Hello everyone! Welcome to the 295th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've continued crossing bugs off our list from the 3rd community playtest, with some exciting things solved like UI issues with the gamemode scoreboard, faction turret errors, fighters being able to fly straight through Capital ships, turret shot rendering, and turret descension. We've also snagged several other generic errors that were stopping things like respawning or dealing damage, particularly with Missiles. The community tests were also invaluable in helping us establish a baseline for how much health a Capital ship should have - the Bolitho would be considered a light Cruiser, and is in the very smallest Capital category of ships, so it should be able to hold its own against a limited number of fighters, especially with its complement of 7 flak cannons, but it shouldn't be an impenetrable wall if you sneak up behind it or outrange it's flaks. After the testing last week, we've doubled the health of the Bolitho, which gives it a bit more appropriate bulk for taking fighter hits. We've also taken the opportunity to tune Capital vs Capital damage - two Bolitho fighting each other with 3 Conventional turrets currently feels exactly like we'd want it to feel. Not too many hits to take one down, but it doesn't feel like it's made of glass either. A new feature requested last week and quickly added in are turret reticles. These small pips will always be directly in front of the turrets on your ship, showing you where your shots would go at that exact moment, while the turrets are still transiting towards your mouse. While they no longer get stopped by flak, this does give you a good idea of a ship's best firing angle, which on the Bolitho is directly ahead, with all guns to bear on the target. A feature that is making its return, but at a fully-improved level, are ship wrecks. Randomly generated from the Capital ship model that just died, these wrecks appear with a brilliant explosion. Now, they work with any Capital you happen to be flying, not just the Bolitho. We're to the point where we're testing the Capital Beta out every week - Join us next Sunday to help test out multiplayer aspects of the update. Your help is greatly appreciated. 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 add Hangar space to captured enemy Capitals? A1: Unfortunately a captured ship is very difficult to modify without the original schematics. They'll be stuck with the Hangar space they have, unless you build a version of your own and spec it as a Carrier. Q2: An annoying issue with capitals is that some small obstacles will stop the largest and strongest ships in their tracks. I can see this becoming a significant issue and/or exploitable strategy for many factions. Especially as larger ships get deployed. Will there be a mechanic to overcome this? A2: We're working on a way to deal with this - the first change is live that prevents your throttle from getting set to 0 when you run into something. In the future, we want to use the collectionservice to tag small debris that should be able to be moved out of the way of Capital ships. We tried out detecting the size of debris live when you run into it, but unfortunately the debris isn't uniformly set up, and would be a pain to detect that way. This will take some dedicated effort to group and tag items in the existing maps. Q3: Can we collect debris to turn into resources? A3: Sure, debris that is created by the destruction of ships will be a vital aspect of any faction's fleet maintenance scheme, since most of the resources that went into a ship should be recoverable from the wreck, if your particular side wins the battle. Now you wont be able to scoop this debris up with a net or anything, but you will be able to mine them like very valuable asteroid chunks. 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 294th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This weekend, the community helped test out one of the last pre-release versions of the Capital Update. Thanks to their help, we've now created a list of bugs that absolutely must be patched before we release, and can start crossing them off to make it over the final hurdle. We did manage to sneak a new feature or two into the Beta as well - Flak turrets are now grouped into a single weapon group that can be disabled with a single button, instead of one at a time, and disabled weapons show up as grey on the reloading indicators on the HUD. Weapon descension has been enabled, with turrets being able to angle down about 10 degrees. You may see shots fire through the hull of your ship if it protrudes from the turret far enough on a level plane, but unless there's a lot of demand for turrets to respect collisions there, we'll leave it as-is - it makes it much easier to hit targets directly in front of you, and there will be an exceptional amount of weirdly-shaped ships that make this difficult to control. The Bolitho now has a stronger Engine effect, and some trails, instead of using slightly scaled-up versions of fighter effects, and we've been slowly filling out the achievement icons on the rewards screen. Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ No questions this week - drop by #dev_questions if you have any questions about the game. 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 293rd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've continued work on the code front, but we also found time to work on a few new achievement icons that will be awarded after a round - in honor of a certain urban legend that has arisen in the past week. Things on the code front are progressing well, and we've moved from getting all the code sorted and updated, to debug testing where we attempt to play the game until something breaks, fix it, then repeat. This week in the dogfight there were 109 kills, 37 with auto, 0 with beam, 0 with laser, 0 with plasma, 6 with railgun, and 66 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 43 kills, followed by the SSA-3-2_Ritojin_Kai with 24. The most dangerous map was Blue_Spaceway with 66 deaths, followed by Frostland with 27. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 80 kills and 7 deaths and a 11.42 KDR; tygrys202 with 28 kills, 34 deaths and a 0.82 KDR; and Outpost with 1 kills, 68 deaths, and a 0.01 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Radiant Corps Moonray in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 134) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ No questions this week - drop by #dev_questions if you have any questions about the game. 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 292nd issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've continued working on the reprised Capital menu, and we have the brand-new cycle reward ship to show off. Introducing the Radiant Corps Moonray: With a color scheme chosen by committee, and great stats to go with, this ship will soon become a reliable part of your arsenal. Top the leaderboard in the next 6 weeks, and it can be you and at most 20 other's exclusive ride. Work continues on the Capital menu reprisal, and as always code doesn't make great pictures. Things are slowly starting to work again, which is a very important step in getting everything to work again. This week in the dogfight there were 79 kills, 11 with auto, 35 with beam, 0 with laser, 0 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 33 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Iridium with 32 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 28. The most dangerous map was Blue_Spaceway with 45 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 30. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were IdyllicDestroyer, with 32 kills and 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; FangABXY with 28 kills, 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; and Ace2554 with 11 kills, 1 deaths, and a 11 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Radiant Corps Moonray in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 133) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ No questions this week - drop by #dev_questions if you have any questions about the game. 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 291st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, we've continued to work on the ship modification menu reprisal. Things are continuing well, with new code being added to fill in the unforeseen gaps in the prior code, and old, buggy systems getting entire remakes to do things in a more logical fashion - for instance, instead of passing a server-requested dictionary through 8 different functions and subfunctions until it is finally used by a bit of code, we're instead just requesting that table in the function that needs it. Before, this table had to be specially delivered because the later functions wouldn't know whether it was the table for Fighters or Capitals until it got there, whereas the newer version will always know exactly which type of ship it's handling at any given time. This week in the dogfight there were 1138 kills, 21 with auto, 41 with beam, 11 with laser, 282 with plasma, 31 with railgun, and 752 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Silencer with 932 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 155. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 579 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 385. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were tygrys202, with 532 kills and 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; Phaytox with 294 kills, 29 deaths and a 10.13 KDR; and FangABXY with 184 kills, 18 deaths, and a 10.22 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 133) Now, for the overall cycle stats! Pillarum was the most dangerous map, with 926 kills, followed by Blue Spaceway with 616. The top ship was the Silencer, with 1172 kills, followed by the VSa1-1 Kazan with 416, and the Ritojin Kai OH with 205. The top weapon was the Torpedo, with 1214 kills, followed by Plasma with 691, and Auto with 101. Laser marked up to 88, Beam with 71, and Railgun with 48. Overall, 26 pilots participated this cycle and earned at least one kill, while 10 players died at least once. The lowest KDR belongs to The Outpost with a .006 KDR. The dogfight has seen 8,621 visits, with an 83% approval rating (156-30) and 393 favorites. This cycle there were 1,833 kills total. Topping off this cycle's leaderboard was tygrys202, with 532 kills, 0 deaths, and a NaN KDR. He was followed by FangABXY with 491 kills, 42 deaths, and a 11.69 KDR, and Phaytox with 333 kills, 29 deaths, and 11.48 KDR. These three pilots have unlocked the exclusive Golden Centaur Skin, coming soon to a dogfight near you. If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Championship Series 19) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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 atmospheres have bullet drop? A1: An interesting scenario that we hadn't considered just yet. Of course, it would make sense for our physical projectiles to feel the effects of gravity and atmospheric drag, so we'll have to look into how to best make that happen. Might want to avoid shooting straight up until we do. 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 290th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. Last week Idyllic set out to reorganize and reprise the code on the ship modification system, and is making significant progress in that area. The code now takes advantage of modulescripts for sandboxing certain common functions, and we have reduced the number of global variables getting written to and rewritten, that was causing most of our problems with phantom turrets and ghost ships. It has been quite a lesson on doing things right the first time, rather than leaving optimization and correcting things for the future. Also this week, a few members of the community helped test out the juggernaut and capital TDM rounds that will be coming soon with the Capital Update. They found a plethora of bugs that could only be found when testing with multiple people, and will help us finalize the code for these new modes. Have some pictures from their tests: We'll get these things all patched up in the coming weeks - stop by the community discord and you too can join us in testing. This week in the dogfight there were 168 kills, 0 with auto, 0 with beam, 42 with laser, 41 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 85 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Silencer with 165 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 2. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 99 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 41. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were pigyyyyy345, with 127 kills and 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; Phaytox with 38 kills, 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; and SaltyAnd_Sour with 2 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 132) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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 incoming rockets/missiles be destructible, making a need and use of picket ships and Point-Defense-Weapons? A1: Indeed - flak barrages will screen Capitals from incoming missiles and torpedoes, and will be a vital part of their defenses. We'll have to consider whether auto turrets can be automated and do the same in the future. Q2: Will there be any extreme mods for ships that push them far beyond the safety limits? A2: None are planned at the moment, but that would be an interesting area to explore with research in the full game. Q3: Do ground vehicles get shields? A3: Yes they can. While they wont be ubiquitous like shields on ships are, spending 0 points in the shield category can make an armor-only vehicle, if that is your faction's preference. 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 289th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week Idyllic is deep in the trenches of the ship modification system, and has unfortunately come to the realization that the spaghetti code that it contains will not stand up to the requirements of the future, and will need to be cleaned up. Too many bugs have arisen from poor coding decisions made before expansions to the system were made make it unwieldy and a mess to try and debug, so we're going to take some time to cut it down to the essentials and make it work. However, this newsletter will have at least some content: A secret project is underway, and it has flashing lights. What could it be? This week in the dogfight there were 118 kills, 58 with auto, 21 with beam, 12 with laser, 0 with plasma, 10 with railgun, and 17 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 33 kills, followed by the Iridium with 21. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 34 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 32. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 38 kills and 21 deaths and a 1.8 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 27 kills, 27 deaths and a 1 KDR; and PrabuRamadhan with 23 kills, 1 deaths, and a 23 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 131) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ No questions this week - shoot us any questions you have in #dev_questions. 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 288th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic delved into a variety of bugs facing the hangar menus in the Beta and added a new feature to the killfeed. First up, the killfeed - in the beta, when you get a kill with a weapon, that weapon type is now displayed on the killfeed using the turret icons from the ship menu. Seen here, the player has killed an outpost turret with lasers, and the square laser icon is displayed next to the feed. Now you'll have a better idea of what weapons enemies are using during engagements, without having to guess at what killed your teammates. Idyllic is working diligently to fix the last few bugs up in the beta, so if you find any more let us know in the Discord #bug_reports. Among the ones found this week was an interesting one dealing with fighter turret mounts when selecting a Capital, seen below. Not exactly in a functional state. We'll keep fixing bugs as they pop up, and hope to get the Beta out officially very soon. This week in the dogfight there were 219 kills, 21 with auto, 3 with beam, 13 with laser, 13 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 169 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 168 kills, followed by the Excalibur with 41. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 93 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 63. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 187 kills and 3 deaths and a 62.33 KDR; Xepeus with 26 kills, 6 deaths and a 4.33 KDR; and DevKomodo with 3 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 130) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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: Are ships made of one part meshed together, or several? A1: Currently, ships are separated by material and color, and then unioned. Eventually they will be meshed but kept as these same parts, so if you'd like to keep pieces customizable down the road, change those parts' colors by one number in the color3 and they'll stay separate. Q2: Will faction species have special abilities or immunities to environmental hazards? A2: Unfortunately, balancing abilities and immunities would be nearly impossible. However, we do plan on there being gear available to everyone to unlock and purchase that could simulate a natural ability, if you make sure every member of your species has that gear.
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 287th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. Up this week were some bug fixes to the Capital Update Beta, a shiny new effect for the deploy button, and further work on the planetary chunk terrain system. First up, the deploy button has a shiny new hover animation to really emphasize what that big orange button does. No more confused new players not knowing how to launch their ship into the running gamemode. Besides a simple new button effect, Idyllic worked on fixing up some broken code, from the radar pinging mechanic, to turret obscuring, to outpost turret health being reduced by half to speed up player-outpost engagements. On the chunk terrain front, a new planet has been painted, but there are a few bugs to work out in the saving/loading system. Here we have chunks overwriting small parts of existing chunks with air, making the surface very bumpy and unusable. We've narrowed it down to the part that reads whether there is an existing voxel of terrain where the new chunk is trying to write air, which appears to work correctly in most scenarios, but in a few, it doesn't recognize that there is terrain already there. We will continue investigating this issue and continue on our way with this cool feature. This week in the dogfight there were 119 kills, 1 with auto, 6 with beam, 7 with laser, 64 with plasma, 7 with railgun, and 34 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the SSA3-2_Ritojin_Kai_OH with 64 kills, followed by the VSa1-1_Kazan with 33. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 80 deaths, followed by Blue_Spaceway with 40. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were TheUnderseer, with 64 kills and 1 deaths and a 64 KDR; FangABXY with 33 kills, 0 deaths and a N/A KDR; and wegbhap with 11 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 129) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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: If we have house sigils that are assigned to each player based on their ancestry, can we have them appear on the sides of our ships based on whos flying? A1: It might be possible to customize ships if we are provided a list of icon ids and a corresponding rank in your Roblox groups, or possibly the possession of a badge. We'll keep you posted. Q2: In the Juggernaut gamemode, will there only be one capital allowed? Or will we get to choose what capital we play as when we get chosen? Could there be major differences (stat allocations) between capitals that would pose similar differences in capability to that of fighters (per size class)? A2: Currently, more than one player can be selected as a juggernaut with a 1-10 ratio. They are dropped into a modified Bolitho with better stats, but this could easily change in the future. Stats will definitely play a role in the performance of a juggernaut capital. 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 286th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, RoboGojo has returned to assist with a refined planetary gravity system that doesn't use hamster balls to simulate physics, but instead recreates the player experience directly and accurately. Idyllic has spent some time this week working on the planetary generation system, with a few incredible breakthroughs that will vastly improve loading times and player experiences while on the surface. Daedalus Rex, our planetary proof-of-concept, is getting old. When we first put it together to prove that it was possible to create planets on the scale we were envisioning and have gravity physics without breaking the clients, it was revolutionary. But the time has come to push the envelope even further, and to make it even more efficient in the process. Daedalus Rex taught us many things about how planets worked on Roblox, and now is the time to use those lessons to improve. One of the biggest issues with Daedalus Rex was that it took about 10 minutes to load into the game. It has 10,200 wedges forming the surface, and each of those parts has to load in before you can join the game. Streaming was ineffective for our purposes, cutting away far too much of the horizon to make it worth it to have round planets at all, especially when loading in from high orbit. And the mostly-smooth surface wasn't even remotely close to the detail level we wanted to support, meaning even more wedges would be required. But there is a solution - a custom chunk loading system could give us the control we need to support the resolution we want, but it would be difficult, and would require a bit of outside-the-box thinking to make it serve our purposes. Chunks and Smooth Terrain It was always a part of the plan to eventually turn planets into smooth terrain, instead of triangle terrain. Anyone that has seen Idyllic's Avatar Icon or seen the original demos showing off ground vehicles has seen our intent. And as a bonus, the smooth terrain voxels provide a much more efficient process for storing lots of terrain, they just require a lot more math to make it work for your purposes. And they also needed a few important features to work, which the team investigated: Client-side Terrain Terrain loaded on the server has to be sent to every player that tries to join. This flaw had to be avoided, and the best way to do that was to load terrain chunks on the client instead of the server. There was a problem, however, since TerrainRegions, the easiest way to copy and paste bits of terrain, do not replicate. Saved chunks in ReplicatedStorage don't download to the client, and there's no way to send the bytecode contents over the wire, so a custom solution needed to be found. Below are two of the most important pictures in the entirety of the planetary project. They may not look like much at first glance, but the feature displayed was the lynchpin of making planetary chunk loading work. They show the client side and the server side of the same place at the same time. The client, on the left, has loaded terrain on its own, while the server has none of its own. Without Client-side terrain loading, players could explore an entire planet to load all the chunks and make loading times to that server skyrocket. With everything loaded locally, this tactic will not work. But this was not the end of the problems, nor the solutions. We still had to send this terrain data across to the client somehow, and paste it into the world. Enter WriteVoxels. WriteVoxels is the workhorse of the terrain functions, taking several multi-dimensional arrays of terrain, material, and occupancy values and turning them into voxels of terrain. These tables can be converted into strings using the EncodeJSON function of the HTTPService, and strings can be sent to the client. But large chunks of terrain have extremely long strings, and we quickly hit the max string limit on these encoded tables. So we took the encoding one step further. After encoding the string into a JSON table, which is just a bunch of values in quotes and square brackets, we pushed that string through a compression system based on LZW that compressed the string to a fraction of its original size. Turns out that a bunch of repeating "Air" values, which the terrain chunks mostly are, can easily be compressed. So we wrote our own code using WriteVoxels to write terrain chunks and... Turns out WriteVoxels doesn't care about existing terrain voxels, and unlike PasteRegion, it doesn't have an option to ignore air when writing. Each new chunk written overwrote portions of their adjacent chunks, which looks pretty cool, but doesn't make for a very solid surface to walk on. So we wrote some more code, did some more math, and merged existing voxels with the new chunks to be written, and voilà! Now it was just a matter of loading the chunks closest to the player, which with a small number of chunks like the 300 here, was just a matter of checking all their centers, but will eventually involve some quadtrees and more math. And we have our first successfully chunk-loaded planet. But this is only half the project. How do we get these chunks to send to the client to load? Are they procedurally generated? No, not entirely. The current plan for planets is for them to be procedurally generated using the system Idyllic developed a long time ago, to get realistic continents, mountain ranges, and biomes, and then for someone to go in and finish detailing them by hand. Carve interesting landmarks, place vegetation and points of interest. To really make the biomes unique and realistic. After they're hand-finished, we can use the automated system we developed this week to chop them up into chunks, and save them as compressed data. To this end, Idyllic made a first planet, called Atlas, to test this out. After generating a sphere of sand, we painted on mountains and rivers and ice and forests, at a reduced scale. Then we chopped this planet up. Faster than the eye can see, the system pastes the whole world, identifies the chunk it wants to save, chops off the rest of the planet, floodfills to determine the bounds of the remaining terrain, and saves that chunk. This data is the same data that is send over to the client, and written as voxels. Unfortunately water is still a no-go because of the stair-stepping it does at 45° angles, but it was worth a shot. Now, onto the second half of this extremely long newsletter. RoboGojo took one look at Daedalus Rex's gravity system, and was horrified. While an interesting technical feat, it could be done better. Those of you who have tested Daedalus first-hand have no doubt experienced the weirdness that is the humanoid controller. While the gravity aspect is great, it has a lot of problems, mostly relating to sliding and momentum. And so, we set off on another gravity adventure. Returning to our origins, of using EgoMoose tech demos in unique and original ways, Robo has been developing gravity mark II using his wallstick controller as a base. No more giant spheres rolling down any slope over 1°, but instead regular-shaped humanoidrootparts moving in normal humanoid ways. Important features for this new gravity controller include the ability to stand in place without sliding around, the ability to climb ladders and do normal humanoid stuff, and only be able to jump once before landing. Each of these has been going well, including a maximum slope angle players can climb before the slide back down. We are considering including a climbing mechanic for the steeper slopes, but that remains to be developed. And since this controller is as accurate as possible to the normal humanoid, walking is controlled by a force, and if you "accidentally" set the force too high, you enter into a semi-stable orbit around the planet you once stood upon. So we shall return to our hero again, to see if he succeeds in falling from orbit and wresting control of the planetoid. This week in the dogfight there were 351 kills, 0 with auto, 0 with beam, 0 with laser, 291 with plasma, 0 with railgun, and 60 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Kokytos with 178 kills, followed by the SSA3-2_Ritojin_Kai_OH with 140. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 272 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 50. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were Doombomb1622, with 178 kills and 1 deaths and a 178 KDR; TheUnderseer with 140 kills, 4 deaths and a 35 KDR; and FangABXY with 25 kills, 0 deaths, and a N/A KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Stormfront Armaments Centaur in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 128) Calexian Community Challenge The challenges are: 10,000,000 Kill Distance, and 100 Outpost Victories 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 fighters with damaged ship models be added to the game? A1: If you'd like your fighters to appear damaged, you can build them that way. (Like the Akatanan wrecked finch.) Fighters in combat likely wont suffer any physical damage effects beyond fire and smoke to show hull damage. However, Capital ships can have a "destroyed" version that appears when they've been exploded. Much like Avenger, which serves as a proof-of-concept for the wrecks feature, other Capital ships should have about 3-5 chunks that can be randomly rotated when that ship is destroyed. You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us! If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here! Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite! |
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |