Hi Everyone

First off I want to thank Crayfish for taking the time to answer all of these questions for SpaceSimCentral. Just incase people don't know Crayfish is the Infinity Community Manager on the Infinity project. Here is a little background on the game taken from Infinity's website:

How can you not want to play a game like this. Now for those people that have been living under a rock for a while and haven't heard of Infinity before you do need to go to their website and read the wealth of information that is there: http://www.infinity-universe.com/

Sit back and enjoy the Q&A:

There was a mention of owning several ships and hiring NPC's to run them and you could give them orders. So will this be the same concept as the X games where you can have your own ships use traderoutes to buy/sell goods for credits?

We've not finalised this aspect of the game yet but the plan is that the player will be able to give NPC ships under his control simple orders. We're not keen to encourage single player empires, we'd rather players team up to take on large projects. Because of this, NPCs will probably require a certain level of micro management rather than just being able to leave them with fixed repeating orders that earn money.

Is there any plans to have cosmic events in the Infinity? (ie: dying stars, black holes, planet destroying asteroids, meteor showers)

There are no plans to implement such events as random occurrences in the engine. It is very likely that cosmic events could play a large part in the story arcs we're writing for our Infinity's dynamic storyline.

Will there be degrading factor on all ships, equipment and buildings? For example if you were traveling many months in space I doubt your spacecraft would look brand new, or outposts start to show signs of decay because of heat/cold/wind.

The ships in Infinity all have an associated "dirt map" channel in their textures that is gradually increased the longer it is since the ship has been serviced. How this will affect ships in real terms is undecided but it's quite likely that if you don't have your ship regularly serviced things will start failing. You can see the dirt map in action in this video at 0.50:

If a player comes across another player/guild buildings/settlement on a planet could they attack it? If so will there be defense structures that could be bought for protection or Mercernary NPC's?

Yes, player owned structures will be vulnerable and there will be defence turrets available for when the player is offline. However we also intend to use the vastness of the universe to help protect players from interference. If you place a mining rig at a random location on a planet the chances of another player finding it by chance will be tiny. As structures get larger and require more power they will start showing up at increasingly large distances on player's scanners. All of the large cities on a planet would be visible from orbit around that planet but a small base on that planet may only become visible from within a few kilometers. We hope that this will allow small player groups to operate "under the radar" of larger groups until they are powerful enough to defend themselves from attack.

Could a player build or occupy an asteroid for a small base?

We have a number of pieces of concept art for asteroid bases but at the moment we cannot guarantee that they will make it into the game. Hopefully players will be able to build bases on any planetary or sub-planetary body. We also have concepts for floating bases in the atmosphere of gas giants.

Will players/coporations be able to build mining facilities wherever they want to in the universe?

Yes. We want to focus on prospecting as the main gaming activity when it comes to mining. We have a beautiful planetary engine so it makes sense to require out players to explore those planets in order to find exploitable deposits of minerals. Once the ore has been found we do not intend to require players to sit watching a mining laser as the ore is extracted. We want them to be able to drop a mining rig and then go and explore some more.

Will Infinity have some sort of news agency that players can use to their advantage to make extra credits with trading or with help protecting a colony/coporations assests?

That's not something we've really considered yet but it's a good idea so perhaps I'll bring it up at our next team meeting. There will be agents from various organisations at space stations and cities that will give out missions to players.

How will a player be able to outfit their ships? And will we be able to really customize components that get installed on our ships?

When a ship is purchased it will be an empty hull with certain innate characteristics. The player then completely customises the hull by installing whatever equipment is needed. We have a principle of non-speciality in our ship designs that means a player should be able to buy a ship that would normally be used as a combat vessel and outfit it as a hauler if that is what they want to do.

Will there be some type of research and development assests we can use to research new items, weapons or materials?

The research side of the game is still in development. It's most likely that we'll have a technology tree with all possible equipment mapped on to it. As players research various technologies, new branches of the tree become available to them. As the game progresses we will add new equipment to the technology tree but the addition of new equipment will be driven by the developers for the purpose of game balance.

On a planet's surface what will we actually be able to do?

Ground based cities will have star ports and offer all of the services that an orbital station can. There will also be missions based around ground based facilities, bases and ruins for the player to engage in. Mining and prospecting will be another major activity that can be engaged in whilst planetside. We're also considering adding missions related to the flora and fauna that can be found on alien worlds.

What happens to a player when they are not playing? Will there hired NPC's that still accomplish tasks, can your assets still be attacked, and what happens to my ship if not docked somewhere?

It's unlikely that NPCs will continue to work on players behalf whilst they are offline. It's not impossible but we want to encourage players to be active if they want to advance in the game. Permanent structures can be attacked as I mentioned before, but first they have to be found. When a player logs off without docking first we do not want their ship to visibly disappear. If there are no other players around, we can simply remove the ship from the game to save server resources and use the vastness of space as an excuse. If other ships are around we hope to have the player's autopilot take over until either the ship is alone or it has docked.

I have noticed the community is helping out with models, sounds and ideas. How much of the community created content will be in Infinity when complete?

We've had hundreds of ships and other models contributed to Infinity. We will choose the best of these models to include in the game. We expect to have something like a hundred ship designs for the player to choose from at launch.

How is Infinity coming along in relation to estimated starting date of the Alpha (end of 2009)?

Things are coming along very nicely, it's a big ambitious project and it's expected that it will take a long time. It's possible that we could begin alpha testing before the end of this year but such estimates in the world of software development are pretty crazy. Our first alpha tests will be closed events internal to the development team.

We don't have any new screenshots at the moment and the engine isn't in a build state where they can easily be made. Here is a link to our existing hi-res screen shot library:

http://www.infinity-universe.com/~dev/PR/

I took the luxury of linking to some of images to post here with the interview. Remember these images are still from a very early build of Infinity and could change. (Click on image to enlarge)