RoVerse Development newsletter #277

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 277th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, with Roblox back in working order, we can now return to your regularly scheduled programming. While the servers were down, Idyllic took the opportunity to dive into making ship shields. Since that all takes place in blender, and we had luckily pre-exported a selection of ship models, we had everything we needed on-hand.

Our prior proof-of-concept method for making ship shields involved painstakingly tracing out a low-res outline of each ship, which with an ever-increasing number of submissions and additions, was infeasible. So with the encouragement of the community, Idyllic explored alternative options for automating the process, as well as re-exploring some ideas that didn't work when we initially prototyped the system, but that miraculously work now.

Our original prototype shield simply scaled up the Excalibur mesh and replaced the texture, but unfortunately not every ship is nearly as convex. Ships that have protrusions or bends will not scale correctly, as a proper shield is offset from each surface's normal, not scaled from model center. So this required revisiting the drawing board.

For the Avenger, recreating the shield was a simple enough task - just match the angles and go around some weird corners, and it works passably well. But this would not be nearly as easy when asymmetry became involved, or very complex shapes. The first one to really give us trouble was the Blue Komodo, a particularly round ship that was going to be a right pain to mesh.

So we re-explored Blender Modifiers. The first time around, Solidify-Remesh-Decimate produced quite terrible results. They were often collapsed in the wrong place, or triangulated on angled surfaces, and were going to be just as much work as doing them all by hand. However, since our original experiments, Blender 2.9 has been released, and it has added a new setting to the Remesh Modifier - Voxel. This setting, combined with an extremely aggressive Decimate modifier to cut the number of faces down from the millions, provide a nearly-perfect shell of just about any ship. 

And so, Idyllic set to work refining the process. Prebuilding the Modifier settings, figuring out the best order to apply modifiers in, and figuring out how to fix any irregularities without killing Blender. With the process complete, it was time to make the shields of the somewhat random selection of ships available.

28 ship shields so far, have been imported and attached to their host.

There are, however, a few remaining problems. Bulk-importing the meshes from a single .obj file breaks the UV maps of each ship, making it so that the shield doesn't do the shield effect, which is the entire point, so each ship has to be exported individually. But this does give us the opportunity to name the mesh correctly, so it can easily be associated with the right ship. We can still bulk import the meshes, but by selecting multiple files. But the results speak for themselves - we can't wait to see all the ships in-game with such fancy shield-damage effects.

Be sure to complete the Hallows Eve Quest before Wednesday, when the mission dissolves into the ether like the Roblox Servers. Also, get your final speedrun times in, to be in the running for a second special skin.

This week in the dogfight there were 368 kills, 7 with auto, 0 with beam, 53 with laser, 7 with plasma, 1 with railgun, and 300 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan with 253 kills, followed by the Aether_Mk1 with 49. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 244 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 73.
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And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were FangABXY, with 253 kills and 2 deaths and a 126.5 KDR; Screech9791 with 49 kills, 7 deaths and a 7 KDR; and IdyllicDestroyer with 47 kills, 3 deaths, and a 15.66 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Vostok 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 119)

Now, for the overall cycle stats!

Pillarum was the most dangerous map, with 837 kills, followed by The Great Hollow with 544. The top ship was the VSa1-1_Kazan, with 735 kills, followed by the Silencer with 281, and the Aether Mk1 with 231. The top weapon was the Torpedo, with 1230 kills, followed by Laser with 191, and Plasma with 182. Beam marked up to 118, Auto with 65, and Railgun with 47. Overall, 21 pilots participated this cycle and earned at least one kill, while 17 players died at least once. The lowest KDR belongs to The Outpost with a .05 KDR. The dogfight has seen 8,377 visits, with an 83% approval rating (152-30) and 382 favorites.

This cycle there were 1,833 kills total. Topping off this cycle's leaderboard was FangABXY, with 847 kills, 37 deaths, and a 22.89 KDR. He was followed by Tygrys202 with 297 kills, 5 deaths, and a 59.4 KDR, and Screech9791 with 260 kills, 44 deaths, and 5.9 KDR. These three pilots have unlocked the exclusive Golden Vostok Skin, coming soon to a dogfight near you.

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Championship Series 17)

Calexian Community Challenge

With the completion of one of the Community Challenges, it is time to announce the prize, and the next challenge.

​The reward for 6,000 Outpost Turret Kills, is the Calexian Industries Astris:

Collect it today in the Dogfight Alpha.

The next challenge is to get kills from a collective 1,000,000 studs away. Any kills in the dogfight will record their distance to target, and the further away the better. Let's practice that long-game.

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

There were no questions in dev_questions this week, check back next week!

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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!