RoVerse Development Newsletter #200

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 200th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, Idyllic began turning ideas into reality with regards to the UI renovation we have undertaken as we approach the Capital Update, and Skinny has been designing brand-new state-of-the-art skyboxes for the different sectors of space.

First up, are a selection of Skinny's new skyboxes - starting with the Wastes.
Before:

After: 

The various dogfight maps we have created so far have been spaced out across the galaxy - that way, we never are making assets that aren't needed for the full game. At this point, we have a dogfight map in every sector except the badlands and the abyss.

Next up, the Ether...
​Before:

After: 

and lastly, The Great Hollow...
There isn't a before, since Pillarum was the red-themed map, but that takes place in a special Ninazu pocket of space, not the generic Great Hollow systems, so some imagination is required.

Solving the skybox puzzle turned out to be half the fun. The program that exported these skyboxes would pick a random front face, meaning every time skinny made a change and re-uploaded, the sides of the box switched around. But after carefully piecing them back together, he got them working just right. 

Idyllic has been working on building out the UI we showed concepts of last week. We now have rough layouts for the main menu...

the edit options menu...

and the edit ship options menu.

Once the menus are finalized, he'll be jumping into coding the new menus.

A new Roblox feature was recently released - atmospheres. As a vast improvement on the flexibility of fog in games, Atmospheres allow better control over a variety of settings as well as working in situations the original Roblox fog did not. We'll be messing around with this new feature to see how we can best use it for RoVerse. Below is an early test involving Hyperion Station and a bit of spooky lighting. It goes to show how something as simple as a bit of darkness in the corners of a space can drastically change the atmosphere​ of a build. Ideally, we'll be able to use this new fog to improve biomes on planets.

We've also had a chance to crunch the numbers on the 2020 RoVerse Community Egg Hunt. Overall, there were 102 unique participants in the hunt that at least visited Hyperion Station. 65 eggs were collected at the station - 28 egg of NPC, 15 egg of the cube, and 13​ egg of the rock and egg of maximus. With about 100 participants, the success rate of each egg is pretty much the number of people who collected it as a percent - 28% being the highest. The faction eggs were a bit harder to come by, with 8 collections of the artifegg, and 6 egg of Noxheim. In total, 10 players collected all 4 station eggs, while only 4 players have collected Jubilation in the Dogfight.

As for the Calexian eggs, 6 players collected the technoloegg, 6 collected the corrupted egg, 5 the securegg, and 5 the mystifying egg, earning the Sails of Cheer. There was also a secret ship, the Golden Lepus, available in the Calexian addition, which 5 people collected.

Time to take those brand-new ships out for a spin in the RoVerse Dogfight!

On to the dogfight - this week, there were 246 kills, 88 with auto, 55 with laser, 46 with beam, 32 with plasma, 21 with railgun, and 4 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur, with 134 kills, followed by the Squall with 62. The most dangerous map was The Great Hollow with 50 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 42.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were JakorKilludge, with 72 kills and 57 deaths and a 1.26 KDR; FangABXY with 36 kills, 8 deaths and a 4.5 KDR; and rileytw with 25 kills, 14 deaths, and a 1.78 KDR. Nice work pilots, you've earned the cycle-exclusive ship Stratus Squall!
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If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 44)

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 we be able to take people prisoner on ships?

A1: Unlikely. There is the potential for arresting players in stations or on planets, but there aren't many situations where someone in a spaceship would rather surrender than fight to the death.

Q2: Will RoVerse be able to support 200 player servers?

A2: That is entirely up to Roblox. We will do our best to optimize gameplay to work with as many ships as possible, but the bottleneck for large servers quickly becomes network capacity. Too many people sending updates on positions and firing weapons, and chatting, bogs the Roblox server down. We'll do the best we can on our end, the rest is up to the talented engineers at Roblox.

Q3: Will explorers get prospecting tools to find ore deposits on planets?

A3: Much like in space, explorers will have access to a range of equipment to locate and identify the ores available in a system, from long-range belt-scanning modules to short range locator beams, finding ore won't always rely on visual identification alone.

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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!