Hello everyone! Welcome to the 119th 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 progress on system generation systems, with an excellent demo of asteroid belt generation from Legomadamada, continued work on Fighter and Capital menu systems from Idyllic, as well as system scale development work from Idyllic and Lordrex, and a progress update on default stations from Juszl. Continuing on his quest to create the Most Interesting and Variable Chaotic System Debris Simulator™ possible, Lego has made progress this week in the asteroid department, adding a belt variety to his system. Previously we've shown off his cluster generator, where clumps of asteroids were generated away from a celestial body. The asteroid belt, though, is created by asteroids gravitationally captured by a celestial body, be it a star or a planet. Notice the variations in density as you move around the ring - not an easy detail to master. The easy route would be picking random points inside a large circle, but larger than a smaller one, where you'd end up with perfectly evenly spaces rocks arranged around a center point, and that wouldn't look too realistic, now would it? The system is flexible enough to vary the attractor points that increase asteroid size, as seen in the two images above - the first has four points where the scale of the asteroids increases, while the second has two or three, and each are of dynamic width. With 220 star systems, we need a system that is simple enough to quickly generate a large number of maps, with the complexity to not generate the same map for every system, which would get unimaginably boring for miners to fly around collecting ore in, or scouts looking for good base locations. You can expect further progress on this system in the coming weeks. Juszl has continued working on the station model we showed off last week, with further progress on the Industrial type default station. It has now moved beyond just the single central tower, to three towers arranged along a horizontal superstructure. The industrial station is just one of four types outlined in the introductory video. Along with Refineries, Shipyards, Farms, Research, and the new type, the Military station, these models will be the primary focus of player activity prior to the Planetary Update. These stations, and the faction versions factions will build, will be hubs of activity for ore exchange, shipbuilding, faction recruiting, research, resource generation, and defensive locations for friendly pilots. We highly recommend factions do their best work when building each station type, keeping a consistent and recognizable theme throughout. These structures will dot the skies through every star system under your control, and will be a major hub of activity for neutral parties, and an imposing target for hostile ones. Last week we had hit the roadblock of system scale, and we covered it in-depth in last week's newsletter. This week was full of testing of a mockup we've made of a system to find the boundaries of what we can do on the Roblox engine. This involved flying both a fighter and a capital ship from one celestial body to another, and timing the trip, and comparing ship scales and speed to roughly sized planets. Overall, the Excalibur at full boost took 20 minutes to travel from one planet to the star in the center of the system, while the Avenger took about 30 minutes. Now fighters won't be able to run boost non-stop for 20 minutes, and the stats for ships aren't final yet, but they're close, so we get an approximation of the scale of the system through this testing. The results show that systems will be large enough at the speeds available to make travel without warp a lengthy, but possible process. Space feels large enough that you aren't crowded out in the void of space, but not too big for the engine to handle. We even took our XXXL out for a test drive, and after setting the max zoom distance out a bit further than normal, were able to fly it next to our proposed planet models. Even such a gigantic ship, still feels small compared to the size of planets - which was our goal all along. The problem now is that the visual distance doesn't match what we were hoping for, so some mathematical trickery will be needed, to scale down distant objects faster than they should, and make systems feel as expansive as we want them to feel. Idyllic spent this week cleaning up the mess left after the sweeping changes made to the turret selection menus last week, fixing up the sorting of folders for faction ships, adding some checks to make sure there are valid turret models in the folders the script is looking for, and adding in the section that pulls a list of available faction turrets, not just the defaults. While he was working on Faction ships, it was only appropriate that he add in a few of the Community-submitted ship models he's already received. For some reason, the theme of the week seems to be round ships... The rigging and ship addition process is being refined with each submission, and the time it takes to add a ship to the game has been substantially reduced. Once a fighter has been prepared to the correct scale, it is a matter of minutes to add a core, group body parts, engine parts, and weapon attachment points together and drop it in-game. A bit of data entry to add stats, and the ship is ready to fly. 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 stations be able to move around? A1: A key aspect of faction gameplay is placing and constructing your stations in the right place - a military station guarding a trade route, a shipyard keeping a fleet flying - but they are still stationary structures. Take care to pick the right spot, because they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Q2: Will there be a starter faction like eve? A2: All of the Factions in RoVerse are community-created. Anyone not part of a faction is considered neutral, and are usually found around the neutral stations that will be available that are a bit safer than the far reaches of the galaxy. It is possible for someone to start an alliance of independent worlds or similar, if they wish to not have any faction interference. Q3: How does recruiting work in-game? Will we get offices, or just menus? A3: Neutral stations should be hubs of activity among unaffiliated players, and would be an excellent place for you to send your recruiting officers or possibly purchase an advertising stall, to find new players to join your cause. Using our proposed landmark system, you could build a recruitment center for people to teleport to, in a separate game. Q4: Any plans to expand the galaxy? A4: We can if we ever need to. 220 systems is a lot larger than it sounds, but if faction conflicts are overtaking the entire galaxy, we have the option to add more systems to the map. Q5: Can you steal ship blueprints for analysis, and a buff against that specific ship? A5: There is a possibility that you could steal transported ship blueprints off of cargo ships you've captured, but the primary use will probably be resale to other interested parties, or building your own copies for research on how the ship performs firsthand, or espionage missions. Q6: Can you upgrade a fighters stats to different versions, like Mk1 and Mk2? A6: You'll have a few points to spend on ship stats when you first construct a ship, but it will inherently be the same ship. If a faction wants to build slightly different versions of a ship, that's where we'd recommend they use the Mk. naming convention. Q7: Can we have ridiculous throwable weapons for ground combat? A7: We're not to the point of listing out every hand-held player weapon that will be available for ground combat, but if there is a particular weapon type that numerous factions want us to add, we'll try our best. Spears weren't originally on our list of sci-fi weapons, but they may be possible. Q8: Can Neutral system stations be destroyed? A8: The whole point of neutral system stations is that they provide a sheltered area for new players of the game to experience the mechanics, get a bit of practice in, before joining a faction in their quest to conquer the galaxy. So no, you won't be able to kill them.
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 |