Hello everyone! Welcome to the 111th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week Idyllic has continued work quashing bugs, dropped in the radar module, and experimented a bit with mining lasers. Lordrex fought an epic battle to the death with one bug in particular (stay tuned to hear if he survived or not) and a new member of the team made some important contributions to asteroid field generation. Let's go! Idyllic has had a list of bugs to work on this week, with varying success in tracking them down and fixing them. Switching Capitals from a direct rotation mode to an inertial system like the fighters use had a few kinks to work out, and a few test pilots died from the excessive g-forces that appeared in testing. Fine-tuning the inertia system will be an ongoing and intensive process. We'll continue tweaks until ships are flying just how we like them, which will be much slower than the nimble fighters of the Dogfight Alpha, but still recognizable as our own style. We have a new ship all rigged up, and though it isn't a military craft, being able to rig and test it is an important step for the future. We have here the WTT-017 Mining and Cargo vessel, with a pirate-modded laser turret mounted on top. We thought it interesting to show here because it shows the importance of turret transit speed - if your ship is fast and nimble and turns on a dime, a slow-transit turret may not be able to rotate to stay on the mouse fast enough. Consider spending some points boosting transit speed, rather than damage or fire rate, to ensure effective performance. "Was that a mining ship you added?" asks an inquisitive reader. "What led to you adding that specific type of ship to the game?" You may have heard the news this week about the release of the live CSG operation api - you can now code unions and negations to happen while a game is running. For those of us with mining lasers and giant asteroids in our game plan, the chance to cut a hole in real time is a really exciting opportunity. Unfortunately, the system isn't nearly robust enough to support real-time mining just yet - testing shows that even our low-poly unioned asteroids that heromaster made for us are too complex for the system to cut holes in. We'd have to reduce asteroids to cubes before it'd work, and at that point we might as well use smooth terrain. So we will wait on that feature, testing routinely, until it becomes possible to rely on, because cutting holes through rocks in space would be a really cool feature. For now, we'll stick to shooting mining lasers at veins of minerals lodged in the surfaces of the giant hunks of rock orbiting stars, planets, and other dense objects in the futuristic old-fashioned way. You may have noticed in the above images a few new features relating to Capital ship piloting - yes that's right, we have dropped in the radar module meaning talented ship captains can now home in on their quarry from beyond visual distance. Still works like a charm. When ships aren't spinning uncontrollably killing their crew, the full-range movement model really starts to shine. Attack from above, attack from below, from the side, from an angle, fly circles around your enemies - it's all possible. This isn't a 2D battlefield of naval ships, it's a battle for the stars in a completely wide open 3D world! This week lordrex faced down a bug of epic proportions, one that threatened to sink the entire project into years of debugging and re-coding. The stage was set - system asset loading and replication, the stakes outlined - 220 star systems in peril; it was a fight to the death. But who emerged victorious? Find out next week. We'd like to welcome a new member to our team - Legomadamada from over at CCS has taken on the fun and exciting task of star system generation. While we have the database of stars and planets, we've lacked any progress on generating fields of asteroids for players to mine for minerals, gas clouds to obscure and amaze, and all sorts of other fun environmental zones for the adventurous player to explore. He will be creating a system that is run by seed, but that creates a complex environment that is unique from system to system, so everywhere you turn there are new and exciting places to find. Early work is promising, such as this cluster of over a thousand asteroids of varying sizes. Each biome of asteroids is made from a set of about 8 meshes, so loading time for an entire field is not outrageous. Color changes and textures add flavor, while changing scale and rotation makes for an outstanding complexity. If you have any ideas for interesting environmental forms, send them by Idyllic and we'll see about adding them to the generation system. In the past week we finally publicly debuted the RoVerse wiki, a community-driven enterprise for players to fill out information they discover on their travels, search for important stuff to know before they head out into the black, or even discuss the various happenings of the galaxy. If you're a Faction hopeful, feel free to add a page about your faction, or look through the faction list page to find out what other players are planning. We plan to add information on planets, systems, minerals, and all sorts of other interesting fact pages as development progresses. 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 all the weapon types work so far? A1: All the ones shown in newsletters are passably working, but not completely polished. Mines are going to be added yet, and haven't been coded. Q2: How will shield regeneration work? A2: Similar to the way it works in the Dogfight Alpha - after a period of no damage, it starts regenerating. This exact time, and how fast it regenerates, will vary per ship. Q3: Will player-generated wormholes connect to a jump gate in an adjacent system, or pop out in a relative location? A3: The easy way would be to sync up with the closest wormhole in the adjacent system, but that sort of defies the point of making your own. So the other option is to either pick a random location in the system, or calculate the angle from where you started to where you are trying to go. With the inherent instability of wormhole travel, we'll leave that up to chance. Q4: Has the newsletter come out yet? A4: By the time you're reading this, yes. Q5: What sort of stats on turrets will be customizable? A5: While we don't have the official list done just yet, expect stats like rate of fire, transit speed, and power consumption to be on the table. Q6: Will anyone stop me from putting 50 beam turrets on the front of an XXL and firing them like the death star? A6: Layout and firing patterns will be based on ship shape, I don't think we'd try and stop you on that front - on the other hand 50 turrets is probably a little overboard for what will be possible. Q7: Will using headlights and beam turrets reduce fuel/power reserves? A7: The topic of fuel for ships has come up a few times. It would be neat to have refueling ships moving with convoys to ensure they have enough fuel to get where they're trying to go, but it does add the problem of getting stranded somewhere. We'll need a bit more time to think about it, but it's still on the table. As for weapons drawing power, we'll have to wait and see. Q8: What are the average dimensions of a star system? A8: I don't have any hard numbers for you, but we plan on using the full 100k render distance and beyond as best we can. Using our chunk system to load only assets near the player like asteroids and debris, while turning far away objects into surfaceguis will keep things manageable on the lag front. The full size of a star system will never be explored, with combat and construction focusing on a few landmark points throughout systems, like planets, gates, and asteroid fields, while mining may venture a bit further. In other words - very, very big. Q9: Will there be random wormholes that lead you to dark and dangerous places? A9: You might just have to wait and find out. Q10: Can you dock and despawn ships, or must they stay in-game all the time? A10: You'll be able to drop anchor at stations or use a feature called 'subspace parking' that shifts your vessel into another dimension while you're away. No need to worry about pirates stealing your ships at anchor. Q11: What factions do the devs enjoy the most? A11: The creative ones. Don't be afraid of gimmicks, sometimes a really cool feature makes a faction stand out. The Contagion idea that died a while back had one of the most original concepts I've seen, which was pretty much a gimmick. Any factions that go the extra mile to be unique and original are my favorites. 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 108th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic has continued working on Ship Customization, adding that category to the 'in-progress' on the Roadmap, and making quite a bit of progress on it too. We've got an update on station NPCs and their actions from Stratiz, and Lordrex has continued work on asset saving and replication. Last week we showed you the in-progress version of Idyllic's stat comparison chart for different turret mounts. Early this week, he had completed the math behind dividing the percentage of maximum value, into 5 chunks, and after quashing a few bugs related to underflowing and overflowing the chart, as well as some aesthetic changes to make the stats more visible against the blackness of space, he had a working version! In the demo below, the stats are all randomized for testing purposes, so don't write them down; also, the Blank turret variety has been set to 50% max, to demonstrate both Bonus and Penalty for turret selections. Here we have a working version, where the stats of each turret are a Bonus to the 0 stats of a blank turret location, without any overflow, as well as the system working on a different ship. Quite the achievement. Unfortunately it also brought up a bug in how previous turrets on display were removed, but that was an easy fix. Moving on from the stats, it was time to work on the interaction between players, and which mount they have selected. Previously, that involved clicking the arrows to the right and left of the selection, but clicking on buttons isn't always the most efficient way to quickly find the turret you want to change out. So on a suggestion from lordrex, Idyllic added scroll-wheel functionality, with the ability to add controller support in the future, making switching between turrets a breeze. The first iteration of camera movement that avoided clipping into the ship when a turret on the far side was selected, looked a little like the zoom was spazzing out, and wasn't nearly as fluid as we wanted. So Idyllic did a bit more research, added some more code, and added tweening. Now the camera smoothly transitions from point to point, and the user can tell just where the turret they have selected is at, with the added bonus that their camera isn't jumping all over the place making them dizzy. Continuing on his excellent work streak, Idyllic added Ship selection menus, that let you scroll through the ships that are available for purchase or unlock, also with scroll-wheel functionality. For now we only have a few rigged up, we'll be adding some more in the coming weeks. The demo layout we showed a few weeks ago featured a turret location graph, but unfortunately it would be too complicated to code, and would require renders of every ship added to the game from several angles, which could easily grow into thousands of renders, so we had to drop that feature. We figure the tweened camera movements between turret slots to be a fair replacement, as well as the ability to orbit your ship while in dock was much more functional for locating where you're putting your turrets than a graph. In place of the graph menu, we're placing a selection description for both ship selections and turret selections. In 300 characters, we provide a description of the weapon you have selected to mount to that location. Information, like their most useful scenario, to charge sequences or bullet velocity, that aren't covered in the stat comparisons fall within this paragraph, as well as the cost and confirmation of purchase. The descriptive menu is identical when it comes to descriptions of the different Capital ship options you have available, with descriptions of the ship's turret layout, the ship's expected handling and speed, and armor capacity. Factions submitting ships to be added to the Capital Update are encouraged to write their own descriptions of their ships, with useful info like mount layouts, illustrative depictions of the ships handling and armor, or it's designed use in conflicts. Just keep it around 300 characters long, so it fits in the box. Next on the list, ship stat comparisons. Please note that again, these data values are for testing purposes and aren't official stats for the shown ships. A simple matter of setting up the stat tables, and changing the pointers to the capital stats, and the math and case logic from the turret stats converts right over to ship comparisons. After fixing a few bugs regarding overflow and underflow, the stat comparison feature works like a charm. Now it's easy to tell exactly what effect changing ships or turrets is going to have on your combat-readiness, though you'll have to figure out for yourselves the right balance between speed, firepower and defenses. With as many features as Idyllic has added in the past week, it is important to test as many variables and situations as possible. With that in mind, Idyllic took to rigging and importing a few new ships to add to the lineup, including this Capital from the Cyber Sovereignty... ... which tested a new percentage of stats, as well as the system's handling of XL classed ships, the Distronian Renegade... ... which tested updates to a ship's physical model after the first rigging process, as well as revealed a bug in the stat code when a value was exactly 1/5 max power, that was quickly fixed, and the Ninazu FrigateB... ... which looked too cool to not rig up. He also rigged up another ship from the default line, one of Diesoft's ships, the Ironclad. At the beginning of this week, the extent of ship loading was a pseudo-random loadout of turrets occurring with the click of one button - very useful for deploying immediately to test capital movement and firing mechanics for the new weapon types. Idyllic's goal this week was to add as many of the ship customization features as possible, as well as getting back to the state that you could deploy the ship and fly off into the stars. With a goal in mind, he pushed through quite a bit of code and design and rigging work to make that happen, and I'm proud to say that he accomplished his goal. We are to the point where you can enter ship customization and selection, edit your loadout of turrets, or choose a different capital ship entirely, confirm your selections through the 'SELECT SHIP' and 'MOUNT TURRETS' button, and fly out of the hangar. While we're still working on transferring turret control between the two scripts, it should be an easy addition to make in time for next week. This significant step forward means that actual combat between customized ships isn't all that far off, though there are a few things that need completion first, like replication, now that experimental mode is permanently enabled. (see floating characters falling through the void instead of being invisible) And as with any good slate of testing, we didn't just launch the Avenger from the shipyard and call it good... Though in the future, deployment of Capitals will take place from the gamemode menu, not directly from the edit menu. On that front, this week, Lordrex has created a list of gamemodes that we'd like to add to the game to keep things fresh and exciting over time, as well as test out future features of the Factions Beta and Full Release stages, and we'd like you to help us out. In our community discord, we will be creating a new voting post with a list of gamemodes, we'd like you to vote for the ones that sound like the most fun, and we'll focus development on those first. Now the usual gamemodes like TDM or FFA won't be included in the list, since those are straightforward and will definitely be added, but let us know what other variants pique your interest. Through the testing process involved with launching a variety of ships with a variety of loadouts, we realized that we had the opportunity to give a graphic reason for meshing each faction ship, even though it was more work, and the efficiency of meshParts is questionable at times - our ships move through space using the SetPrimaryPartCFrame function, which, though useful, has a problem with rounding. Accuracy errors build up over time, slowly tearing the models it is used on apart, like below. On the other hand, if a ship is made out of two or 3 parts, we can fix these errors periodically by saving relative locations, and resetting the parts. With a large number of individual parts, such a process would be either nearly instant but slow you down significantly, or an extensive and ugly process at a slow rate. With 2-10 meshParts, resetting offsets live won't be a problem at all. Another benefit of meshing ships in blender, is a much more accurate volume calculation for class assignment. Below we have the Protector L Capital. Using the bounding approximation, it's volume was about 30,300 cubic studs, putting it in the L class. By meshing it, and using an inbuilt 3D printing volume calculation plugin, we can get a much more accurate calculation for weirdly shaped ships like the Protector. Using this method, the volume is calculated at 31,525 - still an L class ship, but slightly larger, resulting in higher calculations that could lead to lower speed, but higher armor. It's also a much fairer system, that doesn't rely on the rigger's best judgement. A rather simple task, one would think. Until there isn't enough seating for everyone and a fight breaks out. And easier for some to manage than others... No longer just wandering dancing and waving robots, these station NPC's have their first activity to participate in that is tied to a specific location. Exciting work. Lordrex has continued his work on asset saving and replication, running a successful test today of certain mechanics, and he may draw up a diagram when his work is completed, but for now all we get is a status update - things are in-progress, and working just fine. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Will you be able to see neighbor factions when choosing a home planet, so you don't end up next to the xenophobes? A1: There's a careful balance that must be struck between fog of war covering a map, and blinding players to everything not currently on their screen. A map of faction control and home planets should be readily available, and might even be live-updated on our website, but you won't be able to see installations or defenses in systems or on planets from a distance. Q2: Will factions be able to blacklist who can or cannot buy their ships? A2: Definitely. If just anyone could buy your ship designs, we'd have a huge problem on our hands. Pirates flying flagships, recruits in enemy fighters - truly a mess. Q3: Will there be such things as magic attacks? A3: They aren't currently on our list of planned features, but as a compromise, you could have lore and designs for weapons that involve mystical power sources or effects. A plasma cannon is basically a magic missile launcher, all things considered. Q4: Will crashing into things be a valid attack strategy? A4: Even if you have a cheap ship or lots of money, shooting something will always be a more effective attack than crashing your ship into an opponent's. We'll allow a little damage, but we don't want to encourage running over fighters with capital ships as the best strategy. Q5: Can multiple factions use the same ship design? A5: An interesting concept. I suppose there could be lore behind two factions having the same design, and while I'd prefer they have slight differences to distinguish them, it could work. Of course, you could always sell your ships to another faction. Q6: Will there be a limit to the number of factions based on the number of available colors for the map? A6: Not that I can foresee. Since it's likely that two or more factions might pick similar colors for their primary faction color, we'll probably have a way to draw edges of factions that doesn't involve just color differences. And you can always click on a system on the map to see who controls it currently. Q7: Will ships be able to cut other ships with wing blades? A7: An interesting concept to be sure, but not one the game engine could support right now. Basically due to limitations on the server end, we can only do a shell of a ship that you can shoot at and trigger damage, and with replication being inconsistent, flying close and cutting another ship with a wing blade isn't exactly possible. Cool idea though, maybe in the future. 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 102nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we have some effects updates on turrets from Idyllic, some excellent system-crossing networking code from lordrex, and a very important bug fix on weapon systems for capital ships. We'll start with the best news first! Some of you noticed and pointed out that the turrets in the previous gifs posted in newsletters rarely fired directly where the cursor was apparently pointing, and you'd be correct. Idyllic has been trying for a month to figure out the bug in the code that caused the turrets to elevate twice as high as the cursor was aimed. He tried everything, from halving the elevation distance per step, to comparing the code to the (working) version where he originally coded turrets without the ship attached, to removing all but one turret from a ship to make sure it wasn't iterating over twice - but nothing worked. It drove him mad. But good news, he was not driven mad in vain. The bug has been found and fixed, resulting in an excellent and 100-fold improvement in the accuracy of turret firing. Where the other turret types were inaccurate enough for it to not be noticeable, with the beam turret's impressive accuracy, the problem became readily apparent. With a few keystrokes and some changed variables, the problem was remedied, and turrets are in excellent shape. With that bug quashed, it was back to the list of other important updates to weapons systems that have been on hold for a while, the most noticeable being locking turrets that are unable to point at the target to not fire randomly off in another direction. With that highly-requested feature complete, Idyllic spent some more time improving the weapon effects, and creating important functions for delayed and charged weaponry, notably the beam and plasma turrets. Both weapon types have a 'charge up' delay after the player clicks fire, to charge up the weapons before energy is explosively discharged. We're still waiting on a turret model for Capital plasma weapons, but they will function similarly to those available in the Dogfight Alpha. An energy burst projectile fired after a charging cycle, that wreaks havoc on any shields or undefended ships it manages to hit, which we hope to have ready for next week. Plasma weapons and flak turrets are the two remaining weapon types to be coded, both with unique and important functionality. This week, lordrex has continued working on systems used to teleport players to a specific system, even though we're sending them to the same game file - one of the key features we've been looking forward to implementing. Here we have the private server console showing an incoming connection from a new player, requesting system data for the system they just loaded into. A player can join the lobby, create a character save, give themselves a nickname, and jump into a randomly selected spawn system. We'll be working on loading in specific system maps in the coming weeks. Important and exciting work! 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 orbit around the star systems? A1: We had hoped that we would be able to move planets around stars in a realistic orbit, and we have performed tests on the subject, but unfortunately the Roblox Engine does not like large numbers of moving parts or triangles. We'd either have to choose between pretty planets that give you an idea of the surface from orbit, or simple colored spheres that we could move around. That being said, I think there should still be plenty of gameplay involving proper positioning of stations behind and around planets and moons, as well as the asteroid fields full of rocks, that we couldn't move even if we wanted to. Q2: Will there be a neutral system for faction leaders to meet and discuss politics, trade deals, or alliances? Would it be safe? A2: Any significant communications between leaders will probably happen in Discord rather than in-game, where it's prone to troublemakers and assassins. Of course, we plan for a few neutral systems throughout the galaxy for new players to start at in a safe area, and we could add spaces to support leaders meeting in-person to discuss matters or just relax. Q3: Will there be quests? A3: Yes! For those that don't like mining or carrying cargo, players will be able to take on a variety of quests assigned by NPCs, as well as faction requests for items, for which they will be rewarded. Everything from hunting down a bounty to processing material to finding rare items is up for grabs packaged in little adventures. 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 ninety-ninth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we have continued work from Idyllic on refining the turret systems, including a repaired aiming function, added details to missile turret firing, and begun work on menu UI coding. Lordrex has hit a milestone for the back-end and lobby integration, and on the building side Bradford has constructed a turret model for the beam weapons. The past few months the aiming mechanism for the capital ships has been a bit finicky, with several cases where they would not point exactly where the cursor was aimed. In the turret-scripting save file, this bug did not appear, so Idyllic spent some time this week tracking down the bug. Along the way, he also discovered that he had left the accuracy at 5° intervals, so as the player moved their mouse around, the turret would try to track to within 5° of the cursor. On top of the aiming glitches, this further reduced the accuracy with which a player could aim their turrets. With the previous types of turrets, like autocannons and lasers, accuracy was never intended to be high in the first place, but with the introduction of the beam turret, where one of its key features is accuracy at long distance, improvements to this code became necessary. Standard turret accuracy has been increased to 1° for now, and might be raised higher in the future, as well as the ability to vary the tracking accuracy on a per-type basis. Here you can see the increased performance of tracking. Previously, there was a 10° dead zone around the turrets current location, so fine adjustments to aiming at your target were nearly impossible. We'll continue tweaking this value until we find the perfect balance between accuracy and performance. In a fine addition to our arsenal of default ship turrets, the beam turret makes its mark on the battlefield - high transit and elevation speeds, coupled with near-perfect accuracy and exceptional range make it a dangerous weapon in the hands of a skilled tactical officer. The turret model, built this week by Bradford, makes clear its use with a slender barrel engulfed with the energies it pours forth, and the requisite neon so you know it's futuristic. In an update to the VLS missile mounts, the bay doors now open with each volley that launches. This detail had been planned since the mounts were first rigged, but its importance compared to other work was minor. But fortunately, the organizational scheme worked, and the doors blow open in time for the missiles to be launched, then close after firing stops. Delaying the closing of the bay doors until after firing had stopped completely was a deceptively complicated. If you were to just open them every time a missile fired, they'd open and close 8 times in rapid succession in the current setup. By attaching a separate function that tracks the time since the last missile was fired, the doors can be closed without any weird artifacts like missiles firing through shut bays. Beauty is in the details. NPC's have gotten an upgrade in the form of character skins. The demo last week had empty robots wandering around the void waving at each other and dancing - this week, the NPC's have stolen the looks of several famous, and several not-so-famous robloxians to use as their own. We'll be making a nice, large list of NPC character skins so your stations will be filled with life, but for now, Stratiz's demo uses a list of a few playerId's to show how well characters and their attachments load. A significant milestone today for lordrex, as he compiled all his tweaks and updates in the lobby and the back-end server's connected scripts, and performed a test that ran with a grand total of 0 errors. Those that code often know how hard such a feat is, especially cross-platform, but it marks a great step forward for the continued work on the full game. Last up is an update on the load-out-editing menu debuted last week, describing the back-end code that will make it work. Here we have the comparison bars showing 5 important turret stats that you'll want to compare when switching out the various turret types. With a single bar, doing a percentage of max stat values would be simple, but with 5-segmented bars, the math becomes a bit trickier, though not impossible. Using modulus and the percentage size and position properties of gui objects, scaling the dark 'current' bars in simple, the trick lies in scaling and moving the orange 'difference' bar dynamically. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: How will minerals be refined into spaceships? A1: Right now we're leaning towards a simpler crafting tree than what we originally designed, focusing mostly on resources in, vehicles and weapons out with variation coming from which machines a layer uses. A refinery on a factory module at an outpost would be required for turning ore into base metals, that could then be taken to a workshop to be turned into a ship or other vehicle. Q2: Will players have access to system sensors that give you a readout of the players in your vicinity? A2: The server player list provided by roblox is always accessible, but as for telling you exactly who's there and what ship they're piloting, wouldn't that take some of the fun out of patrolling for ships and enemies? Q3: Will we be able to disguise military vessels as civilian? A3: If you're at war with someone, I'm not sure being a civilian cargo vessel would be any safer than looking like a military ship, in that a civilian ship would be an easy target for pillaging. You might be able to design a set of ships that look similar to each other as a faction theme, or use civilian cargo ships in a limited war-time capacity, but I don't think we'll be supporting any camo like that anytime soon. Q4: Can ships dock with other ships to improve them? A4: No, you will not be able to combine your ships into a giant robot, but smaller ships will be able to dock in a large enough ship's hangar area for refueling, repairs, or filling up with cargo or fighters. Q5: Will RoVerse be providing factions with battle songs to play in-game? A5: Unlikely. Due to copyright problems, and the cost of uploading stuff like that, we won't be doing it for you. You could always play your battle anthem in a group voice chat or another staging place, but it won't be in RoVerse directly. 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 eighty-seventh 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 an update on the status of the Capital Update, some more planet work from Idyllic, and some more backend development and documentation from lordrex. Idyllic wrapped up this week solving a few more planetary generation problems, with continued work on moisture distribution. While some generation systems just randomly place biomes wherever they want (looking at you, minecraft), we weren't happy with that process. Instead, we opted for a relatively simple process that generates moisture for every 'tile' on a planet based on whether its land or water, then in a few cycles, moves that moisture around. Using the wind vectors we set up, water moves over land, dropping out as it goes, with more dropping when obstacles like mountain ranges are encountered. This creates realistic rain-shadows behind mountains where deserts are more likely to form. Desert biomes will be dry because they don't have consistent access to water, not because a random point generator picked a spot. It also takes into consideration the heat factor we've generated - the poles will be cold and snow-covered with little precipitation, while mountain valleys with the right shape and direction will collect excess water, forming rainforest or swamp biomes. And with continued work, each of these biomes should end up with unique foliage forms suited to their stats, to better immerse the player in the planet surface gameplay. While some may say that working on such complex planets isn't worth the effort, we don't agree. The exciting gameplay experiences possible with planetary invasions, or exploration of the four corners of the galaxy, pushes this game beyond the arcade shooters that have come before. Lordrex has continued his work on backend systems as well as the design of the finer details of faction interaction. This week, we've ironed out the details of how a faction leader will go about running their faction, from how they use an expanded galaxy map, to what information will be available on that map, to how they can orchestrate raids and battles from a central command point with their HRs. Along with this came further discussion about how faction conflicts will be run, and we believe we've settled on a compromise solution that solves the problems we have identified with faction warfare, as well as allowing players to attack anytime, anywhere. In other words - no set battle times restricting participation. Further details will be released at a future time. Many of you may be wondering about the status of the Capital Update. We are working hard on catching up on the 3 months of work that we lost when craft left the team, but progress is slow because of the school year. Our dedicated team is doing the best they can, and we'll be continuing to provide updates as we go. Of note this week, Capital ship movement has been refined from NoCollider's Demo, with some added features like collision detection. Idyllic has also begun to help out with Capital Development, to speed up the process. We should be seeing promising results in no time. The two gifs here are comprised of a total of 1 day of work on the refurbished system - Capitals aren't all that complicated on their own, but the most challenging features are replication, and collision detection with minuscule fighters. Also of note is a simplification of the process of setting up Capital ships for easy implementation. As long as the model has a core part and a bounding box, it should be able to fly. Prior systems, including the original Dogfight Alpha were very poorly set up to accept different ship models and turret models, which we had to re-write for the Capital Update, which was well worth the time we put into refurbishing that part of the system. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: How will borders work? A1: While we could implement a system that bars people from flying into your systems automatically, that really wouldn't be in the spirit of giving Factions a realistic playing field on which they can do as they please. If a faction want's to secure its borders, it'll have to hire security forces, or recruit members to patrol these territories, and should consider the extra area to cover before invading every system they can - if they can't defend their territory, they won't hold it for long. Q2: Will there be HIGHSEC or similar? A2: Continuing from the above question, the security of systems will be up to the owning factions. There won't be an automated law system anywhere, because factions can have their own set of rules, which they are free to enforce. While we will rank systems based on their hostility towards new players for initial spawning purposes, there will be no interference by us in how players act. Q3: Will we be able to keep systems independent from faction control? A3: With the newly decided details of Faction and Subfaction abilities, it is likely that this will be possible - if enough people residing in a system want to keep faction influences out, they should be able to attack any faction installations that try to be assembled, whether that means that individuals or organizations keep the entire system free, or just a planet surface, is entirely up to them. Drawing inspiration from the Browncoats of Firefly, or the Hutts of Star Wars, there is a wide range of possibilities for uncontrolled systems. Each planet acting entirely independent from one another, or whole systems run by a powerful mob boss, the possibilities are pretty cool to think about. 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 forty-sixth 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 seen an astonishing amount of visual work from Vedrakkerous and Idyllic has been working behind the scenes on the resource system for RoVerse, and has a very convoluted and terrifying spreadsheet detailing the first progression concept from basic minerals to full spacecraft and structures! This spreadsheet has been an absolute nightmare of organization and research to ensure that almost all ores and materials progress in a way that is somewhat accurate. As seen above, Idyllic is still quite far from completion, but has already managed to create the most convoluted chart ever seen, and we are excited to see what new organizational nightmare he comes up with later on. Vedrakkerous, on the other hand, has been hard at work creating, refining and optimizing particles for just about everything from space dust to entire stars! Take a look at some of these beautiful visuals that will enhance the game just that bit more: The image below is the shield effects, which flare up when your shields take damage and pulse outward around your ship based on the type of shield you use! Once a shield has been completely dissipated, it will create a form of vortex around the ship to indicate it is recharging, and once charged you will be once again safe from damage! Vedrakkerous even got the inspiration from Stellaris to make a few stars, namely some of the most common stars; The Class M Red Dwarf star: The Class G Orange star: The Class A White Dwarf star: While the stars are beautiful, and look absolutely stunning in dogfight mode, Vedrakkerous decided he wasn't done yet and decided to go out of his way to prepare warp effects for larger ships which look absolutely stunning as is to be expected at this point! And finally, he prepared a gif showing off the set status effects each ship has when under damage to provide just that little bit of additional detail to ships to show off current damage or destroyed modules on larger ships. At the time of my writing of this, Vedrakkerous is still hard at work updating and creating new effects for use, and if I were to update each time he made a change, I would be here all night! 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 there be clan specific / lore-based minerals? A1: While supporting clan lore specific minerals would be cool, in the end, it'd just be unfair - either only certain clans would get their own special mineral, or everyone would have to get their own, and can you imagine how much more convoluted that flowchart would get with a bunch more minerals to start from? Q2: About how much would the largest, most fully 'decked-out' capital ship cost? Millions? Billions? Trillions? A2: This is hard to say at this point - we want it to be possible for clans to build capitals, but not so easy that there are hundreds floating around. In the end, the price should be balanced to keep them expensive, but entirely possible with the right teamwork. Q3: Will there be AI planet populations? A3: I'd say an AI population in the most basic sense - there won't be characters wandering the streets, but there may be some generalized AI, sort of like a city simulation game would have. Q4: Will there be unrest for planetary populations? A4: In continuation of the previous question, a generalized city AI would allow us to have events occur in cities, like an outbreak of plague or other positive things, like a city-wide celebration boosting profits. So unrest would definitely be a possibility to explore. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us!
If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! Author's Note: Hey guys, I will be going through and organizing every newsletter published from #37 and prior to support a new category system you may have noticed on the right side which you can use to sort for specific topics you are interested in! We will try to tag every newsletter appropriately, and this will, hopefully, be the first of many overhauls to make the site more user-friendly than it already is. I've also removed the author tags on the bottom in order to have a permanent tag for all three authors (Vaktus, Idyllic and myself) on the right side under the categories. Thanks for reading this week's newsletter, and I hope you guys enjoyed all the amazing work put in by our development team! ~ Aleuvian Hello everyone! Welcome to the forty-fifth 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 quite a bit to show off from our team, and we especially look forward to showing off Vedrakkerous' work! We have received a lot of information on the planet status from Idyllic this week. He has said that the main setback for planetary generation is the time it takes to generate roughly 600 planets in low and high detail separately. We are switching from Vector3Values for the parameter storage of continents, wind, elevation, etc. in favor of a table format, which will allow all information to be accessed in a less intensive manner, therefore speeding up the generation process. Idyllic has also been constantly going back and forth to time planetary generation to find the slowest processes, and has generated the following timetable!
All of these numbers narrow down to a total time of 2.2 hours, which is still far too long for the galactic scale we are looking for, however this is definitely down from the 4 days it took to generate high detail planets in the past! RexPatriot has also been hard at work getting the Research Center finished after studying several concepts we've sent him, and he has come out with yet another stunning product that captures the feel of a high-tech laboratory! With the massive satellite on top, you can imagine a network of these structures working together to improve and synchronize tests with the top-of-the-line orbital relay technology, all working in tangent to produce an end product across the planet! This week, Vedrakkerous has been hard at work setting up the grayscale nebula images so that he can generate plenty of nebulae using various colors, and with the recent Color3 support update he is now able to generate thousands of nebulae using a large set of various textures and an absolutely stunning array of colors to blend and make each nebula completely unique! Space clouds have never been more exciting! Grayscale individual textures: Multi-layer Color3 Demonstration Layering Demonstration Color3 on a single layer 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 fly our ships into Gas Giants? A1: Spaceships are designed for a specific location, usually space. Shields would theoretically have a hard time operating in-atmosphere, where a ship would constantly be colliding with particles, and, at this point, we think we will use this as the basis for restricting both ship flights close to the surface of rocky planets, and as a limiting factor for gas giants. Now that's not to say that you won't be able to fly into them at all, it just might take a lot a power to your shields to stay there for long. Q2: How many bases will a clan be able to establish on a planet? A2: So recently, a member of our discord community did the math on the surface area of the average planet that we have planned - with a radius of 4,000 studs, each planet would have around 200,000,000 square studs of surface area. That's a lot of room - so you should be able to establish as many bases as you would like, so you can have a quick response to any attacks. Just don't put them too close to each other, or they might make an easy target for orbital bombardment! Q3: Will we be able to buy in-game 'stock' within businesses starting out in Ro Verse? A3: We haven't quite nailed down how businesses will work, but running a stock market on top of that would be extremely complicated. I wouldn't look for it in the initial release, but depending on how businesses work out, it might be implemented at a later point. I can imagine giving employees a cut of the profits might encourage them to defend your fleets, or investing in mineral acquisition could make you a millionaire. Q4: With all this talk about planets, is RoVerse no longer a space game? A4: RoVerse is very much still about exploring star systems, giant space battles between fleets of star ships, and the conflict and politics of a larger galaxy, planets just happen to be a cool part of the picture, both as a backdrop for conflicts as well as part of the economy, and the lore of clans. Big empty voids are only so much fun, but without landmarks, players lose interest fast. Also, we talk a lot about planets because we currently have a lot of progress being made on them every week, while the systems for star systems and space are less pretty at the moment. Look for more work from Vedrakkerous, as he completes more nebula effects and other space-based stuff. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! ~Written by Aleuvian ~Edited by IdyllicDestroyer |
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |