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 107th 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 been continued on a variety of fronts on the Capital Update, from menu coding to ship spawning. Lordrex has continued work on the asset loading system, with good progress on that front. Skinny has continued with meshing the line of ships for the Update, with some interesting one's at the end of his list. Up first is the menu interaction Idyllic's been working on. A few weeks ago we showed you the menu mockup for editing capital ship loadouts, and since then we've been finishing up the turret varieties. With the 8 turret varieties all wrapped up for now, we could move forward with the coding for the menus. Here we have each of the varieties of turret being interchanged on a Capital ship while in dock. The first piece of the puzzle this week was getting Capital ships to spawn at a specific location. Before now, in the demo videos, Capital ships have been spawning wherever they were placed into the game - if we want to make it a working game, being able to place spawning players wherever we wish is an important bit of code that just hasn't been at the top of our list yet. Now, we can spawn a husk ship in a dock to allow players to edit it, then a full ship can be deployed as they enter the game, with all the proper data being set to allow for the proper position, as well as turning and pitch angles. At this stage, we've updated the code to set the ship name in the player's menu, with the corporation being pulled from a database - loading its stats will be the next bit to be added on that front. Here we can also see the beginnings of the turret stat comparison guis, which has been some complicated math for Idyllic, but it's beginning to show promising results. One of the less obvious additions this week was the addition of a 9th 'turret' type, the blank. Blank turrets are placeholder turrets for when you don't really have the power to weaponize every spot on your newly purchased capital ship, or when you just don't want to. It also solves a problem that was brought up in our community in the past few weeks about the number of turrets to place on ships. With a wide variety of ship designs, and the possibility of points being assigned to a ships power systems allowing more or more powerful weapons, there has to be a way to support different numbers of turrets. That's where the blank turret comes in. Faction designers can put as many turret mounts (within reason) on their ship, with only limited numbers of turrets being mounted at one time. Any turrets beyond the mountable number, or those that you just don't have the money to purchase yet, will show as a mount, but not have an active weapon. Beyond the visuals, Idyllic has continued work on bridging the gap between the dogfight and capitals, working towards the next major milestone of flying a fighter at and around a capital ship, possibly with some combat involved. We can't wait to see his continued progress. Lordrex has been working for several weeks ensuring that the asset loading and replication systems are as efficient and robust as we will need, knowing that RoVerse will probably put a serious load on any systems we put in place. You let a faction build a station, they'll try and build 100, so to speak. He is currently working on two divergent models with differences in http request lengths, and time will tell which one is more useful for our purposes. Skinny has meshed most of the line of ships we intend to add to the Alpha, and even though he got quite busy in real life, he had some time to work on the last, and most complicated, models on that list. The designer of these ships was going for a uniquely alien and foreign set of designs when he created these ships, and using his patented method of union duplication and offset, created some truly unique designs. These ships, intended for any sort of player-vs-entity gamemodes we might make, don't follow the same standards as the rest of the ships. The most obvious trait is the weird angles, that make meshing complicated - though not impossible - and are drastically different from the flat and angular designs pretty much every faction has created so far. There's also the matter of their reflectivity, which when in the night sky, makes them hard to see. This detail won't be allowed for faction assets, but could bring some interesting situations to Capital Update battles. 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 events outside of RoVerse have an in-game effect (clan wars)? A1: While the concept is interesting, at this point it is hard to say what in-game effects a war taking place in individual bases could have on the game at large. The easiest effects to add would be changes in group diplomacy, and factions could certainly pay out resources as a result of that loss, but RoVerse will play no part in enforcing any agreements like that. If anyone has any specific cases after release, the admins will surely see what they can do about it, though. Perhaps the landmark for that base could change colors for a week? We'll see. Q2: Are animated mech going to be added? A2: Mechs have been on our wish list from the first time planets were announced. Being able to support a scifi staple vehicle would be a cool feature, and we'll continue trying to add such features. I don't see any reason yet why mechs couldn't be added, seeing as Vortex Security managed them years ago. Q3: Will jetpacks be available? A3: Planets should have a variety of options for on-foot travel across the surface, from hoverbikes to jump assist, to expand the exploration aspects of the game. There's nothing more satisfying than stumbling upon a bit of hidden treasure in a hard-to-reach place. Q4: Is there anything requiring that our faction species must be humanoid-sized? A4: While the character that you operate in-game must be approximately the size of a default humanoid, there's actually no limit on the size of your species in lore - you could be a race of giants, operating humanoid forms remotely, or a regular sized bird, piloting a bird-shaped robotic suit. Be creative! Q5: Will there be bounty boards on planets? A5: While we don't have immediate plans for any NPC structures on planet surfaces yet, there should be a way to construct a bounty interaction board on the surface to find nearby players to hunt down for the reward. Who knows, you might stumble upon a strange wanderer in the wilderness, who needs some resources in exchange for a reward. Q6: Will faction builders be able to fix bugs they find in ships after submission? How about make visual updates over time? A6: While we'd prefer the ships be perfect the first time around, we can't expect that from everyone, so there should be a way to make minor adjustments after launch, as long as it doesn't mess with database data, like changing the number of turrets, or cost of production. As for updates over time, we should be able to support changes like that at some point, but hopefully that won't happen for a while. And unlike galaxy, significant changes in design will require a new ship, not replace an old design. 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 ninety-eighth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week we got down and dirty on the programming side, with significant updates and additions to the Capital Update code, including turret assignment and gui integration - as well as some design work - and an expanded weapons list, adding beam turrets to the list of functioning weapon systems. On the backend, lordrex has continued his work merging the lobby and our server code. Early work this week on the Beam weapon type was pretty rough - we had several versions that didn't perform up to our standards. Seen below is one such version - the beams fire from the turret to the mouse, and update every heartbeat, but stutter significantly when there are several firing at the same time, or the ship is moving. Both cases are likely to appear in the Capital Update. So Idyllic went back to the drawing board. Rather than creating and destroying a 'bullet' for the beam each frame, he modified it to create one and the update it each frame. This, too, stuttered significantly. Where the other turret types fire off their projectiles and are free to leave them behind, the beam turret requires stability, the failure of that becomes immediately obvious. So how do you code them to keep up with the ship? Well, first of all you make them shoot straight from the barrel like every other weapon coded so far. But after that, you work on parenting the object anchoring the beam effect directly to the ship - that way you don't have to update their position every frame, and the move along smoothly. Now the only stuttering is the pulsing of energy traveling along the beam towards your enemies! Though quite simple in the end, this experience was quite entertaining to figure out how to code, if only because it was a departure from the modules used for the other weapons. It goes to show that a one-size-fits-all approach to weaponry isn't always the best solution, and that even if it is a little bit more work, taking the time to individualize and customize different weaponry types creates better, and probably more fun, results. You may remember the initial Capital combat demo video - the different weapon types were just edited rate of fire stats, with different colored neon projectiles launched out, so the steps we've been taking since then to expand on the weapon variants have been quite important to us. Some notes on the beam weapon type - it emits a constant stream of energy traveling incredibly fast in the direction you aim the turrets, with a high degree of accuracy, even at long distances. Unfortunately, it trades accuracy and range for damage - low individual hit damage, but if you manage to keep your target in your scope, the damage will add up. Also helps keep shields from cycling and recharging, so it offers some tactical benefits so it's not completely useless for all but the most accurate snipers. In the coming weeks, we'll be refining the weapon type further, including a short charge up delay, and overheating systems, all taken care of in the data tree. With several of the weapon types up and running, it was about time for Idyllic to dive into the turret switching menus and integrations for Capital ships. We released a demo of the fighter rekitting process quite a while ago, but since then we have further developed our aesthetic, and will probably be updating that soon. For the capital ships, though, we had a blank slate to work with. On fighters, only a few turrets were available to swap out, so a few hovering buttons were manageable to use. With the possibilities of hundreds of turrets kitted to an XXXL capital, we needed a more flexible solution. Enter the newest ship-editing interface! Improving on the original design, this newest ship editing screen has lots of important info to help you make your purchasing decisions - will you change your forward gun batteries to missiles, to chase down fleeing foes, or protect your flank with a spare flak gun to take care of those pesky fighters and missiles? It's up to you! Featuring stat comparisons between currently-kitted mounts, mount locator for easy identification of which mount you're switching out when zoomed in, overall ship stats and class names, all to improve the user experience. It's still in its early stages, so if you have any feedback, let Idyllic know. 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 limits to the number of ships a faction can produce at once? A1: There will be no hard limits instituted by us, but if a faction gathers the resources required to build an excessive number of large capital ships, good for them. Obviously if things get ridiculous, we'll start tweaking costs to keep things balanced, but other than that, we won't limit a fleet to, say, 20 Large capitals at once. If we tried doing that, they'd probably just start making alts to hold ships for them. Q2: What sort of interactions will there be with planets from space? A2: From the star system server, you'll be provided with, or have to scan for, basic information on the status of the planet. Planet name, environment, resources, who owns it, etc. To get a good look at a planet, you will have to send a landing party, as they have done many a time on Star Trek. Q3: Will there be giant railguns to shoot capital ships with? A3: By comparison, the small turrets we've been demoing the past few weeks are dwarfed by the ships they are attached to. Further down the line, we will be adding the different tiers of turrets, and tiers of mounts they can be attached to. For example, a ship may have 10 light turret mounts, 4 mediums, and one heavy mount for a large weapon, sorta like what you described. Q4: Will there be QA to ensure faction-submitted ships aren't weird or low quality? A4: There will be an approval process as part of the rigging process. We want as many factions as possible to submit their designs, but a faction not putting much effort into their ships breaks the whole thing down, ruining immersion, and reflecting the game poorly. The devs will try to help out in these circumstances, if only slight modifications are required. Q5: Is there a formula to generate ship stats, or is it faction- or developer-picked? A5: We have been working on a formula that considers a wide variety of factors to calculate different stats like turning speed and radius, and there will also be limited faction input on how they want their ships to perform. If a faction builds a heavy cruiser that the formula spits out as low-armored, no one would be happy. So a limited number of points will be able to be spent to determine base ship stats, by the ship creator when submitting. The nature of this platform requires things to be both fair, and functional. 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-first issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has seen continued development on the Capital Update with a few new features for Capitals, as well as some Datastore work for saving player data. Idyllic has been hard at work whenever he has free time to get the Capital Update rolling. In recent weeks, we've seen it grow from simple ship movement to having nearly all the features we've been designing for the past two years. This week, we've implemented a community suggestion, adding a toggle for the turret aim indicators... So in those situations that require fine-aiming, you can toggle on the indicators and blow enemy ships out of the sky, while remaining undistracted when you aren't in a heated conflict. Beyond that, he has been working on ship selection, which is currently in its rudimentary stages with a simple gui menu, but it allows ships to be dynamically loaded based on a selection, rather than a preset variable. Moving forward, he will be refining this feature, and adding in a process to customize the turret selection on these capital ships. When he needed a break from Capitals, Idyllic took the chance to implement the turret system onto some of the ground vehicles you may remember from a few newsletters back. Using the same system to set up the organization of the turret pieces, and attaching it to an anchor point on the vehicle, this test was a success. Get ready to shoot invading fighters out of the sky with this Anti-Air turret equipped Behemoth! Following this test, it was brought up that aiming in 3rd person from this vehicle was less than ideal - particularly when an obstruction behind the camera could be in conflict - so we made a few modifications... Including a turret-mounted camera for the driver, or potentially a second passenger acting as a gunner, to operate the weapons system. Now you can see the fighters entering atmo to bomb your outpost, and return fire as well! On Lordrex's end, there has been work done on using Datastores to save particular information, as well as work around the 260,000 character per entry limit. Rather than pay for an external server to handle absolutely everything coming from this game, we're making the best use of every feature we have available, and testing the limits to see just how far we can go. Using datastores to cache data relieves the strain on an external server, and helps cut down on those HTTP requests which are severely limited to begin with. 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 faction cities be able to be made from a variety of different styles? Like a colony vs a capital? A1: If a faction has the developers to build that many different building types, we'll try our best to support features like that. There's definitely a benefit to immersion if a gleaming capital city looks different from a border system colony. Q2: Will there be anything special at the center of the galaxy? A2: Alpha Prime is at the center of the current sector that is available for exploration, and it does have some special rare resources found nowhere else, but there is nothing to say that the current map is the extent of the galaxy RoVerse takes place in. Who knows what mysteries lie beyond the edges of the map? Q3: Will there be giant ground vehicles to act as mobile ground bases during invasions? A3: Large sandcrawler-like vehicles are definitely on our wish list, and we'll try our best to make them happen. Ask us again closer to planets being done, they'd be a great addition to ground combat and invasion strategy, if a bit expensive. 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-eighth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, lordrex has been designing the character creation data systems and menus that players will use when they first join the game, to create the personification of their RoVerse character, and Idyllic has continued work on Capital Ships, with some promising work on turret transit and aiming systems. Let's take a closer look! For RoVerse we wanted to blend the characters you use elsewhere on Roblox that are supported by a fairly limited set of options, with our own more expansive system that provides more options for customization - including the possibilities for custom meshes for different species both Dev created and faction created. To blend the two, we have been working on a system that will import pretty much the entirety of the Roblox Catalog into the game for use on your character. Assets sorted into categories you are familiar with, like hats, shirts, and pants, as well as some of our own design at some point in the future. Tacked onto this are more robust character options including the aforementioned custom meshes, as well as a wider variety of colors and adornments will be possible. The backend systems to support this aren't all that new - Catalog Heaven used catalog assets in-game particularly well, and the Roblox API's are readily available to grab asset ids - and the systems used to load these assets into the character creation screen aren't all that different from what you will encounter in-game when you visit shops at stations to further customize your character. It's important to look your best when terrorizing the starways. Idyllic recently picked up the task of working on Capital ship scripting for the upcoming Capital Update, and has been making steady progress for these past two weeks. Last week saw the ship movement systems, including strafing, pitching, yawing, and rolling on the global plane, this week he has continued work on these systems, including the addition of a vector lock toggle that maintains your current heading and speed, allowing you to move the camera about to aim your turrets. Contrary to the rudimentary system in the original Dogfight Alpha, this vector lock does not rotate your ship to upright, allowing it a more versatile use in combat. Upon testing it is clear that it is hard to tell when this function is enabled, so in the future we will be looking into visualizations to show the direction your ship is locked to, in addition to the HUD toggle readout. This feature added, he moved on to more important aspects of Capital control systems - turret transit. While the previous iterations of turrets worked as long as they were oriented upright, that didn't quite work for us in space, with its 3 dimensions. Using some advanced calculation methods helped along by inbuilt Roblox functions, Idyllic managed to get turrets to track the mouse position and turn to face it as closely as possible, with the turret at any orientation. This includes turrets mounted sideways like those on the front of the Avenger below, as well as those mounted to the bottom, or any angle in-between. Another aspect of importance is the modular aspect of the turrets - a hardpoint on the ship model, and a matching hardpoint on the turret model makes adding and interchanging turret models a breeze, as well as a standardized grouping format of the turret parts should allow us to easily change between any variation of the model imaginable, whether it's developer created or created by a faction. We'll be releasing the final details in a few weeks, so you can get your devs working on custom faction turret models! Here you see the turrets independently pointing at the cursor, as close as is possible on their axis. Also included in this code is the groundwork for weapon groups, so you can turn on and off sets of turrets for various situations - turning on left or right groups of turrets if you happen to get flanked, for example. Moving forward, Idyllic will be taking on the task of turret firing, of all the various projectiles we have prepared for every weapon type, as well as beginning to interchange some of the turret models and effects to test how well the system works. 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 fighter-ground vehicle hybrids be possible? A1: While a combination fighter-mech would be cool, I'm not certain how reasonable it would be to make nor use one. In the end, it'd have to be debuffed as both a fighter and a mech, making it worse at everything than two separate vehicles would be. If there is enough interest we could possibly add it in at a later point, but until then you would probably be best off with a fighter large enough to carry a dedicated mech you could jump into when you've landed on a planet. Q2: Will cities have to be filled with skyscrapers? Will dead cities leave ruins? Could I build a bunker in the ruins? A2: Actually, no. If your faction theme is better suited with low-rise structures or other shorter buildings, you can design them like that, it's up to you. Dead cities will leave ruins as a marker of the history of the place, to add exploration interest, allow factions to rebuild their cities, and to retain more history than anything in the clan world can currently. Imagine walking among the ruins of a capital of a faction that died out years ago. If you're looking to build a small structure in a city, a base is the way to go, rather than building an entire city. Q3: How will sieges on cities work? A3: City sieges will be live-fire against whoever is there to defend, with any reinforcements you bring along. Attacking a city will be straightforward, involving shooting everything, but will be tempered by a large health pool. Defenders should also be able to conduct repairs, so your invasion force should be sure to take out any incoming cargo ships bringing resources. Q4: Will ringed planets be textured planes, or will the rings be made of real junk? A4: Since one of our primary goals is avoiding the shortcomings of previous space games, it just wouldn't be right of us to take the easy way out for planetary rings. I would expect that at a long distance, the rings will appear as a textured plane or two, while up close there should be detritus to mine, or avoid crashing into on approach. 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-third issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has seen some great progress on our scripted systems, including a remastered chat system from davness, and some continued work from lordrex on the VPS backend data retrieval system. We also have some unfortunate news about the status of the Capital update as well, which we'll cover at the end. A few months ago, Idyllic roughly mocked up an edited chat system that modified the Roblox-provided scripts to try and customize the format and the look of the guis to better fit our theme, in a very short time frame. The system worked passably well, as long as you didn't look too closely at the edges. Since then, we've spent quite a bit of time building our own system from the ground up, with the features and design that we've always wanted. Developer Davness has been creating this system, and the progress he's made has been exceptional. Creating a custom chat system is more complicated than it may seem - there are lots of little features included to make sure that use of the system is as smooth as possible for all users, features like multiline chat messages and supporting usernames of any length up to 20 characters that are easy to ignore in a good system, but make use horrible if they are overlooked. He's also set up the system to easily scale with screen size, so that all users get the best experience possible. He has also set up an early demo of a shout system, so that RoVerse Admins can shout important updates, faction leaders can relay messages to their fleets, all with an easy-to-use system. Lordrex has successfully gotten our private server to read data from Google sheets, marking an important step in the development of our backend systems. Reading from saved data, making decisions about where to place people and fleets based on recorded information, sending star system data from the database we showed a few weeks back. A critical feature, and one that must be done right. Idyllic has continued remastering planet generation, this week taking a stab at table sorting as a way to easily grow continent shapes by having a handy list of all the closest points. While not completely solved yet, it does have some pretty results. We can't wait to see what else he comes up with. So many of you have been asking about the status of the Capital Alpha over the past three months since the originally planned release date passed. Since December, 90% of the update has been completed, including fighter models and rigging, gamemodes, all new custom maps, everything that would improve on the original system ten-fold... except for the mechanics of the capital ships. Since we couldn't release a Capital Update without Capital ships, we had to push that release back. To complete a rework of the system that NoCollider made nearly a year ago, we hired on craftsmashbuild, who had demoed several versions of his own ship flight scripts for his own project, that showed great promise for a robust and fun capital ship system fitting for a project as ambitious as RoVerse. Since then, craft has run it many, many personal problems, and has been unable to handle the stress of working on a professional development team with expectations and deadlines. Because of this pressure, he has chosen to leave the team permanently, and shows no sign of allowing us to use any of the progress he's made over the past 3 months, if any exists at all. While he had asked us to remain civil in the explanation of his departure, he proceeded to post several entirely incorrect tweets since then, and blocked all the RoVerse Devs, so civility is not something I can provide him. When we hired him in December we were clear with our expectations - while we understood he couldn't have made the original Christmas deadline, which we proceeded to push back, it was made clear that the Capital ships would be an important feature of this project, and if he didn't think he could manage such work in the required time, we would hand that portion of the project over to SmellyPencil and TheFurryFish, two talented devs who have done an exceptional job on the rest of the Capital Update. He insisted that the assignment was well within his grasp, so we hired him on to let the others do the final polishing of the other systems. After pushing back a planned release to the end of January, and now to the end of February, with no visible progress since the demo we showed of a capital ship doing donuts, the managers of this project, namely Vedrakkerous and IdyllicDestroyer, obviously had questions and concerns about the status of the project, that were always met with 'can't talk right now' or 'Ill have something to show by the newsletter' without any progress. Since it didn't seem like the completion of his project would occur within a reasonable amount of time, we initiated our backup 'plan B' - having the Update Dev team complete a rudimentary Capital system effective enough to release as the Capital Update in a limited capacity, to give craft enough time to complete the official and robust Capital system. It was at this point that craft decided he didn't want to work on this project anymore, due to the pressure of developing in such a public position. So don't worry, craft's sudden departure doesn't mean the Capital Update won't be coming out, but it does mean that it will take a bit more time than previously expected. In the future, we will be making sure that the devs we hire for such an ambitious game understand the expectations prior to assigning them any significant portion of our project. And to craft - if you had properly communicated to us at any point in the past 3 months that you didn't think you could complete the portion of the project we had expected of you, we could have provided support, or reassigned the parts that were out of your grasp, rather than having wasted our time for three months before deciding you wanted to work on your own space game more than you wanted to work on ours. Also, we are not the type of people to become vindictive to those who have legitimate reasons for leaving the team, as several members have come and gone over the development of this project without incident. But you spreading falsehoods in an attempt to slander us for who knows what reason is not something we take lightly, and as such I have written out the proper sequence of events for the public record. Had you be clear with us, or communicated when we asked, and even remained civil as you asked of us, this could all have been avoided. Let the facts stand as they are, and if they 'destroy your development career' as you claim we said, it is naught but your own fault. And on that note a quick recap - chat systems are progressing nicely, with lots of neat little features tucked inside. Backend development is progressing slowly but surely, with an important step towards our end goals being made over the past few weeks. And Idyllic has been playing around with planets, as he has always been. 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 indicators of ground combat from space, like explosions and stuff? A1: That's a great idea! We'll have our scripters look into how expensive it would be to send a notification to star system servers when and where ground combat is breaking out, but having little explosions appear on planets would be a cool little feature to notify people of things going on down below. And as always, ships 'in orbit' in the planet server will be able to see combat directly. Another light week on questions from the community. If you want to know more, feel free to ask in our community Discord. 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-first issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. Continuing off of the excellent work with vehicle gravity last week, Idyllic has continued to improve the system, as well as take a first stab at miniaturizing the vehicles, which didn't turn out to be as easy as first expected. To go with his work, a new, larger, generated planet, has been created, with Vedrakkerous working on the details of both planet biomes and other atmospheric effects, like a day-night cycle. After some important tweaks to a scaling plugin to scale the effects of attachments properly, and setting up a specific grouping and process for welding, miniature vehicles got off to a bumpy start. With some interesting results that looked more like a foal trying to stand for the first time, than a suspension system, tweaking of forces was necessary. That was the earliest, most promising results, because when it didn't spasm out like the above, it would either just disappear completely, having been launched out of view in a single frame, or explode into individual pieces. So it may not look like it, but it was very important progress. After extensive work balancing variables, Idyllic managed to get a vehicle that could stand under its own weight, and operate as designed when driven. There are still a few things that need to be smoothed and tweaked a bit more, but the results are looking good. The suspension is a bit rigid going over obstacles, and prone to breaking when hitting anything exceptionally hard or at a weird angle, but nothing unfixable. Idyllic was also able to tweak the radar system to work with planets, the major change being that anything that is at your elevation is displayed as such, even if it is around the curve of the planet making it seem to be below you. So ships strafing you overhead will appear with a riser, showing their location. We look forward to more work on that system moving forward. While Idyllic was working on the technical systems for planets, Vedrakkerous took to improving the green, grassy boring planet Idyllic had been testing on, filling it with biomes like the polar zone, a desert, and some rocky plains. While not officially generated procedurally, these test runs will provide a basis for designing the systems that will generate biomes, using a variety of terrain materials and colors to create unique, and sometimes alien environments. But it wasn't just painting terrain. Other atmospheric touches include a transition from clear at night, showing the thousands of stars, to nearly opaque during the day, resulting in a nice blue sky. And since the day-night cycle moves around the planet, rather than using the Roblox-provided one, the math behind finding where exactly the player was, turned into an interesting challenge that proved to be no match for the two devs. And what's a desert without a pyramid rising from the dunes? Next up on the list of features are a more dynamic camera than one fixed to the back of your turret, and the big challenge of getting characters to rotate to match the surface. We can't wait to see what our talented devs come up within the next week. 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 scanning of planets to get extra information about them from orbit? A1: Having a readout full of useful, and maybe some not so useful, information display when looking at a planet from orbit would be really cool, adding a bit of extra depth to the universe you're exploring. We'll look into putting important information, like a rough estimate of resources, hazardous conditions, and day length, when we get closer to implementing those sorts of guis. Q2: Will faction members be forced to wear a set uniform, to avoid those embarrassing ones? A2: It will be left up to factions whether to require members to wear a specific uniform, with the possibility of certain accessories being allowed, so characters keep their identity. Or, alternatively, we leave it up to factions entirely to manage their members - there's nothing stopping you from kicking members that violate your rules. Q3: Will we be able to make hovering land vehicles? A3: Of course! Wheeled vehicles may be what we're working on now, but only because they were expected to be the most problematic. Hovering vehicles are a staple of sci-fi, we'd be remiss to not include them. They will of course handle much differently, and will have certain situations where they excel, as well as situations where they hold you back. Q4: What benefit will AI colonists provide to factions? A4: Building a colony on a new world will be a significant step in a factions growth, making them as an interplanetary force to be reckoned with. Besides the boosts to the economy, and increasing faction population statistics, a city on another planet is a significant stronghold should that planet come under attack. Taking care of a colony will reward you with a better presence, and an improved economy that could mean the difference in your military campaigns. Q5: Swarm Missiles over traditional single-shot missiles? A5: We'll look into it, because they're sure cool to watch. Q6: Will there be unarmed combat? A6: In the hopefully rare occurrence that you run out of all ammo while invading a planet's surface, you'll be able to scavenge for other weapons or ammo, bring in shipments on friendly cargo ships, possibly even call down a consumable drop pod with supplies. When that runs out, you'll be provided with a weak laser pistol, that should hold its charge for a significant amount of time. While hand-to-hand combat would be cool, it's not really within the scope of RoVerse, and probably wouldn't work exceptionally well at the tiny scale we're working with. 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 seventy-sixth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. We hope everyone had a lovely Christmas this past week, and were able to relax for at least a little bit. We've had a busy week around here as well, but we made the most of the free time we have, and some of the boring time while family is around, to work on some pretty cool, and very important features for the game. This week, the development team working on the Capital Update has continued to work hard on finishing everything we will need. When we were trying to rush to release by Christmas, we ended up shelving a few features that we wanted but would take to much time, but now that we missed that original deadline, we can reconsider. And some of those features were pretty vital to extended gameplay, so putting them back in should make the game that much more fun to play. Idyllic finally took on the monumental task of digitizing and organizing the star systems that were designed nearly a year and a half ago, putting them into a handy google sheets database that we can use to manage and keep track of the status of systems, as well as one very important feature - loading the layout of systems from a saved and packed data file. Because the system we have planned uses a trick to create the different star systems, planets, and station servers, we need a way to load that information in, so when a new server is created, it has the most up-to-date and accurate information with which to build the system layout. Rather than have 800 individual place files all in one gigantic universe, our servers will come in about four different flavors, and upon creation, load in the instructed location from an outside source, create the star and its asteroids, the minerals in the debris, any station locations and planets. After the success of organizing the star system data, Idyllic took on the grueling process of not only organizing, but completely creating a list of every planet in the galaxy. With some fancy formulas and a few mistakes, he created an ordered list of all 539 planets to be generated, each with a connection to its host system. Each of these lists includes the necessary information to generate the right biome and size and any other information needed, making it a huge step in getting the game to production. With this work on the database, he also took on the task of giving the galaxy map a facelift, as well as making it load from an external source, rather than a list of systems as originally designed. With the new database of information, he was able to create a much more informative map than was previously possible, with star types and sizes, planets and their orbital radius, and asteroid field biomes. You may remember the old galaxy map. While it served its purpose of organizing the systems of the Galaxy into capturable sectors, it really wasn't prettiest design, and it wasn't the most useful. And for something greeting every player in the lobby server, the galaxy map needs to be both those things. And so Idyllic teamed up with Vedrakkerous, to bring new life to the map. We know that many computers don't handle particles exceptionally well, so keep in mind that these features will be toggleable by the user to better fit their computer's capabilities, including turning down particles, not rendering system biome asteroids, and even as far as turning off planets, to cut down on the part count, which admittedly got a bit high. The map features LightInfluence particles that we can use to show the different sectors of the galaxy, like the Badlands or the Misty Reaches, as well as a toggle to show faction control of systems. Flying through the galaxy really is an amazing experience. With this exceptional progress this week, and future plans to digitize the rest of the pre-planned data that has been sitting around, Idyllic should be pushing progress on the game forward in huge steps in the coming week. This week, Skinny was too busy with real life to make any substantial progress on the ships he's been working on, but he did manage to successfully create a proof-of-concept for planetary atmospheres, simulating that blueish outline visible at a distance, that also falls into shadow behind it, as it should. Add in a lovely generated planet mesh, and fleets will be cruising to invade in no time! This week we have also hired on a new shipbuilder, Lorenzo, and he has already done some amazing work with a particularly unique example for this week. Shaped unlike any other capitals in our fleet, and with more room for armor than weapon emplacements, this Medium Capital should work wonders securing systems and holding the line, while reinforcements can be called in. Welcome to the team! 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 a religious faction be allowed in? A1: While we have had many factions discuss their plans in the community about including a religion in their lore, which is entirely acceptable, creating a faction based on a real-life religion would not be allowed. While you may be able to get away with a 'Space Templars' faction, don't expect to use RoVerse to go proselytizing. Q2: What type of machines can we expect for mining into the planet, will we have an ‘unlimited’ inventory to hold the ores or will you put it in a container? A2: Mining on planets is still in the design phase, but it won't be all that different from mining asteroids with a dedicated mining ship. We plan to include mining lasers as possible attachments to vehicles, for fast and rough mining, as well as mining on foot that might get you a bit more efficiency, into harder-to-reach places, but be a bit slower to operate. As for digging in to planets, you should expect only minimal changes to terrain, not significant mining tunnels or the like, at least at release. This isn't quite minecraft after all. 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 seventy-fourth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has been quite busy, with lots more progress and a few tweaks to the Capital Update, some new ships from our shipbuilders, and a progress update on planet generation. Let's get started! Skinny has been working on his new cargo ship for the past few weeks, and it has finally gotten to a point he considers ready for flight. This truly massive cargo-carrying ship will be able to transport as much cargo as a faction could ever want, across as many star systems as they need to get the best price for the contents. With a unique style that doesn't match any other ships designed yet, this ship will truly stand out in your fleet. And we can't wait to see what he creates next. The Capital Update has seen some very important progress, with the first implementation of ship switching, as well as the first few steps towards customizable weapon loadouts. With the way the original dogfight alpha was coded, and the way the scripters handed work over to each other, caused it to become ungainly and very, very hard to modify. So the fact that we've been able to pull it apart and set it up the way it should have originally been set up, if a monumental achievement. We can't wait to show you how awesome this game is, and how much fun it is to fly around. But for now, you'll just have to take my word for it. Also from our shipbuilders, Sae'Tzar has built two new capital ships, the Bard class and the Guardian class, Medium and Small Capital, respectively. Matching the style of his previous ships, these capitals expand the line available from the manufacturer Wolf's Shipyard, and he has plenty more in the planning and early production phases. Mikey has completed another set of icons, this time the Capital Ship Icons. Each size class has a different icon, telling you at a glance exactly what ships are in your area. It's been quite a while since we've talked about where planets are at, as our focus is mainly on the Capital Update at the moment. But that doesn't mean we haven't been working on all the other cool features we've been working on. Planets have been in a sort of transition phase, as Idyllic transfers the inefficient generation system into a much more efficient, purely script-based implementation that doesn't rely on lists of objects holding data. This, of course, means that very complicated table structures have to be developed to hold all the information needed to generate planets. Currently, that means restructuring the continent growing system to select close neighbors from a table, rather than a part in workspace. And the work is going well, with everything on track to be completed before release. So stay tuned for updates from Idyllic's project! This is just about your last chance to sign up for the Dogfight Alpha Tournament. Sign up with a team of your friends and prove who's the best pilot in the galaxy. You can find the form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17KKApFQwTK-EW0uWbNQlWvq0i7OXem1Hf4YVh4SVOn4/viewform?edit_requested=true We should be announcing the date or dates of the battle soon, so don't wait too long! 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: What are the planned differences between ships that use only hull shielding, vs ships that use hull and ray shields? A1: If a ship is to rely on hull shielding, it would ideally have a much higher hull health stat than a comparable ship that uses both types of shielding. The major difference, between a ship with equal health, would be the thickness of the armor, cutting into interior cargo space, along with the weaknesses and strengths of different weapon types. Unfortunately, this week there weren't too many questions that hadn't been answered before. You can find quite a few of these questions on the FAQ page. If you have any questions not answered, feel free to ask them in our discord Community Channel. See you next week! 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! Any fans of the science fiction genre on Roblox can join the Science Fiction Genre Discord and find other fans and developers like you. 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 |