Project Vulpes (PRS 7.0)

Progress Report #2

Since the last progress report ("Blog post"), the main focus of Project Vulpes' development has mainly been its hub and training pitch. The game currently has over 90,000 lines of code.

While the release date is still undetermined, I'm trying to push the project forward with the objective of bringing the best possible quality just as PRS has been known for almost a decade. Interestingly enough, as of writing (12th of March), we are 248 days away from reaching a decade of PRS.

In this blog I will be mentioning ("MPS") in its original state as a community and not as any of the multiple games, development groups and leagues claiming to be a MPS re-make or MPS itself.

If you are part of my generation ("Generation Z"), you for the most part grew up while using the early internet. Which is also why they call us the "Internet generation". And in light to this, it is my experience with the early internet across my childhood and later years that serves as inspiration to how I want to direct this project.

I will later mention in this blog post some of the games I took inspiration from while designing the UI's layout. Maybe it could just be me, but I personally have not found any real interest in any of new AAA games, which is why majority of the mentioned games will be relatively old or part of an aged franchise. All of these games have had many talented developers in its development process.

THE HUB

As mentioned in my prior blog post The decision to rewrite PRS, back in 2020 the concept of a "Hub" didn't really exist in MPS. However, its primary objective was quite clear:

create a single game that allows players to connect to the desired server from a simple UI server list, making the need for multiple match pitches irrelevant

After the original implementation of the "Servers" panel. Every other functionality in the hub was built around it, even if it wasn't really initially designed to. I'm sure you have seen the presence of inactive panels in the hub, that were supposedly work in progress/planned; these never really came to see light of day.

The PRS Hub also has a couple of recursive module fetches/requires that caused many problems in the past, these were fixed with hacky methods that I'm not the most proud of.

You might also come to realise that there are some features that would be practical to be in the hub. One obviously being the settings, which may lead you to the question:

"Huh, why isn't there a settings panel in the hub?"

The answer is quite simple, it would have required me to design and code a completely new panel for it that is exclusive to the hub OR lazily copy and paste the existing design into the hub and frankenstein it to somewhat work. My decision was to pretty much avoid doing neither, as it would have been a plague to the technical debt of the hub. The PRS Hub is already hard enough to work with.

As written in my other blog post, the hub and the in-game UI are the exact same in terms of coding, they just have different features disabled or enabled along with a completely revamped artistic design. So the modularity of the UI is emphasized heavily for that reason.

The new UI is heavily inspired by a combination of games such as Counter-Strike 2 (+ Faceit), Ground Branch, Arknights, For Honor, Mirror's Edge and Hitman 2. All of these games are ones I actively play. I have also found Laws of UX a relatively useful resource. UI in-game is made to be as minimalistic and coherent as possible, while still possessing all of the features.

Project Vulpes' Hub main features are fully functional, however most of its visuals still use placeholders, rendering it non-functional for now. Due to this, I determined the hub's features aren't ready to be showcased in this blog post.

Vulpes does not use any existing "UI Frameworks", and is written fully in native Luau. There are however a couple of in-house Custom UI Elements and Behaviour that roblox does not officially support and that I will likely open-source in the future.

TRAINING PITCH

Some of my games that I wasted considerable amount of time as a young kid include:

Roblox, Garry's mod, Minecraft & Plasma burst 2 (Adobe Flash game)

What do these games have in common? Well, all of these games incentivize creativity by having built-in tools for allowing the community to mold their virtual worlds.

This is how the concept of PRS' Spawner menu gained its "roots". The idea was to encourage players to use their creativity, making additional content for themselves that PRS didn't otherwise offer. To my knowledge even as of writing, there really isn't any other game of PRS' nature that offers this feature.

The problem with the current implementation of a spawner menu is that the menu has buggy and confusing input and the UI design is not very user-friendly, to the point that it may have discouraged players from properly and extensively utilizing it. That isn't even the end of it, as the god forbidden word of technical debt always became apparent when you even attempt to figure out fixing those problems. In PRS you are currently required to use the command ":spawner" to give yourself or another player the permission to use the spawner menu. Sometimes this command would render the spawner menu completely useless (hang) and would require you to rejoin the game in order to be able of utilizing it again.

It also became apparent that some users aren't even aware that this feature even exists, especially amongst newer players, as I never really properly promoted its existence in-game.

With all of this in mind, with Project Vulpes it was decided that the Build tools (Spawner Menu) should and will be fully polished and functional on release. As for the list of new features in them? I will just let you try to guess based on the screenshot below alone... (>ᴗ•)!

One thing I would like to confirm however, is that there will be a way to share your training pitch prop preset slots with other players. Information on the implementation of that will be shared in a future progress report.

You might have also seen some old sneakpeaks of the training pitch complex, that our 3D modeler, Hozan (aeroware), has worked on. Now that Vulpes has a lot more complete features with important decisions in its design made and finalized, Hozan can now finally continue progress on it.

There has been a lot of attention to detail put into majority of the objects in terms of reactivity and sound design.

I'm confident that all the wait will be worth it in the end! (•ᴗ•)

Prototype, does not represent final version

I also recently created a small open-source plugin related to attributes called Attribute Clipboard. Roblox does not currently natively support Attribute Clipboard functionality, so this plugin saves some tedious work.