Hello everyone! Welcome to the 148th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has seen some work on both the experimental side, and the bug-fixing side. Idyllic and Lord have started up the first round of full-on testing of Phase 1, finding any and all bugs that need to be addressed before it makes it to release. Idyllic and the community did some experimentation with the forcefield material, and cracked its secrets. It all started with a tweet from CloneTrooper1019 linking this texture... ...which led to this glimmer effect debuted last week as a potential candidate for ship shield hit indication. But we weren't satisfied just accepting the animation as something magical and beyond our control, we needed to control it, to exploit it for our own glorious ends! So Idyllic did his research - starting with a custom texture created from colors picked out of the glimmer texture, to see how it functioned in a controlled environment. With this texture, he noticed that only one or two colors were illuminated simultaneously, starting with the green and blue, working its way through yellow and magenta, and ending in red. The next step was to arrange them in an order... However with this pattern, the blues, magenta, and green illuminated first, which may have implied a texture-coordinate variation, but that was not the case. The next texture to test was a color selection wheel, wherein all colors could be tested simultaneously. A pattern was found! Drawing a line from the left to the right, from cyan to red, revealed on common factor with other lines drawn across the circle - an increase in the R component of RGB was the determining factor in when those portions of the texture were illuminated, which was confirmed with the very next test. Armed with the handy gradient tool provided by paint.net, Idyllic drew up his first successful custom texture. The scanning effect may find its use somewhere in RoVerse, and it doesn't have any artifacts, so the quality is up to our standards. But a scanning line is one thing, to really go sci-fi there's only one design - hexagons! Using a simple magic wand selection and underlaying a gradient, this texture was rather easy to make, and the results look pretty good. The centers of the hexagons were just deleted to 100% transparency, and you may notice they still flash in the gif, so we recommend using black, as it doesn't appear to ever flash. With the secret discovered and the process defined, Idyllic set to sharing this magic with the world, guiding members of the RoVerse Community and other development communities in the creation of their own unique effects, some of which can be seen below. We've also discovered a few other tricks, like vertexcolor editing to change the forcefield colors. There are a lot of possibilities for this feature, so we thought it best to spread the word and see what creative stuff the development community could come up with, and so far they haven't disappointed. We expect to see armor overshields and barriers and flashy billboards covering clan bases in no time. On the Phase 1 front, we have a status update and a few bugs we found in testing. We officially have all the features we're going to add before Phase 1 is released to the public for testing, with hangar localization and weapon damage being the last things added. The first official kill with a torpedo has been recorded, as they now do damage (quite a bit of it, if you actually manage to hit anything) though they won't be extremely useful until Capitals are added giving you a big enough target to shoot at. There were a few bugs with gamemodes that hadn't been tested with multiple players in a FE environment yet, but mainly just problems with the leaderboard not displaying the stats correctly, which should be a simple fix. The hull and shield gui wasn't properly tied into the ship stats values, so it didn't update your health, but a fix is in progress. There was a slight problem with loading the turrets on the ship you start with, which was fixed pretty quickly, and solved a bunch more problems that popped up down the line. This last fix was particularly momentous because it involved Idyllic's code, and a collaborative fix between both Idyllic and lordrex to solve the problem, rather than one person giving it a go. We'll keep you updated on the status of Phase 1, but things are looking good - just like these torpedo explosions! 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: What's to stop powerful factions from gatecamping the neutral systems? A1: There isn't really. If a faction becomes powerful enough to surround and block access to a neutral system, they can. I'm not sure that they'll find it all that profitable, but we aren't going to stop them. The key feature of neutral systems, though, is that there are 21 of them scattered all over the galaxy, so there will always be an open path. Q2: Will there be a system capture limit? A2: Factions are free to claim as many systems as they have the power to defend. There is a lot of space in the galaxy, 220 star systems and 800-some planets, which no faction will be able to defend a majority of it. It might be possible to blitz in a coordinated attack and gain the upper hand in a majority of systems, but you'll end up facing the combined might of the rest of the galaxy. Q3: How easy will joining factions in RoVerse be? A3: As easy or as hard as the individual factions want to make it. There will be advertising boards and links all over the galaxy, as getting people interested in clans is one of our goals, and we would like it to be an easy jump from joining in-game to joining the official Roblox groups. But of course, factions may want filter groups to weed out the spies and the nincompoops. Q4: How will factions interact with the low-skilled public, will they have too much power? A4: We plan on adding a plethora of permissions settings so factions can specify exactly what different ranks and grade levels can do, all the way down to does this rank have permission to withdraw faction ships from a hangar, do they have permission to sell ore, can they fire on their allies, and more. Q5: Will ships in warp crash into things? A5: Unlikely. The warp system as currently planned will be a way from jumping from landmark to landmark and bypassing endless debris and asteroid fields that fill the void between planets and stations. To calculate a path necessary to avoid any oncoming rocks would be an arduous task, so the current answer is phasing. Warps won't just teleport you to your destination, you'll still experience travel at high speeds, but you won't have to worry about running into anything along the way. 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 |