Roverse Development Newsletter #83

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

This week has seen some great progress on our scripted systems, including a remastered chat system from davness, and some continued work from lordrex on the VPS backend data retrieval system. We also have some unfortunate news about the status of the Capital update as well, which we'll cover at the end.

A few months ago, Idyllic roughly mocked up an edited chat system that modified the Roblox-provided scripts to try and customize the format and the look of the guis to better fit our theme, in a very short time frame. The system worked passably well, as long as you didn't look too closely at the edges. Since then, we've spent quite a bit of time building our own system from the ground up, with the features and design that we've always wanted. Developer Davness has been creating this system, and the progress he's made has been exceptional.

Creating a custom chat system is more complicated than it may seem - there are lots of little features included to make sure that use of the system is as smooth as possible for all users, features like multiline chat messages and supporting usernames of any length up to 20 characters that are easy to ignore in a good system, but make use horrible if they are overlooked. He's also set up the system to easily scale with screen size, so that all users get the best experience possible.

He has also set up an early demo of a shout system, so that RoVerse Admins can shout important updates, faction leaders can relay messages to their fleets, all with an easy-to-use system.

Lordrex has successfully gotten our private server to read data from Google sheets, marking an important step in the development of our backend systems. Reading from saved data, making decisions about where to place people and fleets based on recorded information, sending star system data from the database we showed a few weeks back. A critical feature, and one that must be done right.

Idyllic has continued remastering planet generation, this week taking a stab at table sorting as a way to easily grow continent shapes by having a handy list of all the closest points. While not completely solved yet, it does have some pretty results.

We can't wait to see what else he comes up with.

So many of you have been asking about the status of the Capital Alpha over the past three months since the originally planned release date passed. Since December, 90% of the update has been completed, including fighter models and rigging, gamemodes, all new custom maps, everything that would improve on the original system ten-fold... except for the mechanics of the capital ships. Since we couldn't release a Capital Update without Capital ships, we had to push that release back. To complete a rework of the system that NoCollider made nearly a year ago, we hired on craftsmashbuild, who had demoed several versions of his own ship flight scripts for his own project, that showed great promise for a robust and fun capital ship system fitting for a project as ambitious as RoVerse. Since then, craft has run it many, many personal problems, and has been unable to handle the stress of working on a professional development team with expectations and deadlines. Because of this pressure, he has chosen to leave the team permanently, and shows no sign of allowing us to use any of the progress he's made over the past 3 months, if any exists at all.

While he had asked us to remain civil in the explanation of his departure, he proceeded to post several entirely incorrect tweets since then, and blocked all the RoVerse Devs, so civility is not something I can provide him.

When we hired him in December we were clear with our expectations - while we understood he couldn't have made the original Christmas deadline, which we proceeded to push back, it was made clear that the Capital ships would be an important feature of this project, and if he didn't think he could manage such work in the required time, we would hand that portion of the project over to SmellyPencil and TheFurryFish, two talented devs who have done an exceptional job on the rest of the Capital Update. He insisted that the assignment was well within his grasp, so we hired him on to let the others do the final polishing of the other systems.

After pushing back a planned release to the end of January, and now to the end of February, with no visible progress since the demo we showed of a capital ship doing donuts, the managers of this project, namely Vedrakkerous and IdyllicDestroyer, obviously had questions and concerns about the status of the project, that were always met with 'can't talk right now' or 'Ill have something to show by the newsletter' without any progress.

Since it didn't seem like the completion of his project would occur within a reasonable amount of time, we initiated our backup 'plan B' - having the Update Dev team complete a rudimentary Capital system effective enough to release as the Capital Update in a limited capacity, to give craft enough time to complete the official and robust Capital system. It was at this point that craft decided he didn't want to work on this project anymore, due to the pressure of developing in such a public position.

So don't worry, craft's sudden departure doesn't mean the Capital Update won't be coming out, but it does mean that it will take a bit more time than previously expected. In the future, we will be making sure that the devs we hire for such an ambitious game understand the expectations prior to assigning them any significant portion of our project.

And to craft - if you had properly communicated to us at any point in the past 3 months that you didn't think you could complete the portion of the project we had expected of you, we could have provided support, or reassigned the parts that were out of your grasp, rather than having wasted our time for three months before deciding you wanted to work on your own space game more than you wanted to work on ours. Also, we are not the type of people to become vindictive to those who have legitimate reasons for leaving the team, as several members have come and gone over the development of this project without incident. But you spreading falsehoods in an attempt to slander us for who knows what reason is not something we take lightly, and as such I have written out the proper sequence of events for the public record. Had you be clear with us, or communicated when we asked, and even remained civil as you asked of us, this could all have been avoided. Let the facts stand as they are, and if they 'destroy your development career' as you claim we said, it is naught but your own fault.


And on that note a quick recap - chat systems are progressing nicely, with lots of neat little features tucked inside. Backend development is progressing slowly but surely, with an important step towards our end goals being made over the past few weeks. And Idyllic has been playing around with planets, as he has always been.


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 there be indicators of ground combat from space, like explosions and stuff?

A1: That's a great idea! We'll have our scripters look into how expensive it would be to send a notification to star system servers when and where ground combat is breaking out, but having little explosions appear on planets would be a cool little feature to notify people of things going on down below. And as always, ships 'in orbit' in the planet server will be able to see combat directly.

Another light week on questions from the community. If you want to know more, feel free to ask in our community Discord. 

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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!