NEWS
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Hello everyone! Welcome to the 232nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic experimented with mesh deformation and their potential for ocean waves, a new Capital gamemode has been created, Capital shields have been finished up, and a large variety of ship skins have been created for default ships, to make use of the upcoming skins feature. Idyllic was challenged by the community to look into how mesh deformation worked. It's a new technology that has some excellent potential in a game like RoVerse - it allows meshes to be bent and deformed pretty much at will. It has applications in character animation, which is was designed for, as well as doing a wide variety of other things, like making ocean waves. After a few near-successes, Idyllic managed to code a wave system entirely independent of the Roblox water smooth terrain system, which means it could be a suitable replacement for water, which wouldn't work on our round planets.  Last week we were extremely close to functional shield effects, having created the low-res mesh of the Bolitho. This week we wrapped up that work by welding the mesh to the Capital ship, and hooking it into the code that makes shields flash. We also had to hook up a bit of new code to replicate the shield flash to other clients, which was successful. Now when you're laying down laser fire across a ship's hull, you can see their shields dying in real time.  With the completion of the Juggernaut gamemode, attention was turned to the next important Capital gamemode on our list - Capital Team Death Match. Two teams will vie for supremacy of the skies as opposing fleets of Capital ships. Backup is limited, so make sure you have a winning strategy.  We've been working on a ship skin system for quite a while, and the mechanics and menus for selecting a skin have been completed for quite a while, however, we were sorely lacking in selection. With that in mind, we have created at least one skin for every default ship, with plenty more to come in the future. We have a special announcement to make as well: The CEO of Calexian Industries has decided to sponsor a community event, providing wonderful rewards should his challenges be met. Each cycle, there will be a set of tasks that must be completed by the community as a whole, in the Dogfight. Progress will be tracked weekly in the newsletters, and if the goal is met by the end of the Cycle, a reward ship will be made available for everyone. Challenges begin in Cycle 12 (January 3rd).  The community dogfight continued again this week, with members of the community coming together to blast each other out of the sky. Here are a selection of screenshots from the event - send in your own if you have them. Join us next week at 1pm and 8pm EST and earn double credits for the duration.    This week in the dogfight there were 492 kills, 6 with auto, 21 with beam, 358 with laser, 9 with plasma, 1 with railgun, and 97 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Oracle with 159 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 107. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 297 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 202. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were PreadaterX51, with 324 kills and 126 deaths and a 2.57 KDR; FangABXY with 98 kills, 22 deaths and a 4.45 KDR; and IdyllicDestroyer with 46 kills, 19 deaths, and a 2.42 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Nihilos Asterus 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 76)  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 is skinny doing? A1: "Oh I’m fine. Just living my life. How’re you all doing?" Q2: What is the largest fighter in the dogfight? A2: The Gladius is the largest default fighter, while the Constantine is by far the largest faction fighter available. Q3: Will internet latency be dealt with in any meaningful manner that results in balancing? A3: It is unlikely that there is much of anything the Dev team can do about internet latency beyond streamlining the networking code to be as light as possible. Take comfort in knowing that internet speeds are likely to improve as time marches inexorably forward, and fiber internet becomes more widely available. 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 231st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week marks the single most productive week the development team has had in two years - we have crossed a significant number of items off of our list, including capital wreck generation, proportional collision bounce, flak damage falloff over distance, various fixes to capital weapons, capital ship explosions, fighter turret hit effects, a leaderboard system for the juggernaut gamemode, and a low-poly hull mesh for Bolitho. Let's get started! First up is capital wreck generation. When a Capital ship dies, we could just make them evaporate in an incredible explosion of fire, erasing themselves forever from this dimension, but that just doesn't seem right. An incredible amount of work is put into making a Capital ship, and we don't want it all to just vanish. To that end, when a Capital ship dies, it leaves behind a wreck. In freeroam, they will be able to be scavenged for materials, so you may be able to recover some costs, or an enterprising band of pirates might swoop in and claim it for themselves. With that in mind, we wrote up a bit of code that takes the unioned pieces of each ship, and breaks them apart just a little, then spices things up with a few bits of random debris, leaving behind a beautifully destroyed ship in the wake of a cataclysmic explosion. Speaking of cataclysmic explosions, the next item we crossed off this week was making capital ships explode. We copied over the effects from our old Capital demo, hooked them up to the code, and let them blow ships to pieces.   With that working, Idyllic moved on to improving Capital hitboxes. Previously, they were a box. While this may have worked for tiny fighters, Capitals come in all shapes and sizes, and hitbox accuracy is very important. With that in mind, Idyllic took the Bolitho to blender, painstakingly created an outline mesh that is ever so slightly larger than Bolitho, and imported it back in. As a bonus, this shell will work fantastically for energy shield flashing, in addition to its important uses for weapon hit detection and collisions.     Speaking of collisions - the original dogfight code was set up to bounce every ship that hits something with a specific force, making everything bounce the same distance. While this was ok for fighters, Capitals are much larger, and hit things much harder. So the code was modified to take into consideration the mass of the ship when calculating the force, so Capitals barely bounce, while fighters bounce the usual amount. Heavier fighters may notice they bounce a bit less as well.  With Capital hitboxes improved, an improvement that could be made became apparent. There wasn't enough visual feedback that you had actually hit something with fighter weaponry. Sure, the reticle hitmarkers would light up, but other than that laser bolts and such would just disappear. This had to be improved. An old energy flare particle was found, and coded to appear whenever a shot hits its mark.  A very satisfying pop. Other additions to weapon mechanics including making conventional bolts from capitals pass through the flak they shoot at fighters, instead of bouncing off; flak interference with aim has been disabled for now, as it's more annoying than anything; automated flak aim now ignores teammates; and damage from flak now falls off over distance from the explosion center, so only a direct hit will do maximum damage. Last up this week is the Juggernaut gamemode leaderboard. This mode required a slight tweak to the team death match leaderboard, where one team's lives remaining score is adjusted to the remaining health of the Capital/Juggernaut players. As they are damaged, their score bar goes down in real time and increases if their shields begin to recharge, and a percentage is shown so you know just how much more damage you have to do.  The community dogfight continued again this week, with members of the community coming together to blast each other out of the sky. Here are a selection of screenshots from the event - send in your own if you have them. Join us next week at 1pm and 8pm EST and earn double credits for the duration.   This week in the dogfight there were 357 kills, 41 with auto, 17 with beam, 0 with laser, 11 with plasma, 2 with railgun, and 286 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the HAs7-1_Sensha with 190 kills, followed by the Chariot with 128. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 150 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 127. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 190 kills and 27 deaths and a 7.03 KDR; devOmegax with 132 kills, 31 deaths and a 4.25 KDR; and CandyCobalt with 19 kills, 0 deaths, and a inf KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Nihilos Asterus 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 75)  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 I cover my ships in bits of asteroid? A1: While in theory bits of asteroid could work as natural camouflage to the untrained pilot, they wouldn't provide any extra protection from attacks. Technically, shooting a laser at rock armor would do some amount of damage that would accumulate over time, which would be factored into the ship's 'hull' health count. The ships could look pretty cool, though. 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 230th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic returned to upgrade ship filters, and rigged two brand-new faction ships. Our ship filter system supports sorting by default ships, faction ships, ships you don't own, and ships you already own. Previously, this system was additive - if you ticked owned and faction, it would compile a list of all faction ships and all owned ships. This wasn't quite what we wanted from filters, so this week we've revised the code a bit.  They aren't quite ready for production yet, as there's still a few problems with shallow copying tables, but they should be resolved and re-enabled as soon as those problems are solved. Two new ships have been rigged and added to the Dogfight - the Solerian Chariot  and the Akatana HAs7-1 Sensha, which were both apparently a collaboration between Solera and the House. It will be interesting to see what future projects this arrangement produces.  The community dogfight continued again this week, with members of the community coming together to blast each other out of the sky. Here are a selection of screenshots from the event - send in your own if you have them. Join us next week at 1pm and 8pm EST and earn double credits for the duration.    This week in the dogfight there were 353 kills, 20 with auto, 28 with beam, 236 with laser, 15 with plasma, 14 with railgun, and 40 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Iridium with 78 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 67. The most dangerous map was Core_of_Nothing with 118 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 103. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were Imaboss2122, with 99 kills and 3 deaths and a 33 KDR; Tzleo with 64 kills, 25 deaths and a 2.56 KDR; and MaxieLaurem with 58 kills, 8 deaths, and a 7.25 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Nihilos Asterus 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 74)  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: Do larger fighter classes have higher base stats? A1: Indeed. A medium fighter with 5 points of armor is going to have more health than a light fighter with the same number. This is inverted for stats like speed and agility, with smaller ships being naturally more nimble. 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 229th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic continued to work on the turret modification menu, working down the list of features remaining that we discussed last week, there is a new armament calculator to help you design ship stats, and a new ship from the community has been added to the dogfight. The turret visualization system was hooked up to the new buttons, disabled turrets have been made to get greyed out and be unselectable, and turrets you have not yet purchased for that ship turn white instead of orange.  Turret capacity is also now in progress, which required some updates to default ship stats, as well as some revisions to the math that calculates the gradient on the UI, with solid results. After realizing that previous iterations of the menu lacked the ever-important Blank turret button, which was quickly added, Idyllic set to work perfecting the math on the gradient that runs the power bar placed in the middle of the screen.  We also have developed a brand-new calculator for use when designing faction ships - on the 4th sheet of the Armament Tables page, you can input ship class, number of turret mounts, and your ideal loadout, and it will tell you how many armament points such a loadout would require, or if it would require too many armament points to be possible.  A new public faction ship has been submitted by a member of the community - the MXI-03 Maroon Defender.  The community dogfight continued again this week, with members of the community coming together to blast each other out of the sky. Here are a selection of screenshots from the event - send in your own if you have them. Join us next week at 1pm and 8pm EST and earn double credits for the duration.    This week in the dogfight there were 93 kills, 30 with auto, 35 with beam, 16 with laser, 0 with plasma, 10 with railgun, and 2 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Hayabusa_III with 31 kills, followed by the Iridium with 22. The most dangerous map was Blue_Spaceway with 36 deaths, followed by Classic with 27. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 33 kills and 11 deaths and a 3 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 22 kills, 22 deaths and a 1 KDR; and CandyCobalt with 15 kills, 13 deaths, and a 1.15 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Nihilos Asterus 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 73)  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 have a civilian cargo area in case I need to store my stuff? A1: Neutral stations may have a bit of storage space for you to use, mostly when transferring goods between a mining ship and a cargo ship, but if you're filling your holds up, it's time to sell the ore, start refining it, or haul it to where the prices are better. At faction stations and outposts, you'll have a bit more room to work with, since refined materials are directly useful for building structures in those situations. Q2: Can we make a mining ship that eats asteroids whole? A2: That'd be really cool, wouldn't it? Mining ships can get up into the Medium Capital size range, which is more than enough to swallow an occasional small asteroid, and that would add a bit of variety instead of everything being mining lasers. We'll try and make that happen. 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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