NEWS
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the 271st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic worked on some super secret stuff we cant show you, screamed at blender for half an hour, and got a little teaser of a side-project done to show you all. When not taking out his frustrations with the new Blender interface, Idyllic was hashing out a proof-of-concept for our future website - a ship hangar viewer.  It started simple, with just a lovely Excalibur on a white background. However, a member of the community recommended that we add in the hangar background, to make it feel more at home. So we did. A bit of finagling, and the ship and hangar rotate in unison.  Hosted entirely within your browser, the ship viewer will let you pan around any ship in the game, and try out color schemes with the click of a button and the drag of your mouse. While we had considered extremely complex options that could import an .obj file and render it in 3d, they just didn't suit our needs, mostly by being very complex and, while very cool, not that useful for our limited needs. However, we found a happy medium in our current planned solution that can run easily on any platform, mobile included, and just show the most important bits. The solution is 36 rendered images from a circle around every ship, and an underlay of the hangar rendered the same way. Some clever javascript to get the motion of your mouse, and we have a beautiful hangar view! Solutions to automate this process are ongoing (and part of the reason for the yelling) as we find the best way to render 150 ships, and skins. And on the bright side, if Roblox ever shuts us down we have the option to become a flash game as a backup plan. Some bugfixes this week include fixes to Inikan ships, their hardpoints, and their manufacturing companies; a replacement for the Akatanan ship hangar, without the errored decals; and a fix for a handful of Akatanan ships that mistakenly required a badge to unlock. And since you've all been such a lovely community, a teaser for the super-secret project Idyllic's been working on.  What could it be? This week in the dogfight there were 374 kills, 38 with auto, 55 with beam, 54 with laser, 39 with plasma, 14 with railgun, and 174 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Aether_Mk1 with 120 kills, followed by the Silencer with 46. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 176 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 104. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were Screech9791, with 133 kills and 16 deaths and a 8.31 KDR; FangABXY with 94 kills, 8 deaths and a 11.75 KDR; and tygrys202 with 51 kills, 1 deaths, and a 51 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Vostok 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 115)  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 we be able to intra-system warp to asteroid belts? A1: Asteroid belts are large and pervasive, filling the voids of star systems between planets and warpgates and structures. As such, they won't have a dedicated way to warp to them, mostly because they will always be around you. Building a station in the middle of a belt will allow you to warp there, and scavenge the rocky wastes outward from there with ease. Q2: Will stations be orientation-locked to the solar plane? A2: We don't intend for them to be. Whichever way you're facing when you go to build the station, will be the direction it faces when completed. With the plane-lock function, players might find it easier to build and arrange structures aligned with the solar plane, but by no means will it be mandatory. Q3: Does solar exposure impact station production? Do my solar panels have to face the sun? A3: While it'd certainly look better if they did, we won't be coding solar panels to care whether they have line-of-sight to a star. The only stat that matters will be proximity to exotic phenomena for research stations, and proximity to a star for farm stations. We don't wan the meta to be factions cramming as many solar panels on their stations as possible, which would end up very ugly. 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 270th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week was full of small code updates to the dogfight and optimizations to Outposts, improvements on last week's targeting upgrades, and quality of life changes. First up, Idyllic further refined the target-loss system we added to the ship targeting system last week. Now, when you lose sight of your target, you also lose target lock, which wasn't fully completed last week. Also, you can no longer select hidden targets just by spamming right click in the direction you think a target is.  Some tweaks were made to weapons in the Dogfight - flak turret explosions no longer interfere with aim, and the flak explosions that disrupt the shots you've already made exist for a shorter length of time than previously. The explosion blocking effect used to last a full 3 seconds after an explosion, which was just a random value chosen at the time. After receiving community feedback, and considering the current experience, this has been reduced to 1 second. It will still last a bit longer than the explosion particle effects, so consider it a space disruption explosion that hangs around longer than the fire and shrapnel are visible.
And lastly, someone pointed out that the health text didn't work correctly in the beta, scaling up in size as your health went down - a symptom of textscaled working against us. However, this was fixed by appending blank spaces to the start of the number, to keep it correctly sized. This week in the dogfight there were 395 kills, 0 with auto, 0 with beam, 51 with laser, 4 with plasma, 9 with railgun, and 331 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Silencer with 235 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 86. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 152 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 125. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were tygrys202, with 244 kills and 3 deaths and a 81.33 KDR; FangABXY with 86 kills, 1 deaths and a 86 KDR; and IdyllicDestroyer with 34 kills, 5 deaths, and a 6.8 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Vostok 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 114)  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 drop items in space for other players to pick up, or do we have to manually transfer inventories? A1: Possibly, we could allow you to jettison cargo out the airlock. However, I wouldn't expect to be able to save that between servers, since the size could get enormous with people throwing stuff everywhere, so it'd probably despawn. Your best bet is to transfer directly, rarely would dropping to space be useful for anything but garbage disposal. Q2: Could dropped items be traps or secret caches? A2: Well, you could lay traps for unsuspecting players, but you'd have to be nearby, mostly to spring the trap. If its necessary, we could consider allowing the construction of small structures that can function as remote storage. Star systems are going to be huge so it could work. 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 269th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic worked on a feature we've wanted to add to target selection for a few weeks now - Targets being obscured by obstacles, rigged some updates to Inikan Legion ships, and finished off the Cycle reward ship. A few weeks ago, we debuted a change to targeting that added non-players to the HUD, specifically Outpost Turrets in the Outpost Strike Gamemode. Almost immediately, we had renewed requests for the ability to hide behind rocks and obscure your radar signature by going out of view. This sounded like a fantastic idea, so we brainstormed how we could make it work. While we can't just blast a hundred raycasts every frame to see when a target leaves your field of view, we can spread those out over a short duration, and add in a bit of randomness, to simulate a tracking system slowly losing track of the target.  So that's what we tested. The location of a target is randomized ever so slightly, and the raycasts aren't immediate, but losing sight of a target will lose the lock on and ability to select that target. This should add a bit of variety to some gamemodes and maps - Frostland will likely be a lot more chaotic when you cant track players down from thousands of studs away. We have the disappearing portion down, but it just vanishes without you noticing. That wouldn't do, so we modified the UI a bit, and added a vanishing animation to make it more noticeable. There remain a few kinks to work out, and raycasts don't seem to be working consistently, but we're optimistic this will be a quick and easy addition to the dogfight.  On the ship-rigging side, a slew of changes to Inikan ships have been made, to get them ready for the armament updates coming soon. As some of the earliest submitted ships, they were set up for a slightly different set of rules than what we've worked out through the process, and as such they needed a few changes to make them competitive. Hopefully we'll be seeing them in the sky more often. Introducing the newest Cycle reward ship: The Cosmos Vostok  This week in the dogfight there were 81 kills, 18 with auto, 0 with beam, 19 with laser, 35 with plasma, 9 with railgun, and 0 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Gladiator with 20 kills, followed by the SSA3-2_Ritojin_Kai_OH with 19. The most dangerous map was Citadel with 28 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 26. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were devOmegax, with 23 kills and 10 deaths and a 2.3 KDR; TheUnderseer with 19 kills, 25 deaths and a 0.76 KDR; and FangABXY with 18 kills, 14 deaths, and a 1.28 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Vostok 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 113)  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 we be able to manufacture weapons with different stats to sell to other players? A1: Yep! Most custom submissions that aren't particle effects will be able to be customized with an expansion of the points system used on Faction Fighters. Q2: Will a station's appearance change if it gets taken over by another Faction instead of being destroyed? A2: It will not change directly to the capturing faction's designs, though we might be able to work with players on designing details to add on to the original design to make it clear that it has been taken over by a new faction. Q3: Will custom armor be unlocked through research? A3: If it's a custom version of basic armor, it will be unlocked at the same time the basic version is unlocked. For special armor of higher tiers, that would also be custom, it will be unlocked through research. Q4: Will we be able to assign custom armor based on rank/branch of military? A4: We'll try to make that work. Distinguishing the branches of the military, and even ranks, would be a great addition. Whether that is automatic remains to be seen. 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 268th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic worked on a requested feature for the dogfight: Gamemode Voting. This feature has been requested a few times by the community, and due to Idyllics recent work on UIs and experiments with code, it was finally feasible to attempt. A simple menu was added to the lobby guis, showing three randomly selected gamemodes and 3 randomly selected maps, and everyone has until 10 seconds remain in Intermission to select which one they'd like to play. Players who played the previous round will be able to vote on the next mode and map they'd like to play on.  We will be adding a countdown timer to show how long you have until voting ends, to make that clearer, but for now the system is live in the Alpha Dogfight. Give it a try today. And just to verify it works, here is a player voting for KOTH, and the resulting selected mode.   There are still a few bugs when voting ties, but we'll have those worked out in no time. This week in the dogfight there were 271 kills, 37 with auto, 13 with beam, 7 with laser, 69 with plasma, 5 with railgun, and 140 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 184 kills, followed by the SSA-3-2_Ritojin_Kai with 24. The most dangerous map was Blue_Spaceway with 137 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 126. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 154 kills and 14 deaths and a 11 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 99 kills, 20 deaths and a 4.95 KDR; and TheUnderseer with 13 kills, 2 deaths, and a 6.5 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 112)  Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills  Now, for the overall cycle stats! The Great Hollow was the most dangerous map, with 806 kills, followed by Pillarum with 798. The top ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan, with 1164 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 280, and the Koguun with 196. The top weapon was the Torpedo, with 1208 kills, followed by Plasma with 382, and Auto with 246. Laser marked up to 219, Railgun with 112, and Beam with 106. Overall, 25 pilots participated this cycle and earned at least one kill, while 31 players died at least once. The lowest KDR belongs to The Outpost with a .06 KDR. The dogfight has seen 8,239 visits, with an 83% approval rating (151-30) and 382 favorites. This cycle there were 2,273 kills total. Topping off this cycle's leaderboard was FangABXY, with 1123 kills, 38 deaths, and a 29.55 KDR. He was followed by IdyllicDestroyer with 311 kills, 58 deaths, and a 5.36 KDR, and CptJaller with 197 kills, 8 deaths, and 24.62 KDR. These three pilots have unlocked the exclusive Golden Asimov 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 16)    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! |
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |
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