RoVerse Development Newsletter #314

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 314th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, we've been developing a new and important aspect of Hyperion Station - respawn mechanics. RoVerse is intended to have a fairly complex respawning system, and the work we've done over the past few weeks has set the stage for what we intend to expand as the game does. It all starts with a few key ideas - players should maintain their last location whenever possible; when players die, they should be able to return to their last location, or a safe location they've recently visited; players that have been away for some time, should return to a location that makes sense to the in-game story. With these three factors in mind, we've developed the following system.

Players that leave the game have their last location saved to a datastore. If they merely lost connection, are server-hopping, or are just leaving for a short time, they can rejoin the game and pick up right where they left off - their location is unchanged.

If they return much later, several hours or the next day, the in-game story pretends that they went on their way - they returned their mining ship to the cargo hangar, or they returned to their room at the hotel, or they visited the civilian areas in the upper disk. In these cases, they spawn at select spawn locations based roughly on what they were up to when they last left.

These mechanics were simple to develop - the final category was much more complicated, but also much more interesting. When players die at Hyperion, whether because they got into a gunfight with criminals or police, tripped and fell into an ore grinder, or were nearly incinerated in the core, they are now saved by a helpful medical AI with access to a short-range transporter device and teleported straight to the Station's Medical Facility. There, the best automated doctors patch you up and get you right back into the action - however, you can use the short-range transporter to return to one of the last few locations you've visited, to get right back into the action.

To make this work, on the backend there was a lot of work to track the last locations your player has visited. We found an extremely useful module that lets you divide the world up into zones based on groups of bricks, that can also track when a player enters and leaves a zone. We then chopped the Station up into the 46 pre-planned areas, from sushi shop to Faction Hall, as well as dividing them up by the different Sectors each smaller area exists in. 

The Module wasn't quite designed for what we needed, but we worked out a way to allow a hierarchical structure of zones - when you're in the middle of the Entertainment District, for example, it registers you as in that sector, but not in any of the sub-rooms like the Café or Arcade. 

We're still working on the visual effects, like the transportation and respawning animations, but on a technical side the mechanics are functional and successful. Much like any modern game where your character dies, you can now respawn in the last safe area you've been and get right back to the action without having to wander all the way from some centralized respawn location, or get randomly spread across a rather huge Station.

This feature will be mechanically useful for respawning, but also gameplay-useful for players trying to describe where they're at if they want to meet up with another player. It will also come into play when reporting crimes, letting the police know where the action is so they can get to arresting ne'er-do-wells.
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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: For ground combat, what kind of time to kill will weapons have?

A1: On planets, there will be quite a large variety of weapons to choose from, and as such we can't really give you a straightforward answer. We'll want handheld weapons to have the right punch against other infantry, ground vehicles matched against other vehicles, and spacecraft matched up with spacecraft, but each category will have something designed to 'punch up' to the tier above them in the right scenarios - a handheld grenade launcher for taking out vehicles, or anti-air turrets for taking out aircraft. We'll probably have extensive testing to make sure that everything hits just right for our combat designs - too strong and you spend most of your time respawning. Too weak, and it feels like you're not doing anything at all. A fine balance to strike.

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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!