Hello everyone! Welcome to the 115th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you up to date on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic really dove into his work, with substantial progress in quite a few different areas, from HUD updates to ship explosions. Lordrex has also continued his work on replication data, with a status update on his progress. First up is a small but important feature added to ship loadout modification. The new addition, there at bottom center, is a list of the turrets you have exchanged, and the number of each type, giving you a total cost to rekit the current ship. This marks one of the first steps towards in-game purchasing by the player, meaning we get to mark that section in the roadmap as 'in-progress.' Please note, prices are for testing porpoises only, and may not reflect final in-game cost per turret. With that out of the way, Idyllic moved on to the next feature on his list. Integrating the health and shield HUD demoed quite a few newsletters back, with the new turret weapon systems. Last week, the bullet reflection demo didn't quite manage to show it, but bullets that don't reflect are marked as hits, triggering the damage function. This week involved fleshing out that system, including a small part that registers damage to a ship's health, and updates the player's hull health display. But how to test this system? Loading a test server takes so much time, and integrating every new feature into filtering-compatible takes too much time and effort... So how about the next best thing? The Automated Rapid-Fire Conventional Turret Weapons Platform, or ARFCTWP, for the linguistically flexible. Using the latest in target-seeking technology straight out of the Roblox wiki scripting cookbook chapter 2, to find and eliminate all threats in its vicinity with extreme prejudice. Serving both as a proof-of-concept for any future plans we might have for automated defense turrets, and a helpful tool in testing damage and combat systems, the automated turret does its job quite well, well enough that we're optimistic about future implementations of it. On a technical side, it functions on the same code as ship turrets, but with all the ship code trimmed out, meaning that any tech we develop for ships will also function for automated turrets, from missiles to fixed mounts. In the future, we would like to improve the targeting system to be a bit more complex and anticipate locations, as right now it shoots for center of mass, but that will come with time. Further work on details involving health and damage systems included the classic explosion effect finally brought forward again, with the beginning work on spawning in shipwrecks when ships are destroyed. One detail we'd like to specifically point out is the fact that the ship continues moving after sustaining critical damage. In the Capital Demo video, ships froze and exploded when they had taken too much damage, with led to some awkward transitions from high speed to dead stop. Now, the loss of helm control and the ships inertia mean it continues to travel forward, before being completely destroyed. While we acknowledge that the wreck should also continue to move, the fact that we aren't doing solar gravitation physics requires that it stop eventually. On the replication front, another week of intense coding has gone by, with more and more work being added onto the data replication scripts that make parallel servers possible. This week saw some early-stage data tables being sent from one server to the VPS, where it is compared with existing data, then distributed to other instances, to edit an object's 'health.' Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Can different branches of a faction have different styles of ships? A1: Definitely! If you go through the effort of developing different branches, we'll support it. You can submit the different ship designs the same way a faction would, and we might be able to give you the power to restrict members to their specific branch of ships. Q2: Will there be faction ships in the Capital update? A2: I hope so, the rigging system was rather straightforward, the only barrier remaining would be restricting use to members of that faction, which doesn't seem all that hard to overcome. Q3: Can factions add more ships after the game releases? A3: Definitely, we plan to allow rolling submissions of ships for the entire duration of play, as new factions join up, plant their flag, and take on the galaxy, as well as the established factions improving their designs and updating their styles. Q4: Asteroid harpoons? A4: I sure hope so. Q5: If someone steals a ship model and tries to reupload it as theirs, what will happen? A5: We intend to have a moderation system to verify that ship designs aren't already in-game, but you should be pretty well off if you have a distinct theme of ships. It would be hard to pass a Vak fighter off as your own, in theory. Q6: How will time be calculated in RoVerse? Could a week be a year? A6: Our current plans for a RoVerse calendar include cycles of 7 days as the default unit, four cycles making a quad, 12 quads making an annum, and 7 annum making a septum. Of course, it's recommended that factions have their own calendar systems to fit their lore, while the RoVerse time system is there to help keep track of events happening in-game. Q7: Could factions build relics to have scattered around a few lore systems? A7: Sure, if you build some cool old stuff, we'll do our best to include them in the generation functions, either as ruins on planet surfaces, or wrecks and debris floating in space. Q8: To what extent can factions have moving parts on ships? Foldable wings, or just spinning turbines? A8: As of now we don't have very many plans involving details on ships that move, as most of the movement we currently have uses particles and beams. A few moving pieces may be possible, maybe as a landing gear function, but we'll have to see how things perform later down the line. 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! Comments are closed.
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |