RoVerse Development Newsletter #310

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 310th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

​Skinny has continued updating the visuals at Hyperion, moving on from the Pilot's Sector, to the Docking Arm Hub. The Sheriff's office has acquired quite an improvement to its lighting setup, now properly lit for the tough job of keeping the Station secure.

...and the Security Checkpoint as well:

From there, he headed into the core, to try and make the constrained power of a miniature sun glow like you'd expect it to.

Idyllic spent this week pushing ahead with the wave-simulating deforming mesh concept - last week we ran into the resolution limits that meshing an entire sphere at once would cause, and thanks to some input from the community, we think we've found a good solution. Surprisingly, it's not technically chunk loading. Instead, a single hexagonal chunk of water follows you around, moving as you do, and expanding out to the horizon. Waves can be a lot higher resolution than the full planet offered, but it does involve a lot more complicated math.

Out first iteration involved moving the hex chunk around so you were always directly in the center of the loaded water area, however, that makes the waves jostle about as the bones move up and down the noise field as you move, which doesn't look very good. We moved to visualizing things with a simulated contour map, to make things easier to see:

In this video, wave movement over time has been turned off, to test whether high points stay in the same place. Unfortunately, as you can see, the high points did not stay in place.

​The second iteration instead moves the water chunk in discrete steps, so that any bone that moves is always in the exact same spot as the bone it replaces. Highlighted below are the various bone locations, with the center point highlighted white.

There remain a few edge cases we're looking at diagnosing, but this system should work out splendidly. And if it doesn't work like we need it to, we can always quickly rig up a chunk loading system until it does.

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

No questions this week - hit us up in #dev_questions if there's anything you'd like to know.

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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!