Hello everyone! Welcome to the 231st issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week marks the single most productive week the development team has had in two years - we have crossed a significant number of items off of our list, including capital wreck generation, proportional collision bounce, flak damage falloff over distance, various fixes to capital weapons, capital ship explosions, fighter turret hit effects, a leaderboard system for the juggernaut gamemode, and a low-poly hull mesh for Bolitho. Let's get started! First up is capital wreck generation. When a Capital ship dies, we could just make them evaporate in an incredible explosion of fire, erasing themselves forever from this dimension, but that just doesn't seem right. An incredible amount of work is put into making a Capital ship, and we don't want it all to just vanish. To that end, when a Capital ship dies, it leaves behind a wreck. In freeroam, they will be able to be scavenged for materials, so you may be able to recover some costs, or an enterprising band of pirates might swoop in and claim it for themselves. With that in mind, we wrote up a bit of code that takes the unioned pieces of each ship, and breaks them apart just a little, then spices things up with a few bits of random debris, leaving behind a beautifully destroyed ship in the wake of a cataclysmic explosion. Speaking of cataclysmic explosions, the next item we crossed off this week was making capital ships explode. We copied over the effects from our old Capital demo, hooked them up to the code, and let them blow ships to pieces. With that working, Idyllic moved on to improving Capital hitboxes. Previously, they were a box. While this may have worked for tiny fighters, Capitals come in all shapes and sizes, and hitbox accuracy is very important. With that in mind, Idyllic took the Bolitho to blender, painstakingly created an outline mesh that is ever so slightly larger than Bolitho, and imported it back in. As a bonus, this shell will work fantastically for energy shield flashing, in addition to its important uses for weapon hit detection and collisions. Speaking of collisions - the original dogfight code was set up to bounce every ship that hits something with a specific force, making everything bounce the same distance. While this was ok for fighters, Capitals are much larger, and hit things much harder. So the code was modified to take into consideration the mass of the ship when calculating the force, so Capitals barely bounce, while fighters bounce the usual amount. Heavier fighters may notice they bounce a bit less as well. With Capital hitboxes improved, an improvement that could be made became apparent. There wasn't enough visual feedback that you had actually hit something with fighter weaponry. Sure, the reticle hitmarkers would light up, but other than that laser bolts and such would just disappear. This had to be improved. An old energy flare particle was found, and coded to appear whenever a shot hits its mark. A very satisfying pop. Other additions to weapon mechanics including making conventional bolts from capitals pass through the flak they shoot at fighters, instead of bouncing off; flak interference with aim has been disabled for now, as it's more annoying than anything; automated flak aim now ignores teammates; and damage from flak now falls off over distance from the explosion center, so only a direct hit will do maximum damage. Last up this week is the Juggernaut gamemode leaderboard. This mode required a slight tweak to the team death match leaderboard, where one team's lives remaining score is adjusted to the remaining health of the Capital/Juggernaut players. As they are damaged, their score bar goes down in real time and increases if their shields begin to recharge, and a percentage is shown so you know just how much more damage you have to do. The community dogfight continued again this week, with members of the community coming together to blast each other out of the sky. Here are a selection of screenshots from the event - send in your own if you have them. Join us next week at 1pm and 8pm EST and earn double credits for the duration. This week in the dogfight there were 357 kills, 41 with auto, 17 with beam, 0 with laser, 11 with plasma, 2 with railgun, and 286 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the HAs7-1_Sensha with 190 kills, followed by the Chariot with 128. The most dangerous map was The_Great_Hollow with 150 deaths, followed by Pillarum with 127. And now, the moment you've been waiting for... The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 190 kills and 27 deaths and a 7.03 KDR; devOmegax with 132 kills, 31 deaths and a 4.25 KDR; and CandyCobalt with 19 kills, 0 deaths, and a inf KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Nihilos Asterus in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots! If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 75) 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: Can I cover my ships in bits of asteroid? A1: While in theory bits of asteroid could work as natural camouflage to the untrained pilot, they wouldn't provide any extra protection from attacks. Technically, shooting a laser at rock armor would do some amount of damage that would accumulate over time, which would be factored into the ship's 'hull' health count. The ships could look pretty cool, though. 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 |