Hello everyone! Welcome to the 119th 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 progress on system generation systems, with an excellent demo of asteroid belt generation from Legomadamada, continued work on Fighter and Capital menu systems from Idyllic, as well as system scale development work from Idyllic and Lordrex, and a progress update on default stations from Juszl. Continuing on his quest to create the Most Interesting and Variable Chaotic System Debris Simulator™ possible, Lego has made progress this week in the asteroid department, adding a belt variety to his system. Previously we've shown off his cluster generator, where clumps of asteroids were generated away from a celestial body. The asteroid belt, though, is created by asteroids gravitationally captured by a celestial body, be it a star or a planet. Notice the variations in density as you move around the ring - not an easy detail to master. The easy route would be picking random points inside a large circle, but larger than a smaller one, where you'd end up with perfectly evenly spaces rocks arranged around a center point, and that wouldn't look too realistic, now would it? The system is flexible enough to vary the attractor points that increase asteroid size, as seen in the two images above - the first has four points where the scale of the asteroids increases, while the second has two or three, and each are of dynamic width. With 220 star systems, we need a system that is simple enough to quickly generate a large number of maps, with the complexity to not generate the same map for every system, which would get unimaginably boring for miners to fly around collecting ore in, or scouts looking for good base locations. You can expect further progress on this system in the coming weeks. Juszl has continued working on the station model we showed off last week, with further progress on the Industrial type default station. It has now moved beyond just the single central tower, to three towers arranged along a horizontal superstructure. The industrial station is just one of four types outlined in the introductory video. Along with Refineries, Shipyards, Farms, Research, and the new type, the Military station, these models will be the primary focus of player activity prior to the Planetary Update. These stations, and the faction versions factions will build, will be hubs of activity for ore exchange, shipbuilding, faction recruiting, research, resource generation, and defensive locations for friendly pilots. We highly recommend factions do their best work when building each station type, keeping a consistent and recognizable theme throughout. These structures will dot the skies through every star system under your control, and will be a major hub of activity for neutral parties, and an imposing target for hostile ones. Last week we had hit the roadblock of system scale, and we covered it in-depth in last week's newsletter. This week was full of testing of a mockup we've made of a system to find the boundaries of what we can do on the Roblox engine. This involved flying both a fighter and a capital ship from one celestial body to another, and timing the trip, and comparing ship scales and speed to roughly sized planets. Overall, the Excalibur at full boost took 20 minutes to travel from one planet to the star in the center of the system, while the Avenger took about 30 minutes. Now fighters won't be able to run boost non-stop for 20 minutes, and the stats for ships aren't final yet, but they're close, so we get an approximation of the scale of the system through this testing. The results show that systems will be large enough at the speeds available to make travel without warp a lengthy, but possible process. Space feels large enough that you aren't crowded out in the void of space, but not too big for the engine to handle. We even took our XXXL out for a test drive, and after setting the max zoom distance out a bit further than normal, were able to fly it next to our proposed planet models. Even such a gigantic ship, still feels small compared to the size of planets - which was our goal all along. The problem now is that the visual distance doesn't match what we were hoping for, so some mathematical trickery will be needed, to scale down distant objects faster than they should, and make systems feel as expansive as we want them to feel. Idyllic spent this week cleaning up the mess left after the sweeping changes made to the turret selection menus last week, fixing up the sorting of folders for faction ships, adding some checks to make sure there are valid turret models in the folders the script is looking for, and adding in the section that pulls a list of available faction turrets, not just the defaults. While he was working on Faction ships, it was only appropriate that he add in a few of the Community-submitted ship models he's already received. For some reason, the theme of the week seems to be round ships... The rigging and ship addition process is being refined with each submission, and the time it takes to add a ship to the game has been substantially reduced. Once a fighter has been prepared to the correct scale, it is a matter of minutes to add a core, group body parts, engine parts, and weapon attachment points together and drop it in-game. A bit of data entry to add stats, and the ship is ready to fly. 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 stations be able to move around? A1: A key aspect of faction gameplay is placing and constructing your stations in the right place - a military station guarding a trade route, a shipyard keeping a fleet flying - but they are still stationary structures. Take care to pick the right spot, because they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Q2: Will there be a starter faction like eve? A2: All of the Factions in RoVerse are community-created. Anyone not part of a faction is considered neutral, and are usually found around the neutral stations that will be available that are a bit safer than the far reaches of the galaxy. It is possible for someone to start an alliance of independent worlds or similar, if they wish to not have any faction interference. Q3: How does recruiting work in-game? Will we get offices, or just menus? A3: Neutral stations should be hubs of activity among unaffiliated players, and would be an excellent place for you to send your recruiting officers or possibly purchase an advertising stall, to find new players to join your cause. Using our proposed landmark system, you could build a recruitment center for people to teleport to, in a separate game. Q4: Any plans to expand the galaxy? A4: We can if we ever need to. 220 systems is a lot larger than it sounds, but if faction conflicts are overtaking the entire galaxy, we have the option to add more systems to the map. Q5: Can you steal ship blueprints for analysis, and a buff against that specific ship? A5: There is a possibility that you could steal transported ship blueprints off of cargo ships you've captured, but the primary use will probably be resale to other interested parties, or building your own copies for research on how the ship performs firsthand, or espionage missions. Q6: Can you upgrade a fighters stats to different versions, like Mk1 and Mk2? A6: You'll have a few points to spend on ship stats when you first construct a ship, but it will inherently be the same ship. If a faction wants to build slightly different versions of a ship, that's where we'd recommend they use the Mk. naming convention. Q7: Can we have ridiculous throwable weapons for ground combat? A7: We're not to the point of listing out every hand-held player weapon that will be available for ground combat, but if there is a particular weapon type that numerous factions want us to add, we'll try our best. Spears weren't originally on our list of sci-fi weapons, but they may be possible. Q8: Can Neutral system stations be destroyed? A8: The whole point of neutral system stations is that they provide a sheltered area for new players of the game to experience the mechanics, get a bit of practice in, before joining a faction in their quest to conquer the galaxy. So no, you won't be able to kill 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 118th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic put some solid work into rigging up as many fighters as we have available for the Capital Update, in continuation of his formatting work last week. Lordrex has continued with replication scripting, and has another successful test of sending data between parallel servers, though still in console-readout form. The development team has also gained a new developer, who will be taking on the task of building stations both as a default or as a guide for factions to build their own. Lets get started! Last week Idyllic showed his progress involving the rigging of the slew of fighters we've had built for two years, preparing them for the merge between the Capital code he has been working on and the Fighter code updated by TheFurryFish and Boysun. This week, he has rigged up the remaining ships, entered all their data into the data table, and come up with a whole bunch of descriptions to go along with the fighters. The full list includes the Excalibur, the Anubis, the Hummingbird, the Iridium, the Procyon, the Pulsar, the Red Wolf, the Savannah, the Scutum, the Shuriken, the Vortex, the Xerynite, the Blue Komodo, the Centuri, the Comet, the Danube, the Mercury, the Cardinal, the Halbert, the Gladius and the Silencer, as well as a few faction-specific ships that have already been submitted. He also managed to finish up the code that allows both Capital ships and Fighters to coexist in the same menu system, locking the camera min and max zoom up close for fighters and a larger distance for Capitals, moving the camera to the proper hangar, and searching the folder system for the correct turrets to mount onto the correct class of ship. In continuation of his work on implementing faction ships and class folders, it was necessary to refine the turret edit menu a bit to allow greater flexibility when selecting turrets for the currently selected mount. Not every turret type will be available for every ship, and not every turret mount will be the same class size - creating a way to identify and display this information was an important addition. Available turret options below the turret selector now pull directly from the list of available turret models, and use a UI sorting element to fill out the list. In the long run, being able to specify the available turret options directly, rather than showing a button that doesn't work, will mean a much better user experience when creating ship loadouts. This week a few devs got together to take another stab at building a system mockup to scale. While we're not going for a real-scale star system, the balance between the proportions of ships to stations to planets to stars, as well as the spacing between everything, is an important balance to get right. We've discussed a basic concept before that involves points of interest separated by wide gulfs that fleets normally warp through, and we plan on continuing with that system. Unfortunately, we hit a few roadblocks in the process of making everything extremely huge, in that the physics engine really hates floating point precision past 50k studs from the origin. A year ago, the physics engine would cause vibration of moving parts past about 10k studs from the origin, so the 5x increase is welcome, but it still becomes a problem when you want to build systems out to the 100k stud clipping distance. It also doesn't help that our ships are miniaturized, where small vibrations look much larger on a 1x1x1 stud ship. But good news! There are ways for us to mitigate this, that we'll be exploring the technical side of in the coming weeks. We've run into problems before that required creative solutions, so I have no doubt that we'll be able to work our way around this slight roadblock. In fact, one of the processes we're employing to reduce physics problems in the first place, meshing, has the bonus of reducing the visibility of vibration, when the ship is one part rather than 30 neatly aligned bricks. The current boundaries will allow us to still have extremely large systems from a fighters' perspective, but when it comes to the outrageously large XXXLs that factions can build, scale might get pretty wonky. On the server replication front, Lordrex has continued development over the past few weeks to make the system function as we need it to, and be robust enough to handle who-knows-how-many servers all sending structure health information. This week, he had another successful data test, where he edited values in one server and they were correctly sent to another parallel server. This would be hard enough in a standard Roblox universe place, where you'd have to send the data every instance of one place - but RoVerse has its unique system where all 220 star systems are loaded from the same place file. This means that the server has to keep track of which servers are the correct system, what structures are still in existence in that system, and then send the data through. With another successful test, we're a step closer to adding in health readouts and station explosions, so we can put a gif of it in the newsletter. Our newest teammate on the Development team is someone you all have probably heard of. We've posted his work for the Ninazu Collective in the Community Spotlight newsletter, and when we talk about faction ships his ships are usually around. One of the most active members of the community discord, and by far the biggest twitch streamer of RoVerse-related content - the one and only Juszl! Juszl has joined the team with the project of developing some default station models for factions that don't have the resources to get stations of their own design built right away. We still highly recommend factions build their own stations, as a consistent theme is an important aspect of a factions culture. No one would expect a VAK military station to be a standard-issue station model, now would they? We had initially planned not to build any station models ourselves, as they are pretty specific to factions, but it was determined that having a default version as a guideline would help other faction devs when building theirs - we can set size limits, part counts, and help establish the detail level that we expect. And he's already been hard at work! He streamed his progress as he started construction on an industrial-type station. For reference on the different station types, we recommend checking out the Introductory Videos page, and the Stations video, to get you started. That's all the progress Idyllic's internet has the strength to post, as he's off the grid for the weekend. But let us know in the discord community what you'd like to see us work on or ask any questions you have about the project. 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 planets have different gravity? A1: If we were building a realism simulator, it would be only fitting for planetary objects to have gravitational forces determined by their mass, but we feel like it would get too complicated too quickly for a majority of players. Having each world function differently, in regards to vehicle suspensions and projectile arcs would be hard to get used to, and would probably break all our vehicles. That's not to say we won't have a moon where you can jump 100 feet in the air, but most planets should have the same gravity. Q2: Will there be different types of mining lasers? A2: While we haven't quite gotten to developing mining systems, we have put some thought into it. To match the variety of combat ship weapons that keep things interesting and new, we plan on having different types of mining lasers and equipment, with a variety of stat tradeoffs - you might have a quick-mining laser, but it can't mine higher-tier ores, or a slow but efficient version. Mining will be a big part of the final game, so keeping that mechanic interesting is an important job. Q3: Will the Capital Update have every ship be free? A3: No. The Capital ship will allow you to earn credits for competing in the different gamemodes, which can then be exchanged for turrets or new ship unlocks. We plan on having a testing mode at some point in the future, so you can try out the more expensive ships without worrying about them getting destroyed in combat. Q4: Will there be a galactic police force establishing rules and keeping order? A4: There will be no dev-instated rules about conduct within RoVerse except for preventing and punishing cheating, it will be up to each faction to determine what is legal and what isn't within their own territory. They can hire a security force, shoot down transgressors, or place bounties on rule breakers and let the free market take care of them. Q5: If I get kicked from a faction or it shuts down, will I keep their ship designs? A5: We plan on there being two different groups of ships - ships that players own and can pull out of hangars whenever they want, and faction ships that are accessible from faction stations and carriers and require a group rank to access. You'll be able to keep your owned ships if you are fired or the faction shuts down operations, but any faction-owned ships will become inaccessible. It should be possible for factions to grant you ownership of a specific ship, if you earn it, that you could then personalize and make your 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! Hello everyone! Welcome to the 117th 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 into merging the Fighter and Capital systems, including changing over formats from one version to another, sorting items into their proper folders, and rigging everything up to use the same edit system for loadouts we've seen the past few weeks. With minimal changes, nearly drag-and-drop into the folder system, Idyllic was able to add the Excalibur to the Capital ship selection menu system. While he was at it, he also added folders for Civilian ships, that will come in the Freeroam update, so we can practically use the same file system throughout the full game. Next up came adding in all the data for the ship, like the Name and Corporation and the five stats shown on the comparison pane, as well as selecting the proper hangar for fighters, instead of the gigantic shipyard scaffold. Please note, the stat comparisons are still being compared against the max Capital values, and as such are incorrect - the point is that the system does work with additional ships, even fighters. The Excalibur looks quite small in the hangar, but when compared with the Heavy Cardinal, one of the larger ships, the size of the space makes sense - even the Cardinal has a class of fighters larger, and civilian craft like mining ships can be even larger. When designing hangars, it's important to make them bigger than you think you'll need, because someone will come along and design a bigger spaceship. Addition of the fighter weapon turrets was a bit more complicated - they were formatted differently and are a much smaller size - but after a few tweaks Idyllic was able to convert them to the new loadout system. Not every turret will be available for fighters, nor in a gimbal variety, so there are a few tweaks to make to UI yet, but the system functions excellently. Since it's the same system as for Capitals, all those features we've been working on are already baked in - ship skins will only require meshing of the fighter, faction fighters will be able to be dropped in, and even faction turret designs will be drag and drop. With those systems up and running, Idyllic took the time to rig up a few of the fighters that will be available in the update, making sure each class and odd variants functioned correctly. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Where will cargo be stored? By players, and by factions? How about spare ships? A1: Cargo will be able to be stored in all sorts of places, from the holds of your cargo ships, to Stations, to outposts with Cargo modules installed. It's a similar concept for spare ships, except they're held in hangar space. Individual players might have to pay a stationmaster a docking fee to hold their ships there, while a faction-owned station might be able to hold an entire fleet ready for battle. Q2: Will we be able to form penal battalions? A2: The effectiveness of the use of prisoners in combat is severely limited. There won't be any official system, but in the event that two factions merge and they want that as their lore, that would be a possibility. You could even call a faction colony on a far-out planet a penal colony, if you wish. Q3: Can we have modular ship designs for different kits? Like a cargo kit adding cargo modules, or a battle kit adding more weapons? A3: This should be possible with the system we're developing. Rather than having to scrap a ship and rebuild, which would get expensive, you'll have the ability to re-kit ships for a fee and a time delay, but there's nothing stopping us from switching out the ship model during this process. If you build it, we'll support it. Q4: Will there be any stealth ships? Stealth tech? A4: This has been brought up before several times, and we've come to the conclusion that 'stealth' systems like cloaking would be extremely overpowered on one side, or useless on the other. More moderate stealth may be possible, with possible tech including radar disruptors - players could still use their eyes, but if they rely on radar too much you'll be somewhat stealthy. Q5: What is the system that ships will use to travel around systems at high speed? FTL? A5: By now everyone knows that system-to-system jumps are done through wormholes, but within systems distances are small enough for ships to use some sort of hyperspeed or warp - the final name is up to faction lore and what they want to name their technology, though they will all function the same. Idyllic recommends the 'vroom drive.' 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 116th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you update on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we have continued work on the system environment generation from Legomadamada, and further development on turrets and automatic systems from Idyllic. Let's get started! Continuing off of his work last week on automated turrets, Idyllic decided it would be worth it to explore these systems in relation to automated station and outpost defense. So he dusted off the old outpost generation scripts, made a few tweaks, added some anchor points, and mounted up some defense turrets. Whereupon he found a problem, and the next project he would work on - Turret classes. The code on the backend has been able to support any turret size for quite some time now, but we haven't yet built and rigged any of the heavier turret sizes. This hasn't been a problem, as we've been using pretty small Capital ships, but when it comes to stations and outposts, light turrets just don't cut it. And so, he rigged up a larger model turret for testing porpoises, mounted them on the military outpost modules, and hit play. These turrets will fall into the 'Heavy' category, and pack quite a punch. For now, they're an upscaled version of the plasma turret firing conventional shots, but in the future we'll have custom turret models for every class and type. Currently, there is one code block running all of the turrets mounted on the station, meaning that all the turrets target a single location, which for early tests works perfectly fine. Our future plans involve allowing different turrets to target different opponents simultaneously, without running an entire script for each turret's movement. Here we have a dramatization of a battle with a station. Right now, the turrets are fairly inaccurate because they don't anticipate movement of their targets, nor adjust for range, but that will be fixed eventually. Don't expect a station or outpost you're attacking to just let you sit there and fire at it - it will take a coordinated effort between bomber fighters, long-range weapons, and armored ships distracting the defenses to make any sort of headway. We'd also recommend you avoid getting on the stationmaster's bad side, else you end up on the list of unwelcome travelers. We also tested the outpost shipyards module with the Avenger instead of a placeholder ship, and we are quite pleased with how it worked out. Ships up to size medium will be able to be built in these modules, while larger classes of ships will require a full station to be constructed. On the environment generation front, lego has continued work on asteroid clusters, with variations on scale and density, as well as an important feature that ties into something discussed earlier - outpost generation. The Pirate themed outpost modules are built into the same asteroid assets that will be spawning in fields, so blending the outpost into a field is a possible strategy - a strategy we of course had to test. Here we have a moderately dense field of asteroids crowding around an outpost, where at a distance it is nearly impossible to see the extent of it. In the case that someone does see it, the brave may move in for a closer look, while the smart would keep their distance - this space is full of pirates. The modules of the pirate outpost type are the largest of the outposts because they're built into giant rocks, but they still can be quite flexible in their chaotic layout, which was an intentional design choice. The other systems are designed to be organized and rational, while the pirate outposts use all three dimensions to their fullest. 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 select specific turret groups to fire at different times? A1: Weapon groups are a planned feature for Capital ships as they get more and more turrets, and we hope to let you select groups yourself, as your play style sees fit. Whether you prefer location based groups, or turret type, flexibility is key. Q2: Will there be faction-made quests? Will they be able to award money or weapons, or have multiple objectives? A2: We plan on having a system that allows you to reward players for selling your faction minerals, delivering products, and fulfilling bounties, but the system of developer-made quests given out by NPCs will be entirely separate. Perhaps if a faction has something important in mind, like a quest required to achieve a rank we could work with you, but an in-depth faction quest system is not currently planned. Q3: How will subfactions be able to compete if they can't build ships larger than Medium class in outpost shipyards? A3: Most of the Capital combat we foresee in RoVerse will take place between ships of the lower size classes, as they will be more flexible and affordable for groups to build. The larger ships will require substantial infrastructure beyond what a subfaction could provide, and it will take significant effort for a full faction to be able to build a fleet of their own. Subfactions should be just fine with Medium and Small Capitals, and if they find they're pushing the boundaries of their infrastructure, they should consider making the jump to faction status. Q4: Will automated mining bots be a thing? A4: Any sort of automated system is really contrary to the core goals of RoVerse. We're here to create a system where it is the efforts of real players that determines a factions success, not how efficiently they game the system to produce ore for free. An automated mining system would just be begging for abuse, even if we required you to be in-game to make use of it - you could just program your character's ship to fly in circles overnight, letting the bots do the work. Besides the abuse problem, automating some sort of AI to search for and collect ores would be expensive to run on the server, in the same way combat drones would. Q5: How complex do hangar details on Capital ships need to be? A5: On the Avenger, we added in distinct hangar doors where we had always planned on having them. For those that have designed a ship that doesn't have a space for such a large detail, but still want to have some hangar space, there are a few pseudo-science options for figuring out where the fighters 'come from' like BSG launch tubes, or localized teleport systems. Q6: How will players get into fighters held on Carrier ships? A6: We plan for the ability of other players to join you on your ship as both crewmen, to man the turrets while you pilot your ship, and as passengers - players who can see what's going on, but can only watch, who then can jump into fighters held in the hangar bays. 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 |