Hello everyone! Welcome to the eighty-fifth issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week. This week has been another week full of progress on a wide variety of fronts, with continued work on backend server systems, more work from Idyllic on planet generation, and some other detail work from a few other devs. Let's get started! Lordrex has continued work on the backend systems that will run nearly the entire game, with more successful demos on loading and caching data, with a successful test of pulling data every 15 minutes from sheets to the VPS. Beyond that, he has worked organizing the discord and our storage directory, important work as more and more work gets done on various systems - we'll need to know where everything we've done has been saved. He has also tested the limits of in-game datastores, on both a single server and multiple server basis, during which he found that there is a 6 second cooldown when editing the same value in the datastore, but only when editing from the same server - important information to know when planning out storage and saving systems on a large and complex game. Unfortunately, work on VPS doesn't create many opportunities for pictures... So this is what we imagine he looks like. IdyllicDestroyer has spent the week focusing on planetary generation, with most of it used to hunt down a bug that wouldn't sort tables correctly. For each continent on a generating planet, it grows out to the next-closest points at the edges, so that continents grow to be continuous masses, rather than having to calculate floating groups individually at a later point. To get this list of ordered points, he was using the table.sort method on the list of all points. He was getting correct results in certain cases, so he knew that it was sorting correctly, but for some reason when storing this value for later, it was getting jumbled - it turns out that setting a variable's value to a table makes a reference, not a copy of the original table. So if you want to shuffle a table into different orders sequentially, remember to manually copy each value over into a new table, or you'll end up with a mysterious bug to hunt down, while Idyllic's ghost laughs at you. After solving such an elusive bug in his code, it was a quick jump to update the continent growing functions, plate drift and rotation, and edge collisions, with a substantial reduction in generation time when compared to his original system. Concentric continents, which could be an interesting and rare planet generation setting, but not ideal for all the planets we'll be generating. Grown Continents, in their proper shapes. Continued work includes finding plate edges, and each point's distance from the nearest edge, all used in collision and elevation generation. An important realization reached while updating his old code included the pressure and shear calculations between points on adjacent continents. The old method was less-than-optimal, so taking the proper time to figure out a legitimate calculation for pressure and sheer this time around was a great benefit to the eventual result's realism. Early results show a much better falloff from high-impact points at plate edges, which will form mountains, to more even level central areas. We look forward to his continued work on such an important system for our planned game. This past week, Vedrakkerous has stepped down from team co-director, with Skinny filling in his management functions. He will still hang around to work on those beautiful effects he does so well, but the stress and time commitment was getting excessive. Meanwhile, Skinny has moved south for his real-life occupation this week, meaning no progress on any ships, but he has done some great work managing the devs on the team, learning everyone's current tasks, and keeping them on track. Lorenzo has taken on the proof-of-concept for custom character meshes, we'll see what he can work out in regard to that feature that we'd really like to have. If we can map a custom mesh to use the existing Roblox clothing texture format that everyone is so familiar with, it would greatly help with the implementation of custom character meshes. 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: Can we add bayonets and flashlights and stuff to our guns, and have them work in RoVerse? A1: While flashlights have been planned to an included feature, for navigating those dark corridors and those dark and endless nights on planets, we'll have to look into implementing bayonets in combat. At this point I'll say no, but you can include them in models for looks, and maybe eventually as a feature. Q2: Will different races have different deathsounds? A2: While we might have a RoVerse-custom deathsound, I wouldn't expect a custom sound for each race anytime soon, though possibly in the future. Q3: Will factions/subfactions be able to manage some sort of editable rank system ingame? Either through typing the ranks out, or choosing a premade system? A3: Faction ranks will most likely be a sort of blend between an entirely custom system and the Roblox-provided one, with options to set two ranks equal to each other, or have different branches marked out, and with more permission options for RoVerse. Expect to have most of your ranks set in your group, with only a few more features on our end. 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! Comments are closed.
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AuthorsVaktus: Leader of the Vaktovian Empire and head of the RoVerse Project |