RoVerse Development Newsletter #276

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M | Fantastic! There are others out there who have survived "The Incident!" I was worried I was going to be the last sentient being in all of existence. How boring that would be. I would like to discuss your experiences of the last 48 hours, as I have been wandering about my ship looking for any other people who may have survived that incredible pulse of energy that tore through space. It appears to have originated on a small, unregistered exoplanet drifting in deep space. I was working with my crew to return a strange energetic artifact that was somehow attracted to this chunk of rock, when everything and everyone appeared to vanish, including that strange rock. I must ask, did you have a similar experience? Did that strange persimmon pulse of energy pass by your ship or installation? Do you have a record of the time-code of the event? I'd love to know if the pulse expanded outward with relativistic speeds, or if it was unconstrained by our conventional understanding of physics.

Below, I've included a few strange data entries that appeared in my ship's storage drives after the flash, they show what appears to be a chronology of the creation of the rock we were exploring.

Let me know if I can be of any assistance, if we want to see this through we're going to have to work together. --The Professor, Hyperion Institute

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We hope you were enjoying the 2021 Hallows Eve Event before it was so abruptly put on hold. We certainly had a lot of fun putting it together, and we hope that we'll eventually get to return to unlock the secret puzzle. The Event will run for at least another week, so even if you're slow, you'll still have a shot at topping the speed-running leaderboard or simply unlocking the exclusive ship.

Idyllic had quite a bit of fun returning to the old Brickstyle building, using modern-day tools and tricks to make building so much easier. A decade ago, we were building with clone tool and hammer hopperbins, standing in-game with our character next to whatever we were building. Today, we can fly around, work collaboratively, and use plugins to make building a breeze. But that doesn't mean that we have to leave the old style behind - it merely means we can build bigger and better things.

Lets take a look at some process photos from the Hallows Eve event.

One of the most distinctive features of old Roblox were part bevels. Just like part outlines, they've been removed from the game - but that wouldn't stop a determined and nostalgic developed. Writing some code using the CSG Api, and negating a cut into each edge of every part seemed like a simple and straightforward exercise. But it came with a downside - each part became a union, and unions take forever to load when they're all unique. The event almost didn't release on time because the publish UI in studio would go not responding for half an hour as it tried to upload all the unions, and that was just on the corrupted version of the Tortuga.

We also wanted to use fast CSG to grow and cut a sphere out of the modern ship and reveal the old one, but that was not meant to be either. However, the solution we came up with works just as well, if not better, than the admittedly insane idea of cutting thousands of unions. You can see the remains of this attempt in the crashed version of the ship, with the spherical corrupted area, instead of the full ship.

The Hedgemaze. This was one of the first ideas thrown out, just after the spooky mansion. Every good halloween game has a hedgemaze, and some have sinister pumpkins hanging out inside. But the problem with hedgemazes in 3rd person games is that you can always zoom out and cheat. So we devised a solution to that problem, using the latest technology. The same way the Easter Egg portals displayed a far-off map, the roof of the hedge maze is one big viewportframe looking at an alternate layout of the maze. I hope we tricked you!

If you're going to go back in time and build in Brickstyle, you also have to go back in time with the tools that will solve the level. Most of the old tools required some form of tweaking to get them to work in the age of Filtering Enabled. Several of these old tools tried to insert scripts to do things, which doesn't work at all anymore. And a few created interesting bugs, like the Paintball Gun.

Turns out a rolling ball that never deletes itself when it hits the ground keeps spawning paint splatters, and quickly causes the server to chug. One tenth of those parts would've had the old Roblox servers frozen in panic trying to calculate physics, but nowadays, they work pretty damn well.

The ancient cryptic murals, what could they mean? Back in the days before GUIs, there was very little in the way of guidance in Roblox games. You'd just have to load in, take stock of your surroundings, and try and figure out what to do. The best we could do was simple hints, either built out of bricks, or in cycling humanoid head text form. In honor of those confused by too complex game mechanics, we added a wall of vague but accurate hints.

One of the most difficult features to code was something that used to be the simplest - the key door. Touching your keycard brick to the shiny gold reflective brick on a door used to unlock it and allow you inside, usually by turning transparent and cancollide false. To update this, we used some springs and cylinder constraints, but the biggest problem came from Filtering Enabled. Even with a localscript unlocking the door, physics stood resolutely against us. This required firing a remoteevent, and having the server allow you to open the door - which means that players can open the doors for each other, which wasn't intended. But until someone accomplishes a sub-2 minute full completion, it probably doesn't do much more than confuse new players.

As always, these events are a chance to step away from the grind and explore our creative side, with the added bonus of engaging the community and expanding the lore. We also like to test out potential features we might include in the full game - this event we had a chance to explore the potential of ship interiors, and test out a potential alert dialog system. Though we might have to leave the paintball guns in the weapons locker for the time being.

And watch your step around those timebombs, they aren't as 'armless as they seem.

Until next time, have a Happy Halloween!

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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!