RoVerse Development Newsletter #93

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

With end-of-semester tests wrapping up, our devs are back at work on RoVerse, with Idyllic pushing Capital scripting further with turret features, and a new team member has taken on the challenge of planetary character gravity, and some progress on several other scripting fronts.

First up is Idyllic's Capitals, which this week received a vital update in the form of weapon firing. You can't have spaceship battles without lasers firing off everywhere, so he's been working on scripting how the cool turrets will actually fire projectiles or energy bursts at your enemies. Two different turret types have been his major focus this week - a laser turret and an autoturret fire two of the main projectile types, and have different settings for rate of fire and range, and so are a good benchmark to compare.

After some fun with gravity, Idyllic set to tweaking values to match what we want from each weapon type. The autoturret class of weapons fires physical light projectiles extremely efficiently at the cost of a low resulting damage to other ships. Great for finishing off hard to hit targets with low armor plating (fighters) a few of these in every ship complement is a must.

Next up will be the more exotic turret types - missile launchers and plasma turrets, before finishing off with conventional and kinetic turrets. We can't wait to see further progress.

We have a new member on our team who has valiantly taken on the task of planetary gravity scripts for characters. Many of you may remember the vehicle gravity demos that had excellent results, but when it came to the player, it wasn't as simple. Humanoids are hard-coded to want to stay upright - the same actions and reactions that make you stand up after tripping or getting hit with a giant block are working against us in our pursuit of round planets. But there is hope. A few of you might know about Blobbyblobs planetary gravity freemodel - though outdated, as a concept for smooth and nearly flawless character movement on spherical objects is unmatched - proof that round planets with a nearly original character model are entirely possible. 

In just a few short hours, airwarfare went from completely lost to a workable prototype. Where Blobby's scripts didn't work with R15, ours now do. And scaling the character is just a small step beyond that. Exciting work!

Stratiz has continued his work on a more-complex-than-normal NPC system, so that these large stations factions will be building can be full of life and activity (based on the success of the faction hosting it) rather than a cold lifeless showcase. While he doesn't have any gifs of brain-dead automatons wandering around just yet, we're sure he'll have some great work to show in the coming weeks.

Lordrex has dove into a rewrite of the original Lobby system, updating old scripts to function with our backend database, pulling and pushing the data it needs and collects properly; eliminating old features that have been edited or improved, and a few that have been removed since the first few scripters placed down the first lines of code all those weeks ago. The work of the ancients may be impressive, but a few updates here and there are necessary.


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: What will happen when two nearby colonies expand at each other and meet?

A1: With the procedural generation system expanding cities outward wherever there's room, two cities are bound to overlap. When this happens, the two cities should continue to expand in other areas, eventually forming a line between the two, similarly to how it works in real life. Its possible we may allow two cities to merge at some point in the future, like a real-life city would annex its neighbors to expand, but we'd need a good reason to.

Q2: Will factions have a 'wallet' to purchase faction ships with, or will it be up to administrative players in the faction to hold onto a factions wealth?

A2: Many of you might have heard of the horrors of EVE corporations being swindled by an untrustworthy administrator, and I'm not too sure the members of Roblox are either. With money coming in from territories and taxes, a faction bank account would balance the effort of administration with ease of play that should be the main focus. We want faction leaders planning battle strategy, not tied up keeping track of what money is where.

Q3: Will there be safe places for neutral and beginning players to mine and practice?

A3: We intend to create a few neutral systems that are not included in the faction conflict map where people don't have to worry about getting attacked by a war-bound faction. More on this to come at a later date.

Q4: Will resources regenerate?

A4: Definitely. While minecraft can get away with nonregenerating ores because the worlds are infinite, the planned systems we have are large, but finite. Resources should regenerate over a fairly long period of time, with considerations for rarity as well. Though now that I think about it, factions scrambling for limited resources sounds like it'd be fun to try at least once - maybe to stir things up if they go stale.

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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!