RoVerse Development Newsletter #64

Hello everyone! Welcome to the sixty-fourth 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 got some more work to show on the lobby menus, with Mikey creating a nice mockup of the character select screen. We've also got some good news from Idyllic on the planet generating front, and the completion of a feature we showed off last week.

Here we have a mockup of what we intend the character select screen to look like, where you can see what your character looks like, its faction alignment, its credit balance, and its location in the galaxy. The images above are placeholders for the characters, which we intend to replace with the actual character models, so you can rotate your character in 3D.

We'll be working on the implementation of lobby menus over the next few weeks, stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes info.

Idyllic has been hard at work generating high-resolution planets. This week, he's got an update on the 9-step generation that he has been running for a month and a half now. With over 2,600,000 vertices, that level of detail will put us very close to the final detail level of planet surfaces. With that many triangles, each triangle will be about 12 studs long on each edge. From there, we can either subdivide one or two more times, with an excessive growth in file size and generation time, or we can generate most of the details at that resolution, and fill in the gaps live during chunk loading. We'll just have to see how long the rest of the 9-step generation takes, before moving forward.

Something we don't have to wait to move forward on, though, is the importing of the previously generated planets. Idyllic spent all week working on the code that imports the data, which is in the form of 3 tables - the points, their locations, and their nearest neighbors. From these three tables, it should have been a breeze to reconstruct a planet.

But it wasn't.

Curiously enough, the second table was short 8 values, causing weird things to generate during reconstruction.

A chaotic web of lines and points, that form a not-quite-random pattern, but no pattern that we can understand...

But a cool enough structure to run into in outer space, so of course we sent an expendable dev on a mission to try and fly through the mysterious structure.

Miraculously, the heroic pilot survived the trip!

After a bit more furious typing, Idyllic managed to find the error that led to the problem, and managed to successfully import the first planet into the game. Drawn from only a text file, this planet is the first of its kind, and looks to be the beginning of a really cool experiment made real.

In the coming weeks, we should be able to load in the higher-detail planets, and have the import system ready by the time the 9-step generation completes!

Lordrex has completed implementation of the Trello updates feature we showed off last week into the Lobby. Details about the system can be found in last weeks newsletter, if you're interested. He also spent some time increasing the security of back-end systems so that user data is less corruptible, which will be a very important feature for the game we're making.


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: Will factions be able to create drone fighters for capital ships to deploy?

A1: This question came up in the community, and stirred up quite the conversation. Sure, it would be cool to be able to launch ships to do the fighting for you, but in the long run, automating ships in any way really draws attention away from player participation. If you want to fly into a battle zone with a carrier, you should definitely take a squadron of fighter pilots along with you.

Q2: Will you use the new pathfinding system in-game?

A2: The new pathfinding system looks incredibly cool and very useful, and there are quite a few applications we can see applying it to in RoVerse, but before we make any promises about using it, we will have to put it through rigorous testing, and wait for the first few bug patches that usually come with any new feature. But, it should make our stations much livelier, if it does work out.

Q3: Will ships have jump ranges?

A3: Ships jumping from system to system will either have to use the jump gates they've constructed, the open wormholes where they should be constructing a jump gate, or by attaching a warp core to a capital ship. Each of these methods will produce the same results, jumping one system over. There won't be any bypassing systems by pointing your ship into the abyss.

Q4: Will factions be able to create science vessels?

A4: We have considered the inclusion of ships designed purely for scientific porpoises, but in the larger game plan, they really served no unique purpose. Any traveling could be accomplished with other craft, and it would require the development of many new unique systems to make them worthwhile and fun. They may be possible in an expansion at some point, or we may decide to include them closer to release!

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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!