they don't turn their guns on you. Q2: How will the servers be separated and handled? A2: We've talked before about how all the little corners of the galaxy will be tucked into separate servers, but we haven't talked about how the lobby will be set up. The lobby to the game, the place you see when you first join, will be the galaxy overview map, which we showed a great demo of last week. From there, you can look closer at the territories and factions vying for control of star systems, create a new character and be shuttled off to the tutorial station, or continue on with a previous character back to where you left the game last. Q3: What's coming up next week? A3: Check back next week to find out! 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixty-first 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 made some more progress on city generation, transplanting the flat generation to an actual planet surface, with some new skyscraper structures created by Vitreus. We also have some more information about the galactic map, that has come up in the community channel this week. You may remember city generation from a few newsletters back. For that demo, Idyllic set up a procedural growth system that worked for a small, hand-made island of smooth terrain. This week, he spent modifying it to work in detecting the ground on a sphere, which is slightly more complicated. As of yet, it doesn't quite have all the features of the other version, as slope detection on a sphere is even more complicated, and FindPartInRegion3 doesn't work with rotated regions, so further experiments are required.  Of course, this mock-up may be a bit on the heavy side when considering the density of the final cities, but it's a great example of how cool the city generating system can be even when given only a simple set of parts. A faction can build 8 or 9 custom faction-themed structures, and their cities will look perfectly their own.  Here we've got a lovely view from the night side of the planet, and it appears the entire continent has been built up into a city. Quite the amazing feat! For demonstration porpoises, this planet has been created very much scaled down from their actual size, so don't you worry about planets this small with this many buildings on them. We've also had some questions asked about the galaxy map, what it'd look like and how it'd work. Below, you can see the almost-working model for the map, with faction territory mocked up. We fully intend to have faction logos appear over owned territory, showing just which faction owns what star systems, in the event of multiple factions with the same colors.  And finally, we have the large Cargo ship that WhoToTrus was working on last week, but didn't quite have time to finish up. Next to a standard mining or cargo vessel, this large-volume cargo transport ship is the top of the line, able to transfer huge amounts of ores and minerals across the galaxy. But even the largest ships offer little in the way of defense, requiring a convoy or protection detail to avoid falling prey to wandering bands of pirates.  It's been a rather light week, with several devs being incredibly busy with school, and some recovering from the recent weather, but I am here to say, we are all still dedicated to the continuation of this project. It may not seem like there's a lot to show off, but that;s only because we've completed a lot of the work that can be shown off, the rest is coding and other under-the-hood stuff. Stay tuned for more updates, we'll keep working as long as there's still a C&G community to develop for! 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 borders work? Will it stop other factions from entering your system? A1: Faction borders will be entirely open to whoever wishes to travel between star systems. Civilians using jump-gates, cargo transporters shipping goods from one end of the galaxy to the other, anyone can come through the gate. Border security is up to the factions controlling the star system. If they want to secure their space, apply taxes or confiscate contraband, they must host their own military security presence. Of course, things can then be complicated by alliances, allowing certain factions to bypass security based on a trade deal their leaders hashed out. It should be interesting to see how different factions handle it. Q2: Will factions be able to add a cloaking device to their ships? A2: A cloaking device is an interesting sci-fi staple that we would be remiss to not include in-game in some way. We haven't quite figured out how it'd work, or how to balance it so that everyone isn't just running around invisible, but there should be some sort of cloaking available, whether its exclusive to a particular ship, or a very expensive module. Q3: How will scanning for minerals or life-forms work? A3: Straight out of Star Trek, approaching an unknown planet and turning on full scans, trying to find out just what waits below. The format of RoVerse is a bit different from that sort of thing, but scanning planets and asteroid fields to get a rough estimate of the minerals and valuables in proximity to your ship could definitely be worked into the game. 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixtieth 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 exciting new information about those civilian ships that we haven't heard much about before, some news about planets, as always, and news about the members of our dev team. Let's dive right in! First up, we have the Civilian Class of Vessels. Civilian Ships are the other side of the coin from the Military vessels you all know so much about. Where the military ships are comprised of fighters and capitals, the civilian ships come in three categories - Cargo, Transport, and Mining. Mining Ships come in a range of sizes, from small, single head drilling ships, to larger ships with multiple mining heads, with the possibility for even larger ones, designed to make on whole asteroids at a time. Right now, we are looking at two classes of mining types - mining laser drilling, that uses lasers to vaporize ore into small chunks, which are then pulled into the craft. The other class is your more traditional drill head, meant to get up close and personal with ore veins. A bit more efficient on the power side, and quite a bit better at withstanding the sudden shocks that come with crashing into giant chunks of rock. Cargo Ships are your miner's best friend. While mining vessels have ample internal storage, all that mining equipment, hull shielding, and maneuvering equipment takes up a lot of room, that otherwise could be filled with chunks of valuable, valuable rocks. Cargo ships have an enhanced storage capacity, in exchange for reduced shielding and defensive systems, but are extremely effective at moving large volumes of whatever you happen to be shipping long distances. They lack any significant defensive systems, so they work best when paired with a fighter or two to guard them. Transport ships are like Cargo Ships, but for people. When you need to transfer a group of people from station to station, or planet to planet, a Transport ship is your best choice. Where other ships might have room for a co-pilot, a transport ship can carry more than that. While we don't have the numbers finalized quite yet, we hope to be able to support large ships with as many passengers as we can. Transport ships can also function as a Military Vessel of sorts, able to act as a dropship for ground forces, though without the vehicle space or defenses of proper military dropships.  Idyllic's been working on a default version of a mining ship, which would be a step above the smallest type of vessels. This version uses mining lasers, as seen in the demo image above.     Planets are also progressing along nicely, and we hope to have another demo of a city generating for you next week. But in the meantime, planets have been successfully exported, and reimported, meaning that we should have fully generated surfaces to explore in no time. As some of you may have heard, the southern United States has been having quite the time with the weather in the past few weeks. First, Sae'Tzar had to evacuate out of Houston, and has been otherwise occupied with relief efforts. Now, with hurricane Irma approaching Florida, two more of our devs have been put in harms way. We wish them the best of luck in weathering the storm, and rebuilding their communities in the coming months. 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 ships you built for your clan be accessible by people not in your clan, like would they have to buy your ships but not be in the group? A1: You will be able to sell whichever ships you submit to members of your faction, or to whichever members of the public you want to have access to your ship style. Subfactions that are modeled after corporations would want to sell their specific line of ships to as many people as possible, while factions may wish to keep their ship styles private to their own military's personnel. Q2: How many ships can a nation have? A2: For the official release, it would be best for factions to have one of each ship type and size. While you may not need the bigger ones right away, eventually factions should have one of each. There is also room for different variations in ship models, say if you wanted a slightly different ship for each military branch. But since these ships would have to be moderated and imported, the number of variants should be kept within reason, don't expect to be able to make hundreds of ships for each member of your faction. 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! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifty-ninth 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 some neat new screenshots from environment building that Vitreus has been working on for the Capital Update, some boring scripting that Idyllic has been doing for planet generation, and some more information about capital weapons systems, and how factions can get in on the action. VitreusAeulous has been building environment assets for the variety of maps we've been working on for the Capital Update. Below, we have a cool city in an asteroid, a scifi staple.  I can't wait to fly a fighter through the city, defending it from those who seek to destroy those who can't protect themselves. Or loading up a huge battleship and attacking the city in open rebellion that is full of pirates and low-lifes that threaten our way of life - however you'd prefer it. Planetary generation has been going quite well, with the exporter function performing excellently. Planets have been successfully generated up to 6 levels of subdivision. That's 10,242 vertices! Here's a demonstration of an icosphere in Blender with that many points.  As you can see, it's not quite a high enough resolution for the mountains and plains of the planet surfaces we've been looking for. But it's not too low-res for us to generate some of the more broad features we'll be generating, like continent shapes and wind patterns. Higher-res planet features can be generated later, since they take quite a bit longer to generate. In other news, the Capital Update is still being worked on, but unfortunately it's been taking a bit longer than previously expected. Any of you that have seen the leaked version and know a bit about coding know that it's quite the messy system. Our two dedicated coders have been diving in, making sure that ship selections and gamemodes work perfectly and efficiently. But don't you worry, we're working hard, and it will be an awesome experience when we release it. Some of you may be wondering where our ship developer Sae'Tzar has been these past few weeks. The astute might have guessed that he lived somewhere around Houston, and with the poor weather around there recently, he has been otherwise occupied. Not only did he head out of town early to avoid the first storm, the past few weeks he has returned to the area with a boat, and has been rescuing those unfortunate enough to be trapped in their homes. Needless to say, it's quite wet down there, so we wish him the best, and look forward to his safe return. Now on to the part you've all been waiting for: Capital Weapons Systems Capital weapons systems are a bit more complex than the weapons available to fighters, that we've covered in newsletters before. Where fighters are limited to lasers, missiles, plasma, beams, and railguns, pending more types being added, Capitals can use a wider variety, each with their own benefits and costs. Weapons are divided into two categories - Primary Weapons that don't require ammo, just a power source, and Secondary Weapons that require the proper ammo to be used or fired. The Primary weapon types are Kinetic, Laser, Beam, Plasma, Missile, and Flak. For large ships, each of these types will need to be deployed to set turret mounting points for them to effectively perform in combat. If you set up a ship with turrets in the wrong places to properly engage the enemy, you'll find yourself in a fiery ruin of a capital ship in no time. The Secondary weapon types include Broadside Cannons and deployable mines. Broadside cannons find themselves most effective when you pull up alongside an opponent's ship, and need to fire a lot of weapons indiscriminately in their general direction. Deployable mines from Capital ships won't be exactly the same as their fighter counterparts, being more suited for taking out capital ships than fighters. The secondary weapon types won't be customizable to the same extent as the primary weapons types, acting more as a general ship system than a movable turret. In the coming weeks, we look forward to giving out more information on weapon types and styles, as we get closer to the Capital Update! 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 we be able have atmospheric bombardments with non atmospheric ships? A1: Of course! Nearly all ships will be able to enter orbit, up to a certain size limit. From there, entering the atmosphere may be a drain on your shields, but bombarding the ground will be possible, if inaccurate. We can't allow just any ship to enter atmosphere, though, because some are just too large to fit. Q2: Will Space travel take a certain amount of time? A2: We want the galaxy that forms the backdrop to faction conflict to feel as large as a real galaxy full of star systems and planets should feel, if not to a realistic amount. We are aiming for a speed of transport consistent with sci-fi tropes - jumping from star system to star system takes a certain amount of time, but not an excessive amount, while travel in star systems is slowed down significantly. With jump gates constructed between systems, the majority of travel time will be based around loading time, how fast a player can load the new game, though we will try to keep loading times to a minimum. Q3: Will trees have physics with like wind speed and leaves moving? A3: I personally would love to have planets that realistic, and I'd probably get lost in an endless number of unique worlds if they were that cool. But unfortunately, a system like that would put a serious strain on either the servers running the game, or the computers of the people playing it. I might try my hand at it as a tech demo, but it probably won't make the initial release of the game, any more than a few particle effects of falling leaves. 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! 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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