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RoVerse Development Newsletter #315

1/1/2023

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 315th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made.

The last time we saw each other was in the lead-up to the Hallows Eve '22 event, where a mysterious goo substance was slowly taking over the Station, wreaking havoc on civilian life and disrupting all sorts of important systems, including the broadcast network we used to deliver our weekly updates. Thanks to the valiant efforts of members of the community, we got everyone off the Station without incident and were able to contain the spread of the goo to the Civilian ring. And thanks to the diligent efforts of the Professor, the Engineer, and the Stationmaster, in the intervening time they've managed to fix up the Station as good as new. In fact, they've taken the opportunity to make some improvements to the Station.

With the lore wrapped up for the event, it's time to talk business - Freeroam.

We set ourselves a deadline and we intend to keep it. As of the posting of this newsletter, a beta version of Hyperion Station will be open to the public. Keep in mind, this is in no way a complete release - it is a baseplate upon which we will be building the full game, just with public participation. We have created a form, which you can use to submit any bugs and issues you find in the game.

Lets start with definitions - Freeroam is the name we've given to the phase of the project that encompasses the development of all the features that involve Exploration, Adventure, Quests, Bounties, Factions, Fleets, Mining, and everything else. It is significantly wider in breadth than the Dogfight stages were, but hopefully significantly easier to manage in a step-by-step update process that adds features on over time instead of saving everything up for a big release.

With that in mind, Freeroam will come in three stages - Hyperion Station, RoVerse Galactic, and Factions. Starting with the smallest and easiest stage, we'll be updating Hyperion with a bunch of adventure-oriented features, like quests, bounties, and basic ship features. From there, we'll expand to the rest of the galaxy with exploration and construction features, and bigger ships. Last will come Factions, which will be the most challenging and complex systems to develop, including faction control of territory, shared resources, and extremely large construction projects.

We'd like to thank everyone that's stuck around with us these past few years during a rollercoaster of Roblox and Real-life events that have made it seem like this project would never reach a satisfying conclusion. Your participation in the community and feedback have been invaluable in keeping this project going all this time, and we hope that in the coming year your trust in us will begin to bear promising fruit. I am dedicated to bringing an interesting and exciting game in the sci fi genre, and with clan-participation aspects, to the Roblox platform, and I am determined to make it happen this year. New years is one of the most hopeful times of year, and I an hopeful that we can get this game off the ground in the very near future. So without further ado, and to try not to hype things up too much, here is the first step of many to finishing this game.

Hyperion Station - Freeroam Phase 1 is available here.

(And the Bug Report Form is Available here.)

Go, explore the additions to the map. See first-hand the future important locations that you've only glimpsed in pictures before now. Visit the Korol's hideout before you have to worry about being infamous enough to make it past the door, grab some Sushi from the new restaurant, or pretend to be the Sheriff. And who knows, this time next year, you might just be showing old secrets to the next generation of players in RoVerse. In any case, we'll be back next week with the first set of updates.

See you then.

Happy New Years from the RoVerse Team.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #314

8/21/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 314th 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 developing a new and important aspect of Hyperion Station - respawn mechanics. RoVerse is intended to have a fairly complex respawning system, and the work we've done over the past few weeks has set the stage for what we intend to expand as the game does. It all starts with a few key ideas - players should maintain their last location whenever possible; when players die, they should be able to return to their last location, or a safe location they've recently visited; players that have been away for some time, should return to a location that makes sense to the in-game story. With these three factors in mind, we've developed the following system.

Players that leave the game have their last location saved to a datastore. If they merely lost connection, are server-hopping, or are just leaving for a short time, they can rejoin the game and pick up right where they left off - their location is unchanged.

If they return much later, several hours or the next day, the in-game story pretends that they went on their way - they returned their mining ship to the cargo hangar, or they returned to their room at the hotel, or they visited the civilian areas in the upper disk. In these cases, they spawn at select spawn locations based roughly on what they were up to when they last left.

These mechanics were simple to develop - the final category was much more complicated, but also much more interesting. When players die at Hyperion, whether because they got into a gunfight with criminals or police, tripped and fell into an ore grinder, or were nearly incinerated in the core, they are now saved by a helpful medical AI with access to a short-range transporter device and teleported straight to the Station's Medical Facility. There, the best automated doctors patch you up and get you right back into the action - however, you can use the short-range transporter to return to one of the last few locations you've visited, to get right back into the action.

To make this work, on the backend there was a lot of work to track the last locations your player has visited. We found an extremely useful module that lets you divide the world up into zones based on groups of bricks, that can also track when a player enters and leaves a zone. We then chopped the Station up into the 46 pre-planned areas, from sushi shop to Faction Hall, as well as dividing them up by the different Sectors each smaller area exists in.

The Module wasn't quite designed for what we needed, but we worked out a way to allow a hierarchical structure of zones - when you're in the middle of the Entertainment District, for example, it registers you as in that sector, but not in any of the sub-rooms like the Café or Arcade.

We're still working on the visual effects, like the transportation and respawning animations, but on a technical side the mechanics are functional and successful. Much like any modern game where your character dies, you can now respawn in the last safe area you've been and get right back to the action without having to wander all the way from some centralized respawn location, or get randomly spread across a rather huge Station.

This feature will be mechanically useful for respawning, but also gameplay-useful for players trying to describe where they're at if they want to meet up with another player. It will also come into play when reporting crimes, letting the police know where the action is so they can get to arresting ne'er-do-wells.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #313

8/7/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 313th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

These past two weeks, most of the team has been on family vacations and out of contact, but we do have some updates and things to talk about. We've got another criminal recon quest in several parts, this time involving tracking a specific NPC, a completed hover-vehicle for delivering cargo, and a call for submissions of Faction food items for the Café that is soon to be added to Hyperion.

First up, we have out new vehicle. As a warning to all aspiring criminals, hijacking a post-office vehicle is a federal offense punishable by death. Also, they are extremely slow, so they make terrible escape vehicles.

Mori's hovering cargo delivery drone is fully rigged up and ready for action as a slow, but entertaining, mode of transport.

Last we left you, we'd finished up the Recon: Location Quest code. Now, we've added on three variations of that particular quest. First up, the Korol will have you watching an NPC that hangs out in one specific location. While quite similar to the location variation, the highlight lights up a person instead. Simple code, simple variation.

The next variation involved upgrading our Station NPC system to spawn a specific NPC whenever the quest starts, that follows a preset path in a loop around the station. Find them, catch up, and watch what they're up to, for criminal reasons. Get too close, and they get suspicious. Stray too far, and you'll miss what they're doing.

The NPC system has been upgraded to spawn an NPC whenever requested, with a special action assigned - in this case, follow a randomly selected path, pathfinding around obstacles. This NPC won't be stopping to dance or taking up all the bench space - he's on a mission. Currently the NPC's avatar is randomly selected from the big list of everyone who's played RoVerse, but eventually it will spawn, for example, a security guard on patrol, or a smuggler with a briefcase.

The final variation of the quest is worth a bit more reputation - instead of walking in a loop, the NPC will walk along a path with a beginning and an end, and you'll have limited time to find them, see what they're up to, and complete your mission before they go somewhere you aren't allowed. Failing means facing the Korol, so do be careful.

The explorations into the NPC system originally built by Stratiz will be a major aspect of Hyperion, where the NPCs aren't just random characters wandering around (and sometimes dancing), but simulated people that get up in the morning, head down to Hyperion's Ring, and go about doing their business, whether that is enjoying the Entertainment Sector, boarding a ship for a distant station, or carrying around cargo. And the NPC system sure is flexible enough, these additions show that we can approach the idea, if we want to.

Last up, we've been hard at work working on the central restaurant in Hyperion's Entertainment District, but we have a specific need that we'd like the community to help out with. If you have a Faction, or if you are particularly creative, we'd like you to build some food items from your lore, that we can add to the menu at the Donald Café. Bonus points if they're unique and memorable, like the selections from the Onyx Hold and Akatana below.

We have a selection of Faction Food items from the Faction Food Newsletter we did a while back, so if you'd like to join them in providing food items, get in contact with Idyllic.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #312

7/24/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 312th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week was all about the forces fighting over Hyperion Station, from the criminals breaking the law, to the security officers that enforce them. Our 3D artist Mori has been hard at work making the armor and tools of these two sides, Idyllic has been working on more crimes, Skinny has been building out a new Post and Freight area on Hyperion, and Idyllic, Skinny, and Fang have completed the first Hyperion Restaurant.

Hyperion has received a new area, courtesy of Skinny. Nestled across from the Arcade where the storage areas used to be, the Post and Freight stall handles all of Hyperion's internal mail and package delivery. If you've got some cargo that wont fit in the vwoop tubes, they have the drones to deliver those crates anywhere on the Station.

While we don't plan for any actual features to use this area, it is a nice bit of background scenery to liven up the place. And inside the storage area is one of our newest vehicles - built by Mori. It's a cargo-lifting drone/forklift. Equipped with a pair of gripping claws, the lift can grab crates by the side, or pick up a flat pallet to carry oddly-shaped cargo. Built on a similar platform to the Hoverquads, it hovers above the ground on it's own power.

One of the benefits of ranking up in the security enforcement questline unlocks a security force uniform and body armor for players to equip to stand out in the crowd. This week, Mori put together the several variations of uniform we'll need.

The Security Force uniform is equipped with medium armor, a full helmet with face protection, tactical pockets for any equipment they might need in the field, and backup ammunition for when they get locked into a gunfight with the Station's criminal element.

They come with several versions, with or without full facemask and visor.

And they are equipped with a sheriff-issued sidearm with two settings - stun, and lethal. If you're being chased and see the neon switch from green to red, best comply immediately.

On the other hand, the criminal element of Hyperion Station is well-established. They have access to the same or better equipment than the security forces have access to.

They too have medium armor, but in a more flexible cut for getting out of tight scrapes with the law. Pouches for law-breaking equipment, and tactical kneepads for hacking consoles in tight maintenance corridors.

And unlike the security forces, the criminals have a bit of style.

So which side will you be choosing?

Skinny, Fang, and Idyllic have been collaborating on bringing a sushi-themed restaurant to Hyperion Station, serving a variety of Japanese-themed foods, from ramen to yakitori to sushi. The ground floor is a simple café with sushi-delivery trains, while the more exclusive upstairs area serves the full menu to its treasured guests. Introducing Daijobu Sushi:

The latest crimes to get a final polish and modularization are the recon/surveillance crimes. Tasked with watching a location for anything interesting, the player just has to hang around the target and not be noticed. These crimes now have a proper highlight, instead of giant spheres, a detection meter if you stray too close for too long, and a colored highlight indicator for the different states - too close, too far, obscured by obstacles, and just right.

You can now fail the surveillance task by getting too close to the target, and then the Korol gets disappointed with you and you feel bad.

RoVerse Development newsletter #311

7/17/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 311th 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 quite busy on a variety of development areas. Idyllic dove back into the code for the questing system, completing the module for graffiti quests, Skinny continued optimizing different areas of Hyperion. We also have a big announcement, so stay tuned to the end of the Newsletter.

When we last left quests, we had completed the 'smash window' module, and made available quests show up on the criminal task board. Since then, we've been slowly expanding and optimizing this code, adding on extra final touches to make them as good as possible. Now, we've got the graffiti quests all up and running, giving you a target to use your art skills on. We also added the random-selection functions that pick a random untouched window or wall location as the target of your criminal endeavors. Coming soon, a fresh clean/repair quest will load at the neutral quest board asking kind citizens to clean up the damage the criminal scum have done.

Unlike windows, which are easy enough to highlight the shape of so you know where to go to complete your quest, graffiti can be on any flat undecorated surface, and needed a special way to identify to the player. We tried out billboardguis with alwaysontop turned on, with a shaded version of the graffiti artwork, but that wasn't very identifiable at long distances. It could work if we created a second bright white version of the decal, but in the long run, we'd like to avoid that and keep it extremely easy to add more graffiti to our library, if Factions wish to contribute.

In the end, we used the Curve Cutter Plugin to draw a rough outline of a basic graffiti shape, which disappears as you work your magic. Instead of a huge cube highlight, the target identifier is now a graffiti-shaped space.

Skinny has continued improving the lighting and optimizing builds, and there are certainly a lot of areas due for improvement. Below is an example of the poor optimization decisions someone in the deep past made, that we need to fix, so that players have the best in-game experience possible.

Alright, it's time for the big announcement:

For those of you who have followed this project for the past 5 years, you know of our struggles retaining developers working on the project, when their skills are much more lucrative elsewhere on the platform. We had a strong showing initially, with a big commitment from members of the Clan community, but that didn't carry this project through long enough to see it completed. We don't fault those prior devs for moving on to bigger and better things, in fact we are inspired by them. This platform provides an unmatched opportunity for those with bold ideas and dedication to chase their dreams, and achieve the unimaginable.

But this project must evolve with the times - a cool idea isn't enough to keep developers engaged anymore. With DevEx, working on Roblox isn't just entertainment or a hobby, but an actual potential occupation. With that in mind, and with the return of Banman455 to the development team, we have made the decision to begin directly funding this game, and using those funds to hire on new developers who can help us achieve its potential. In the past two weeks, we've hired on two VFX/Animation artists who are putting together a trailer for the game, we are in the process of hiring two coders to take on various aspects of the game, and a 3D artist specializing in meshing and texturing, and we're going to use their talents to get this game to Freeroam Stage 1.

Having a sponsor or two has definitely opened doors that were unavailable just a month ago, and this week the entire team has been more active than ever getting things moving, assigning tasks to new developers, and making sure everyone has what they need to get to work on the very achievable task of Freeroam Stage 1.

To the community - Thank you for your support over the past few years. I hope you'll stick around with us just a little longer, while we make the preeminent sci-fi space exploration and combat game on the platform. And if you or anyone you know would like to help out, drop one of the Directors a Direct Message, and show us what you can do, and we'll see if there's room on the team for your skills.

Enjoy this free sneak-peek of the new RoVerse Trailer Set - See if you can figure out where this picture was taken.

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

No questions this week - hit us up in #dev_questions if there's anything you'd like to know.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #310

7/10/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 310th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

Skinny has continued updating the visuals at Hyperion, moving on from the Pilot's Sector, to the Docking Arm Hub. The Sheriff's office has acquired quite an improvement to its lighting setup, now properly lit for the tough job of keeping the Station secure.

...and the Security Checkpoint as well:

From there, he headed into the core, to try and make the constrained power of a miniature sun glow like you'd expect it to.

Idyllic spent this week pushing ahead with the wave-simulating deforming mesh concept - last week we ran into the resolution limits that meshing an entire sphere at once would cause, and thanks to some input from the community, we think we've found a good solution. Surprisingly, it's not technically chunk loading. Instead, a single hexagonal chunk of water follows you around, moving as you do, and expanding out to the horizon. Waves can be a lot higher resolution than the full planet offered, but it does involve a lot more complicated math.

Out first iteration involved moving the hex chunk around so you were always directly in the center of the loaded water area, however, that makes the waves jostle about as the bones move up and down the noise field as you move, which doesn't look very good. We moved to visualizing things with a simulated contour map, to make things easier to see:

In this video, wave movement over time has been turned off, to test whether high points stay in the same place. Unfortunately, as you can see, the high points did not stay in place.

The second iteration instead moves the water chunk in discrete steps, so that any bone that moves is always in the exact same spot as the bone it replaces. Highlighted below are the various bone locations, with the center point highlighted white.

There remain a few edge cases we're looking at diagnosing, but this system should work out splendidly. And if it doesn't work like we need it to, we can always quickly rig up a chunk loading system until it does.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #309

7/4/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 309th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, we've got a new proof of concept for planets, updates to Hyperion's aesthetics, and a sneak peek at the criminal hideout at the Station.

Using the new deformable mesh feature, Skinny and Idyllic collaborated to create a proof-of-concept for planetary water. We showed off generated wave systems using a deforming mesh in a map intended to be added to the dogfight, however, that only worked on a flat plane, and was rather repetitive. For planets, we need water to be much more randomized, but still look believable as a wave system - though we do have a bit of wiggle room in the sci fi genre and alien worlds. With that in mind, we put together a small-scale, low-res demo.

Using a python script to generate bones, automatic weights to assign the vertices of an icosphere to a bone, and the custom rig importer, we imported a mesh 'sea level'. With a bit of looping and math.noise, which happens to be 3D Perlin noise, we generated a gentle tidal system for a demo planet. Coincidentally, this might be the one instance where having planets be spheres actually made things easier for us than if it was a large flat plane.

At this scale, the waves appear to be tidal in nature, but we're optimistic about increasing the resolution of the sphere to achieve better wave-shapes when seen up close, like you will when you're a character standing on the shore of an alien beach. Also of interest, the number of bones is less than the number of vertices on the sphere, by one level of subdivision, and the wave forms come naturally from the automatic weight of the bone applied to the mesh.

Skinny has taken to 'fixing' up Hyperion Station, which is a monumental task. He has been removing duplicate parts, fixing z-fighting, and fixing up the small details that somehow got overlooked the first time they got built. Making billboards brighter and more readable...

...Fixing particles that clipped through the edges of models when they weren't supposed to...

...Unaligned unions that moved out of place without permission...

...and small building errors no one would ever notice.

And to wrap it all up, he set Hyperion up for Future lighting, to make the most of some of the coolest aesthetic features we have access to.

The rest of the team collaborated this week on the Criminal Hideout, where the kingpin of Hyperion Station holds his court. This dark and dingy bar is an ominous place that those who are good and law-abiding should hope to never see. Kitted out with a bar of its own, holopool table, armory, kingpin's office, and audience room, this hideout has everything the Hyperion Sect needs to wrest control over the Station.

And for the best part, the holopool table is fully functional. You just have to make up your own set of rules for it.

We hope all the Americans in our community had a pleasant holiday, and Canadians too. And hopefully you still have all of your fingers.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #308

6/26/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 308th 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 just about got crafting working, which was significantly more complicated than we ever expected. Not only do we have to handle individual consoles keeping track of separate recipes and the time that each of those requires, but we also have to handle the player coming back later and picking up the item they chose to craft. We also had a bit of a false start when it came to crafting intermediate ingredients, which we were taking much too literally, when the easiest solution involves just crafting the final item and keeping a running tally of resources used in the meantime. And on top of all of that, we have to handle players leaving the game, and coming back much later, which adds a datastore element to the whole thing. But regardless, we've got the first steps ready to go, and they aren't just the flash UI bits either.

Now, the player's inventory system properly tracks whether you have the necessary resources to craft an item, it can calculate how long it'll take to complete that crafting, and it'll wait until you hit the collect button to add the finished product to your inventory. Eagle-eyed viewers will have caught the new info panel, that displays how many of a crafted item you already have, and shows the increase when you collect your finished goods.

Last week we showed the two halves of the inventory system, this week we've got them combined into one. The list of inventory items that updates live as you collect resources, and the character inventory where you can equip weapons and tools.

Also this week, thanks to a tweet by Elttob_ and ParallelMayhem, we experimented a bit with inverted meshes and backlit shadows. Here's the tweet's image that got us excited - shadows in Roblox are pretty basic, but there are lots of cool hacks and tricks to get them to do cool things when you need to, and this trick is one of them.

By turning a specialmesh inside out, shadows that were supposed to be cast on the top, instead render on the bottom. In most cases, this would be weird and useless - however, in space, this is incredibly useful to give depth to planetary rings. The shadows of a moon or asteroids being cast on the top of the ring is alright, but being able to see the shadow from the bottom, like the ring is actually made up of little bits of debris, rocks, and ice, adds an incredible if subtle visual impact to the model.
And so, we experimented:

The shadows from the bottom of a simple plane are pretty cool. However, this trick also makes the shadow not render on the top of the mesh, so a duplicate that faces the normal way is still required.

As an added bonus, the small-scale of our spaceship portions of the game make the limited range of Roblox shadows seem that much larger - rather than looking like shadows end 50 feet away, they look to be 5000. We're looking forward to continue experimenting as we work on solar system generation.

RoVerse Development Newsletter #307

6/19/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 307th 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 continued work on the Economy Demo, completing the first steps of an inventory and time-delayed crafting system, as well as adding on a few additional menus to serve these new features.

Last week we showed a rudimentary inventory system, that kept track of how much ore you had collected by walking over it. It displayed this info only on the crafting screen for an item that used those resources, as a fraction of the amount required. This week, we've added a dedicated inventory screen, so you can see what items you have on hand outright.

Updates are fed from the server, that keeps track of your inventory. If anyone has any suggestions for other information they'd like to see on the inventory page, besides item and quantity, let us know. Right now, there's no maximum limit on the number of items you can hold, as we're still in the midst of discussion over whether it should be a quantity limit, or a volume limit. It seems that only the most realistic games try to go for an accurate scale of items between in-world and in-inventory, but is that the right choice for a game primarily based around mining ores in space, in the future?

We also didn't forget to make the total count numbers add up at the top of the menu:

With the inventory scroll out of the way, it was time to move on to the second pane on-screen when viewing a personal inventory. The middle of the UI has been reserved for character interactions, equipping tools and armor, selecting special upgrades, and perhaps even upgrading stats. With those plans in mind, we've begun working on that panel:

We'll have more info about this panel, and the other inventory menus next week.

Next up was a very exciting feature - making the crafting system work. While there remain a few kinks to be worked out, and some further discussions to be had with the community about how crafting things is expected to work, on the visual side things are going quite well. We have connected the crafting button to some code that adds up the time to completion, tracks how long is remaining, and visually displays that info with a highlight. The timer counts down as progress is made, and if you change your mind you can always hit cancel.

And if you don't want to hang out in the fabrication interface for however long your crafting is going to take, we've mocked up what a progress indicator on your HUD might look like once you leave.

It'll just be up to you to remember what you were crafting, and where you left it.

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!
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!

RoVerse Development newsletter #306

6/12/2022

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 306th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

Alert the Dwarves! This week was all about mining, ores, and more crafting, including most of the work required for a crafting system demo that we hope to get out to the community soon.

We started off this week with a revision to the UI for the Fabrication terminal. You might remember it getting quite hideous, with lists of resources and textbuttons like it was a game straight out of the 2009 Robloxian past. But no more. We've given our first-pass effort at actually designing the interface now that we've got the basic requirements down:

Using strong vertical bars to separate the different areas of things you can do at that console, and making the most of scrolling frames, the first iteration was off to a great start. It had tick marks for the number of crafting ingredients required for each item, items were sorted into categories based on other similar items, and clicking any of them would open the construction menu with that item and its recipe selected. But we didn't stop there - further work was required, including adding a title, so you know what menu system you're interacting with, an exit button, to close the menu, and a background, for better contrast with the world going on behind the menu. We added a temporary console prompt to open the menu, further refined the visuals of the category titles, and made the code nice and modular, so we can open to any specific window on a whim.

It was then that we saw the incredible potential just barely out of our reach - creating a simulated system, with ores, mining, and a player inventory, and we could test out these crafting menus to their fullest extent. So we jumped at the chance, digging up save files that haven't been edited since 2017:

Turning these proof-of-concept ores into individual clusters that could be spawned wherever we pleased:

Adding on the new ores and minerals we've added since we made the originals, and making a generation system that uses a weighted random to place a variety of ores across the baseplate that hosts the crafting terminal.

And most importantly, adding a basic "mining" function that allows you to walk over the ores and minerals and have them added to your inventory.

And finally, connecting this inventory system with the crafting menu, so that when you select an item to craft, the number of that specific resource you have collected is displayed next to the cost.

There are just a few more things we need to add before we open this up to the public, so stick around until next week when we get to show those things off.

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 get rail vehicles, conveyor belts, or teleporters to get us places?

A1: Rail travel is a potentially viable feature we could look into developing for planet surfaces, it's just a matter of constructing the rails between places you'd want to go. Conveyor belts are a bit weird as a method of transportation, but I believe they're beyond our scope both for players or for cargo - stick to using vwoop tubes for the time being. Teleportation in the RoVerse Universe is a very limited technology. It exists, that's for sure, but it isn't considered a viable way to travel the stars - perhaps because of some unknown danger. Shortrange teleports in Stations are used every once in a while, and zapping yourself from outside your ship into the cockpit is safe enough, but long-range teleports are only used in the most dire of circumstances, like when rescuing crew members from a destroyed vessel.

Q2: Are we expected to make the majority of ship interiors?

A2: Not at all. Interiors are always a non-required addition to any construction you and your factions want to do. If you want a place to chill out while your ship is at anchor, we'll hook up a way to teleport inside your ship into an interior server. But totally not mandatory.

Q3: Do you have to dock point to point with a station to complete a landing?

A3: Not necessarily. We're still trying to figure out the best way to do jetbridges to get from stations to ships of all sizes and shapes, so in the meantime it'll be proximity based, with the assumption that you used a shuttle service craft to make the final hop aboard.

Q4: Will docking at every station have a full-scale flying area outside before you land, like Hyperion?

A4: No, in that instance, Hyperion is special. Since it serves as the tutorial area for new players and we wanted to keep that seamless, Hyperion is in its own little pocket system that is entirely full-scale. For every other station you land at, you'll be docking immediately from space to interior. Allowing players to fly around outside a station would only lead to replication issues when that station comes under attack, if players are defending from inside the server, while others are attacking from the space side - it'd just get confusing.

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