End of year blog from I-Nova http://inovaekeith.blogspot.de/2014/12/merry-christmas.html
Merry Christmas!
Hey everyone, merry Christmas, it's time for another update! For starters a lot has happened since GDC last spring and you may recall us saying something about a “planetary rings†video. This video was originally meant to be the last video we release before launching our Kickstarter (KS). Previously we were hoping to release that video and launch our Kickstarter before the end of the summer and, well, things didn’t quite work out that way. That’s primarily due to the usual culprit: most of us are working in our spare time which makes it difficult to estimate timelines because things come up with health, jobs, and other general life type things.
Recently we’ve had a lot of internal discussion about publicly providing timelines. We frequently miss them and people get angry and call us vaporware. Thus we’ve decided we will no longer provide exact timelines for the release of new content. From now on you will just hear “it’s done when it’s doneâ€. To that end we are obviously not going to be launching our Kickstarter this year. While I’m not going to provide a new timeline I can tell you we will continue to work diligently to release it as soon as possible and as of this exact moment in time everything is really starting to come together.
What does “coming together†mean? For starters we have all of the animations and shots for our Kickstarter video mocked up in-engine. Accomplishing this was dependent on numerous art assets, engine features, and of course the creation of the actual animation curves. Most of our materials are finished and half of our art team has moved on to fun things like lighting and particles/effects. We still have a tremendous amount of polishing left to do however all of this stuff we’ve been talking about for months is finally starting to come alive.
On the engine side we’re wrapping up the last of the major features we wanted to get done for the KS campaign. Early in the year we had another programmer, Kimmo Kotajarvi, join the team and we’ve spent a significant amount of time working on tools, art pipeline, particles, cross platform support, optimization, and HDR. You may be surprised to see HDR on that list as I wrote a blog post about our HDR solution a couple of years ago. Previously we were doing what most games do with regard to lighting by using realistic “ratios†of light instead of realistic “quantitiesâ€. Late last spring we decided to finally switch our lighting pipeline over to realistic quantities of light so we could really show the impact that stars of various intensities have on objects in space.
So, without providing a timeline, where does that leave us? The team is beginning to move over to the polish phase. There will be a lot of tweaking things such as animation, lighting, and post-processing. We still need to record the audio, write the script for the live-action portion of our Kickstarter campaign video, nail down all of our stretch goals, launch the Battlescape website, and put together our marketing materials for the month that our KS will be running. In other words there’s still a lot to do but the good news is that most of it has to do with running a good KS campaign.
While we’re still committed to our plan of keeping most of our new content under wraps until we launch our KS campaign we will be releasing new content mostly in the form of art and/or screenshots. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, G+, or Facebook, you should have already seen some of this content coming out already. Overall we’re very excited as we move into 2015, while launching this KS has taken a bit longer than we originally hoped we’re confident most of you will be pleased with the results!
If it is delayed beyond 2015 then they will have missed the boat.
Some nice pics on the blog hope we get to see some and closer shots of the city. 😎 and one of one of the ships.
And a nice bit of concept art. 😎
I'm starting to notice a growing trend in elite inspired games.
And this one might be one of the few that could become better than Elite: Dangerous itself.
As always the I-Novae engine is impressive, and I hope the upcoming kickstarter comes soon and these guys can make the goal and then work full-time on the project to get it to us sooner.
That the problem it's been impressive for far too long now, as their are few other starting to catch up now and will over take them if it's delayed again.Even if they do get BattleScape out this year, Infinity itself may be starting to look dated in terms of features ie not being able to get out of the cockpit.
That the problem it's been impressive for far too long now, as their are few other starting to catch up now and will over take them if it's delayed again.Even if they do get BattleScape out this year, Infinity itself may be starting to look dated in terms of features ie not being able to get out of the cockpit.
Something X Rebirth has done already and Star Citizen will be doing 😛
Regardless, i'd rather prefer an epic space game in this than some half assed game like X Rebirth was at release 😛 If that sacrifices things like walking outside your cockpit or such, then so be it 🙂
Big question for this will be Battlescape proposed single player game, will it be off line?.
That was not actually our 2014 retrospective, that will come some time in January. We just wanted to do a little Christmas release this year.
As far as Infinity Battlescape [I:B] and an offline mode. The game is being developed as a online multiplayer "arena shooter" (up to 128 v 128 FPS action) that gains more persistence and features as the funding amount raised increases. There is no plan for an offline game, other than possibly a celestial exploration mode, which will also be dependent on funding received.
We will be working on finalizing our crowd funding goals and gameplay in the coming months as well as getting our Infinity Battlescape website up and running where we will delineate our gameplay goals for Infinity Battlescape.
Until then, Happy New Year!
Changed the tile, will keep an eye out for the new website and the retrospective.
I know this is just my opinion, but I have been noticing how quickly multi-player only type games fade away or loose popularity after a few months. It has happened a lot to some of the recent space games and yes I think its about content and patches being introduced that keep people coming back and I think that was a weakness to the failed games.
Will Battlescape run on developer run servers only or are there any plans to allow player made servers?
Because I think having both of these options for a multi-player only style of game helps keep the game around a lot longer. We have all seen games just shutdown after a year of a developer not making enough money off their hosted servers and then a fan of the game now has a dead game they can never play again. So I hope player made servers will be an option in the kickstarter for 2015.
from my opinion i think developing a server that can run on players made servers is a little more binding than a server running on dev machines only, both in terms of pure coding than tests : you must ensure that the software is reliable and robust in various configuration, even more the weakest ones; I guess it probably requires more time and money.
We plan to have both "official servers" (with player accounts) attaining whatever level of persistence we deem reasonable (based on crowd funding level achieved), as well as player run servers. We believe in giving the player run servers as many admin options (engine, gameplay or otherwise) to choose from as possible (within reason). We would also like to be able to release a robust set of modding tools, as well as develop our own marketplace where modders can sell their assets to those players interested in them. Individuals (or teams) wanting to get their mods on the official servers (into the official release of Battlescape) will have to pass through a developer screening/inspection to make sure they meet our design & quality standards. For player run servers, the modding can be anything the server admin wants to allow, etc. We hope that in giving the players the ability to run and "design" their own Battlescapes coupled with the marketplace and modding tools, will extend the life of our game, and hopefully put us on a revenue path to where developing the Infinity MMO is feasible/possible.
This is great news INovaeGene and the vision you have for Battlescape sounds great and should be able to support your efforts, and I am sure we'll see some great content from the contributors and modders.
Some of the best planetary modeling I've ever seen.
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