RoVerse Development Newsletter #189

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 189th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week had a significant merge of many features that have been nearly complete and ready to go combined with the outpost, to get the ball rolling on future portions without leaving anything behind. The list includes ship skin purchasing and selection, weapon classes loadout, models, and deployment, armament potential calculations, and UI to go along with it, changes to weapon purchases to make turrets permanent on a per-ship basis, and more. Lets get started.

First up is a feature that has been in waiting for quite some, nearly ready for deployment, but always less important than other priorities. But no longer. In the Outpost Demo, players can now purchase and equip ship skins for default fighters.

Cruise through the sky as a man of iron in the Ferrous Iridium skin, or make your hard-earned Cardinal look like a watermelon. The opportunities are as endless as the universe. Keep in mind credit-purchased skins in the demo gamemode will not transfer to the official dogfight, since its full of free credits, but if you do happen to test out one of the Robux-purchased skins, we'll transfer those over for you.

Next on the list is a combo feature that is a mixture of something we developed a few months ago, and something developed more recently. After a discussion with members of the community, it became clear that locking certain turrets to certain mounts was not the right way to structure weapon classes. Instead, a system that calculated a ship's maximum capacity, and allowed any sort of turret interchange among the available mounts to allow the most player freedom when building out their ship loadouts, was the better strategy. So we devised a system to convert a ships assigned armament value, do some fairly simple math, and output a capacity number, that limits the amount and weight of the turrets you can have equipped at once.

Take, for instance, the mighty Excalibur, scourge of the dogfight. With two mounts and 5 armament points, it can, at most, load up two light turrets, like you're used to. Medium and heavy turrets are out of its reach, because it doesn't have nearly enough armament points to mount such powerful weapons. It would take 10 armament points for a light fighter to be able to mount a single medium turret, sacrificing points in agility, or speed, or armor. A tricky decision to make.

This system is designed to balance the number of turrets on a ship, with a reasonable firepower per armament point spent. Phase 1 had a problem with 4 turret medium fighters dominating combat because of pure damage output, and this system is here to combat that. 3 turret mediums is the maximum now, and to get there would take a lot of armament points.

In light of these changes, factions that have submitted their ships to the dogfight will be allowed to make stat changes, or remove mounts, to better take advantage of the armament system. The full armament tables can be found here.

The second half of this feature is the actual mounting process. As you select turrets for a potential loadout, a total armament bar fills up. Hit the end, and you've mounted too many turrets for that ships capacity.

Heavier weapons fill up the bar faster, meaning you have to carefully select which turrets and how strong you want them on each loadout.

In addition to this new tiered armament system of weapon classes, another change has come to weapon purchases. Due to community feedback about the turret-mounting process, turret purchases are now permanent on a per-ship basis. Grinding your tail off to earn a missile turret on your favorite ship, will not be undone when you replace that mount with a laser turret for a particular gamemode. Unfortunately, there is no way to refund turrets that have already been purchased and replaced, but any mounts currently on your ships will be permanently unlocked when this change makes its way to the official dogfight. Thank you to those in the community that successfully argued for this change, your feedback is much appreciated.

pew, pew pew, pew pew pew

A selection of beam turrets of each class. Illuminate the starways with your light.

The process of merging Capital flight systems with the dogfight code has begun. Early this week, Idyllic posted a gif to the discord of the humble beginnings of Capital movement. Everything has to start somewhere.

The easiest way to get Capitals working in the dogfight is to re-use as much code as possible from the fighters. This include movement systems, replication, spawning. Trying to recreate these already-functional systems would be a waste of time, so implementing Capital movement as merely a fork in the fighter code, is a good direction to go. From a reskinned-Excalibur movement system, over the week many adjustments were made to get the Avenger moving more Capital-like.

This started by turning off the ship turning based on cursor position that makes fighter movement so unique. Remapping controls to pitch and yaw were trivial, allowing the same control we showed in the Capital tests a while back. Removing the camera follow lock will be the next step, as piloting a capital is all about visibility, to make up for it's lack of agility. There are as yet a few bugs related to 18 turrets spamming serverevents and bogging everything down, but we're confident that they can be resolved in short order.

Some other small updates include the correct operation of texture-based ship skins, which only applies to the Avenger at the moment; A few small tweaks to the code and skin library and textures are now properly applied to the ship. The best image we have, is of a capital ship protruding from the fighter hangar... but this will not be the standard for long.

Also, the outpost gamemode now has radar-tracking capabilities, so an outpost's turrets now appear on radar and have icons on your HUD. No more running out of time looking for that last turret hiding on the bottom corner of the outpost.

Thirdly, the Outpost turrets have recieved an upgrade that should reduce the effectiveness of a discovered vulnerability. Players found that they could hover in place and shoot the outpost with impunity, because it foreshortened its shots to account for movement. Now, turrets randomly spread their shortened shots over a range, which should make it a little easier to dodge while moving, but a lot harder to win standing still. Let us know what you think.
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​With all of these features and their significant code changes, bugs are likely to appear. Should you happen upon a bug or something not working quite right, hop in the community discord and post any and all information about it to #bug_reports. It would be extra helpful to include the F9 console showing any red errors, and a description of what you were doing at the time. Thanks for the assistance!

This week saw the first non-dev solo destruction of a 38-turret outpost reported in the community, by CptJaller. Very nice work, pilot!

A new faction ship has been submitted and rigged, and is ready for battle in the dogfight - the Geostar Trading Corporation Convair.

And last up, a small foray into the star system code that will be the backbone of Freeroam. It appears Lordrex was in the process of importing and cleaning up the code used to fly fighters, meaning it won't be long before you can start to explore the 220 star systems of RoVerse.

We have succeeded, my dear community members! For the first week we have bested machine, laying waste to its weapons systems and crushing the automated monster under our bi-metallic boot-heels. With a resounding 394 kills to 645 deaths, and a .61 KDR, fighter pilots have at long last, bested the Outpost. The greatest contribution came from CptJaller, with a resounding 386 turret kills.

Topping the leaderboard in the non-Outpost category is ManikuCalex, with 39 kills, 9 deaths, and a 4.33 KDR. The most dangerous ship this week was a close race between the Silencer, with 110 kills, and the Cardinal, with 106. There were 313 plasma, 195 torpedo, 91 beam, 86 laser, 49 auto, and 22 railgun kills this week, totaling 756. Nice work, pilots. The most dangerous map was the Citadel, with 35 kills.

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 33)

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: Nicknames for your character in-game?

A1: Maybe. It could be fun. We'll consider it.

Q2: What can we make tracks on tanks look like when they move?

A2: Our best guess currently is simulating track movement using beams connected to each wheel, with an animated texture moving along it to show movement. While it is theoretically possible to move real parts around a track, there are much more important details involving planets to consider, and we want to maintain the best possible gameplay. When we get to that point, we can give it a shot, but until then, expect beams to be the likely candidate.

Q3: Will there be defenses against hovering vehicles? Magnetic traps?

A3: Those sound like a cool idea. Rest assured that there will be a way to counter most things, if you have the resources and the time to set defenses up. Keep in mind that most things that slow up ground vehicles, would have the same effect on vehicles hovering a few feet off the ground too.

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​​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!