Hello everyone! Welcome to the 118th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week, Idyllic put some solid work into rigging up as many fighters as we have available for the Capital Update, in continuation of his formatting work last week. Lordrex has continued with replication scripting, and has another successful test of sending data between parallel servers, though still in console-readout form. The development team has also gained a new developer, who will be taking on the task of building stations both as a default or as a guide for factions to build their own. Lets get started! Last week Idyllic showed his progress involving the rigging of the slew of fighters we've had built for two years, preparing them for the merge between the Capital code he has been working on and the Fighter code updated by TheFurryFish and Boysun. This week, he has rigged up the remaining ships, entered all their data into the data table, and come up with a whole bunch of descriptions to go along with the fighters. The full list includes the Excalibur, the Anubis, the Hummingbird, the Iridium, the Procyon, the Pulsar, the Red Wolf, the Savannah, the Scutum, the Shuriken, the Vortex, the Xerynite, the Blue Komodo, the Centuri, the Comet, the Danube, the Mercury, the Cardinal, the Halbert, the Gladius and the Silencer, as well as a few faction-specific ships that have already been submitted. He also managed to finish up the code that allows both Capital ships and Fighters to coexist in the same menu system, locking the camera min and max zoom up close for fighters and a larger distance for Capitals, moving the camera to the proper hangar, and searching the folder system for the correct turrets to mount onto the correct class of ship. In continuation of his work on implementing faction ships and class folders, it was necessary to refine the turret edit menu a bit to allow greater flexibility when selecting turrets for the currently selected mount. Not every turret type will be available for every ship, and not every turret mount will be the same class size - creating a way to identify and display this information was an important addition. Available turret options below the turret selector now pull directly from the list of available turret models, and use a UI sorting element to fill out the list. In the long run, being able to specify the available turret options directly, rather than showing a button that doesn't work, will mean a much better user experience when creating ship loadouts. This week a few devs got together to take another stab at building a system mockup to scale. While we're not going for a real-scale star system, the balance between the proportions of ships to stations to planets to stars, as well as the spacing between everything, is an important balance to get right. We've discussed a basic concept before that involves points of interest separated by wide gulfs that fleets normally warp through, and we plan on continuing with that system. Unfortunately, we hit a few roadblocks in the process of making everything extremely huge, in that the physics engine really hates floating point precision past 50k studs from the origin. A year ago, the physics engine would cause vibration of moving parts past about 10k studs from the origin, so the 5x increase is welcome, but it still becomes a problem when you want to build systems out to the 100k stud clipping distance. It also doesn't help that our ships are miniaturized, where small vibrations look much larger on a 1x1x1 stud ship. But good news! There are ways for us to mitigate this, that we'll be exploring the technical side of in the coming weeks. We've run into problems before that required creative solutions, so I have no doubt that we'll be able to work our way around this slight roadblock. In fact, one of the processes we're employing to reduce physics problems in the first place, meshing, has the bonus of reducing the visibility of vibration, when the ship is one part rather than 30 neatly aligned bricks. The current boundaries will allow us to still have extremely large systems from a fighters' perspective, but when it comes to the outrageously large XXXLs that factions can build, scale might get pretty wonky. On the server replication front, Lordrex has continued development over the past few weeks to make the system function as we need it to, and be robust enough to handle who-knows-how-many servers all sending structure health information. This week, he had another successful data test, where he edited values in one server and they were correctly sent to another parallel server. This would be hard enough in a standard Roblox universe place, where you'd have to send the data every instance of one place - but RoVerse has its unique system where all 220 star systems are loaded from the same place file. This means that the server has to keep track of which servers are the correct system, what structures are still in existence in that system, and then send the data through. With another successful test, we're a step closer to adding in health readouts and station explosions, so we can put a gif of it in the newsletter. Our newest teammate on the Development team is someone you all have probably heard of. We've posted his work for the Ninazu Collective in the Community Spotlight newsletter, and when we talk about faction ships his ships are usually around. One of the most active members of the community discord, and by far the biggest twitch streamer of RoVerse-related content - the one and only Juszl! Juszl has joined the team with the project of developing some default station models for factions that don't have the resources to get stations of their own design built right away. We still highly recommend factions build their own stations, as a consistent theme is an important aspect of a factions culture. No one would expect a VAK military station to be a standard-issue station model, now would they? We had initially planned not to build any station models ourselves, as they are pretty specific to factions, but it was determined that having a default version as a guideline would help other faction devs when building theirs - we can set size limits, part counts, and help establish the detail level that we expect. And he's already been hard at work! He streamed his progress as he started construction on an industrial-type station. For reference on the different station types, we recommend checking out the Introductory Videos page, and the Stations video, to get you started. That's all the progress Idyllic's internet has the strength to post, as he's off the grid for the weekend. But let us know in the discord community what you'd like to see us work on or ask any questions you have about the project. Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse: ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290 Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ Q1: Will planets have different gravity? A1: If we were building a realism simulator, it would be only fitting for planetary objects to have gravitational forces determined by their mass, but we feel like it would get too complicated too quickly for a majority of players. Having each world function differently, in regards to vehicle suspensions and projectile arcs would be hard to get used to, and would probably break all our vehicles. That's not to say we won't have a moon where you can jump 100 feet in the air, but most planets should have the same gravity. Q2: Will there be different types of mining lasers? A2: While we haven't quite gotten to developing mining systems, we have put some thought into it. To match the variety of combat ship weapons that keep things interesting and new, we plan on having different types of mining lasers and equipment, with a variety of stat tradeoffs - you might have a quick-mining laser, but it can't mine higher-tier ores, or a slow but efficient version. Mining will be a big part of the final game, so keeping that mechanic interesting is an important job. Q3: Will the Capital Update have every ship be free? A3: No. The Capital ship will allow you to earn credits for competing in the different gamemodes, which can then be exchanged for turrets or new ship unlocks. We plan on having a testing mode at some point in the future, so you can try out the more expensive ships without worrying about them getting destroyed in combat. Q4: Will there be a galactic police force establishing rules and keeping order? A4: There will be no dev-instated rules about conduct within RoVerse except for preventing and punishing cheating, it will be up to each faction to determine what is legal and what isn't within their own territory. They can hire a security force, shoot down transgressors, or place bounties on rule breakers and let the free market take care of them. Q5: If I get kicked from a faction or it shuts down, will I keep their ship designs? A5: We plan on there being two different groups of ships - ships that players own and can pull out of hangars whenever they want, and faction ships that are accessible from faction stations and carriers and require a group rank to access. You'll be able to keep your owned ships if you are fired or the faction shuts down operations, but any faction-owned ships will become inaccessible. It should be possible for factions to grant you ownership of a specific ship, if you earn it, that you could then personalize and make your own. 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 |