Hello everyone! Welcome to the 130th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you update on the progress we've made over the past week? Idyllic spent this week combining the two fighter systems, with excellent progress in the ship selection and loadout portions, while Lordrex and Skinny developed a graphics feature for billboardguis. First up is a feature that involves our carefully-crafted sunflares and the billboardgui that powers it. A while back Roblox released a feature that allows you to change the texture of the sun and moon in the skybox, as well as scale them up and down - a handy feature to be sure, and one that we will definitely be taking advantage of. Unfortunately, we had a particular vision of how we wanted stars to look at a distance, not just in the dogfight maps, but in star systems too, and the sun rays shader didn't quite cut it. So Skinny developed an awesome lense-flare effect to really bring out the brightness of the sun - the only problem was that its aspect ratio is a very wide rectangle. When the texture was applied to the skybox sun, even if we scaled it up as large as possible, it still appeared way too small, and wasn't nearly flexible enough to allow players to fly near or far away from it. So it needed to be a billboardgui. There was one small problem - billboardguis are rendered parallel to the camera, when you turn and look away from it, especially with really large billboards, it has the tendency to swing around and hit you in the face. So a solution was devised - detect if the star was offscreen and remove the billboard, often called culling. Lordrex spent a bit of time this week coding this to work, as well as working on the possibility of having the flare decrease in intensity when it travels behind obstacles. The past two weeks, Idyllic has reported good progress on getting ships to spawn using his new menu system for ship selection and loadout editing. Last week, he was 99% of the way there by the time of the newsletter release, so we didn't have all that many pictures of the functioning system, but luckily this week we have both pictures, and even more progress. To give you some insight to how the system works at this point, here is a sample of the helpful comments left by prior developers describing what individual functions do, for future scripters to use to guide future additions and modifications. After figuring out what the hell was going on there Idyllic was able to rig up the fighters, with only a few minor tweaks to layout, add the spawn function to his menu system, and spawn in any ship he wanted. In a throwback to the first teaser video we released, here we have the VAK fighter flying through the darkness of space, firing the original lasers from before their replacement with plasma that you all know and love from the Dogfight Alpha. So he rigged the 26 fighters, extracted the weld script and modified it to work from the command bar instead of having to run whenever a ship is spawned, tweaked a few stats and ship centerpoints, renamed the engine points to "Thrust" so the system could recognize where the engine trails were supposed to come from (a feature that will be modified in the near future to support multiple engine parts), and set off for the skies. A bit of testing was done, to make sure that every ship selected in the hangar menu spawned correctly, that also caught a few problems, like weapons facing the wrong way and welds not sticking properly, and it was time to move onto the last feature Idyllic developed this week. One of the first features that was requested when we released the Dogfight Alpha, second only to switching to a different ship, was switching weapons. Not happy to be stuck using just any old plasma bolt turrets, players wanted to play with a wider variety of your typical sci-fi weaponry. Lasers and missiles and railguns and machine guns were all highly-requested, and the time has finally come that we can add those features to the game. The shot of the vak fighter was the first test gone right, with manual entries into the weapons table for 'laser' that was then quickly and efficiently tied right into the code for the weapon selection system, meaning changing out weapons is a breeze. There are a few bugs here and there to work out - somewhere along the line the code for gimbal turrets was modified and no longer faces the right way - but there should be no obstacles to keeping this feature set moving forward. Next up is code for the more unusual weapon types, like missiles and beams, as well as integrating capital combat into the system. A selection of ships that have been rigged and are ready for combat. 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 a clothing industry? A1: We've always planned on supporting full character customization in RoVerse, from clan uniforms to your back-alley nerf-herder vest. We even covered a method of UV mapping custom species meshes to support clothing from the roblox catalog. And since we can support that, might as well support selling your hard work in-game as well. Q2: Can a faction design a bunch of different uniforms? Armor? Limits? A2: Sure. Make as many uniforms as you have ranks, different squadrons and wings, different departments. We'll do our best to support giving the proper uniforms to your faction members. Armor is the same concept, but you won't just get it for free, you will have to build it. Just try and keep the numbers reasonable, trying to do custom uniforms per member is probably way to many to ask our devs to import. Q3: Will you get a warning when an unknown or hostile ship is warping in? A3: None from our end - you'll need to train your pilots to spot hostile forces early, and report unusual activity. Q4: Can we put light weapons on Freighters and Civilian ships? A4: It might be possible to support a few lightly-armed civilian designs, make a proposal and we'll consider it, though they won't be able to defend themselves very well, and should have an escort in hostile space. Q5: Can we get speed readouts in something other than studs/second? A5: That seems like something we could work on adding, though it will involve lots of math to calculate speed in different units and at different scales. 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 |