13 días después
Weekly Update 100 2-3-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! As promised this has been an exciting week. We released our new weapons patch last Sunday. You can read the full patch notes on our forums but to give a brief overview: We have new weapons, you can now create weapon groups, new explosion effects, new HUD icons, turret improvements, final destroyer geometry, different damage types, better warp, and numerous bug fixes. One of our community members, Playbenni, created a video43 showing off some of the new patch features. Needless to say, our goal of having “massive space battles” is starting to be realized.
Updated cruiser geometry is included in the patch
In other, less exciting news we’ve also rolled out some backend improvements and CDN support. This backend patch should solve issues with slow downloads for people who are living outside of the U.S. as well as problems that prevented Chinese players from being able to download. We’re delighted to announce that our next Alpha backer weekend will start next week on Friday, March 9th at around 9am EST. In the interim we’ll be releasing one or two additional patches to make additional improvements based on feedback we’ve gathered from the latest patch.
Incoming missile…
Looking toward the future, after the Alpha backer weekend, we’ll be focusing on finishing up capital ship weapons, including anti-missile systems, and then shifting focus to the core game loop. The core game loop includes radar/sensors, the resource system, win/lose conditions, and re-arming/repair. Basically, once the core game loop is finished we’ll be entering the home stretch for our full Alpha release. This is going to take a couple of months but I think we’re still on track for release sometime in the first half of this year. During this process we will, of course, be releasing incremental patches as new features are implemented. That’s all for this week, we’ll send out reminders next week for the Alpha backer weekend.
Weekly Update 101 9-3-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! For starters I’d like to remind our Alpha backers that today at 0900 EST/1400 UTC we’ll be starting our next Alpha backer weekend which will continue until Monday, March 12th at 0900 EST/1400 UTC. If you aren’t an Alpha backer but want in on the fun you can upgrade your pledge15 on our website at any time during the weekend for instant access. You can verify your access level by visiting our access page10 and the game will be available for download on the Infinity: Battlescape7 website. Lastly, we’ll be holding community events over the weekend at 2000 UTC on both Saturday (http://bit.ly/2Fwqfeb4) and Sunday (http://bit.ly/2Fwf1Xc7). These will be organized on our public Discord server4 by one of our artists – Dan Hutchings.
Two cruisers duke it out over the volcanic moon of Cinder
Earlier in the week we released an intermediate update that addressed some of the feedback from our weapons patch. This was also the first patch to use our new CDN for faster downloads which, so far, seems to be a significant improvement over the old system. If you’re interested you can read about the details of the patch on our forums. Speaking of patches we’ll be releasing another patch just before the Alpha weekend goes live. This patch will include some stability improvements, audio improvements, AI improvements, an attempt to made HUD clutter more manageable in large battles, and our first iteration on making warp more accessible. Per-usual, once the patch goes live, you’ll be able to read the details on our forums.
A large battle above Cinder
That’s all for this week. Another email will go out once the Alpha weekend has officially started, we look forward to seeing everyone with Alpha access in the game!
2 meses después
Weekly Update 102 15-3-2018
Hey all, it’s time for your weekly update! We’ve had quite a week with the release of 2 patches and our 3rd Alpha backer weekend. The feedback for our new weapons has been overwhelmingly positive and last weekend was the smoothest of our major launches with a relatively small number of support requests. Our core 30 seconds of fun is massive space battles and, even in our rough pre-Alpha state, we believe the latest Alpha weekend has demonstrated we are achieving our goal of building a compelling experience. For those of you who were unable to participate we highly recommend you check out some of our community generated images, videos25, and reviews18.
A massive space battle
Despite all the warm fuzzies from this last weekend there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done between now and the release of the Alpha within the next few months. The most important of these is the core gameplay loop which includes the resource system, ship configuration, and victory conditions. On top of that we need to finish capital ship weapons, implement radar/sensors, and improving warp remains a perennial thorn in our side.
A group of players forming a fleet
I’m going to take this opportunity to segue a bit from the usual dryness of our weekly updates. When we originally launched the Kickstarter for I:B it was with the knowledge that many people would likely lambast us for (temporarily) abandoning our ultimate goal of building an MMO. While this intuition proved to be correct, particularly within the gaming press, we knew we had to reduce the scope of our ambition to something we were confident we could deliver with the resources at hand. We had no idea if we could convince enough people to back I:B and the exuberance of it being successfully funded was quickly replaced by the terrifying realization that we had no idea if the vision we articulated would actually be fun in practice. This was further compounded by the fact that we had now accepted people’s hard-earned money to deliver on that promise.
The view from a corvette
With great relief I believe I can now say we are confident that not only are we moving in the right direction, but that we will deliver a quality gaming experience that uniquely sets itself apart from its competitors. There’s still a long road to travel between now and shipping I:B to retail, fraught with challenges and frustrations, but the game is coming into focus and we can see a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. We will deliver Infinity: Battlescape as a worthy addition to the library of any space combat enthusiast. Thank you all so much for your patience and for believing in us, we can’t wait to release the Alpha so we can begin introducing more of you to the game!
Weekly Update 103 23-3-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! After an exciting week last week this week has been a lot more relaxed. It’s back to the regular grind working on capital ship weapons, implementing feedback from the Alpha backer weekend, and incremental patching. The release of the Alpha is just around the corner and there’s a lot of work to be done to get the core gameplay loop properly mocked up. Among other things this includes the resource system, cargo ship AI, sensors/radar, repair/re-arm, and carrier spawning.
A cruiser in its death throes
On the art side there has been work on some additional HUD improvements. Along with that we’re working on improving special effects, texturing improvements, and the carrier final geometry. We want to get to the point where we’re releasing a new patch roughly once a week but there’s a handful of larger systems that need to be completed over the next few weeks before that’s likely to happen. That’s pretty much it for now, there should be more to talk about next week!
Weekly Update 104 30-3-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. During our Alpha backer weekend two weeks ago we discovered that the resolution of our planets wasn’t properly scaling up on 4k monitors. Upon further investigation we learned that not only were our planets not properly increasing quality based on graphics settings – but that all of our planets were actually being duplicated twice in memory. What that means is that even though each planet was only being drawn on screen once, like it should be, we were generating and caching the data for every single terrain patch twice. Fixing this problem had the obvious impact of doubling the performance of our planetary terrain generation and reducing our GPU VRAM consumption by hundreds of megabytes.
Orbiting a gas giant at sunrise
Now that our planets can be generated twice as fast as before, we decided to slightly increase their average quality. Unfortunately, increasing the quality of our terrain generation reduces the quality of our planets in another area – aliasing (flickering pixels). We have some ideas for reducing aliasing however we may not be able to schedule any graphics work until after we ship the Beta.
Fighting over a station in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant
We released another patch this week along with tweaking our HUD icons, adding dual controller support, researching HOTAS support, making some small improvements to warping, and ongoing texture improvements for stations. Last but certainly not least we’re happy to announce that we will be releasing the Alpha on Friday, June 15th. We appreciate your patience and we’re looking forward to bringing our Alpha backers into the development process. That’s all for this week, until next time.
Weekly Update 105 6-4-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! This week our primary focus has been on getting another patch ready for the weekend. The big ticket items will be planet fixes and improved peripheral/HOTAS support. We’ve discovered a bug in one of our build scripts that causes one of the game’s 3rd party dependencies, specifically Microsoft’s 2017 C-Runtime (CRT), to be skipped during installation/upgrade. This bug will cause the game to crash when the Play button is pressed in the launcher unless you happen to already have the 2017 CRT installed (most people already have it). It will be fixed in the next patch.
Flying over the volcanic moon of Cinder.
On the art side a lot of effort is being spent on the carrier. This is both the largest and the most complicated ship in Infinity: Battlescape. Great care must be taken with how we design the hangar as it will not only serve as a spawn point but also a place to get repaired and re-armed. The carrier is the last ship for us to get the final geometry pass completed and our goal is to get it mocked up in the game by the time we release the Alpha.
Flying towards sunrise over a gas giant.
That’s all for this week, until next time!
Weekly Update 106 13-4-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! To kick things off let’s talk about patches. Previously we’ve stated that our goal is to have at least one patch a week and I’m happy to report that, for the last few weeks, we’ve successfully hit that goal. Not only did we release a patch last Saturday, but we’ll be releasing another one within the next few days. There are still a couple of large game systems on the to-do list so it’s possible there may be some gaps down the road however we have demonstrated we’re able to hit our desired release cadence.
Cinder with the high resolution terrain fix
There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into releasing an update. We implement the engineering changes, collect the art changes, rebuild the game, “cook” assets into their optimized format, build a new installation package, and then upload the installation package. At this point our backend encrypts the installation package, calculates various hashes to ensure integrity, and uploads the package to our Content Delivery Network (CDN) for distribution. Lastly, our installation runtime running on a user’s machine downloads the package, verifies its integrity, and performs the installation operations. That’s a lot of moving pieces and getting them working together reliably represents an important milestone. Being able to quickly iterate on gameplay or bugs and then seamlessly deliver a new build to our users is critical for our long-term success. There are still some improvements to be made, for example we need to add support for incremental patching and optimize post-installation package caching, however the system is holding up well and we look forward to additional stress testing during the Alpha.
A desert moon with the high resolution terrain fix
Speaking of a new patch we’ve fixed some networking issues including stuttering, made additional improvements to how we interface with peripheral inputs such as joysticks, and started work on spectator mode and kill cams. Over the last few weeks we’ve noticed Infinity: Battlescape has started to acquire greater visibility within the larger space gaming community. To that end the team has been discussing things we can do to help our players continue getting the word out. At the moment this primarily revolves around finding easier ways to share screen shots and videos but we’ve also talked about the possibility of adding elements of social networks to our website. That’s all for this week, until next time!
Weekly Update 107 20-4-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. To kick things off we’ve released, as promised last week, another patch. The major changes are improvements to networking error correction, new placeholder geometry for the carrier, and changes to the damage model. You may recall we mentioned last week that we were thinking about different ways to incorporate social networking into our game/website. After some discussion we’ve decided the best way to do this is by making it easier for players to capture “sharable moments”.
The new placeholder geometry for the carrier
A “sharable moment” is defined as anything that has recently happened that you thought was cool/fun enough to want to share with your friends. The first step in this process is something we laid the groundwork for months ago – spectator mode3. Over the last week we’ve made significant progress on adding a spectator mode to the game which allows you to have a free range camera monitoring everything from ships (in/out of cockpit), to individual missiles, to entire planets and moons. We have a number of Developer Access backers who’ve already been quite successful at producing awesome videos while playing Infinity: Battlescape but spectator mode should give you all more creative freedom.
Carriers in combat over Cinder
In the future we want to extend spectator mode into things like kill cams, recording short snippets of video, and even playing back an entire recording of your participation in a match. For Alpha our only plan is to support spectator mode and possibly kill cams as we still have a lot of work left to do on the core gameplay loop before mid-June. Once we get to Beta and we have more time to work on polish there’ll be a lot more we can do to help players capture “sharable moments”. That’s all for now, until next time!
Weekly Update 108 27-4-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. You may or may not have already noticed but we’ve rolled out a new update to our company website. It includes some cosmetic tweaks but the primary goal was to improve the user experience for managing emails. Previously, you could only add a new email to your account by visiting a direct link as there was no way to do it from the main site. On top of that you couldn’t change your primary email, remove an email address from your account, or resend a verification email. This was obviously a problem and fixing it had been deferred simply because hardly anyone was complaining about it and we have a long list of things to do. Lately, with Infinity: Battlescape gaining visibility, some people started running into problems so we re-prioritized it. Lastly, there is a known problem with the new website that will cause it to look all crazy messed up if you have recently visited the old version. To fix this just clear your browser cache or force reload the page (shift + reload in Chrome on Windows).
Looking out the corvette cockpit
On the game side we spent most of this week continuing work on our replay/spectator system. New target indicators have been added along with new weapon and shield impact effects. A patch with all of the spectator code will be released soon and then we’ll shift toward focusing on the rest of our core gameplay systems. As we’ve mentioned before this includes radar/sensors, re-arm/repair, the resource system, and building actual battlescape’s to name a few. That’s all for this week, until next time!
A destroyer near a station over Cinder
Weekly Update 109 5-5-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! With a little less than a month and a half left to go until we release the Alpha it’s been another busy week. Most notably we released a new patch including our new spectator mode, kill cams, improved HUD icons, and laid some groundwork for our menu system. There’s also lots of tweaks and bug fixes which you can read about in the patch notes. Next up, as we’ve mentioned before, is core gameplay.
The new WIP carrier in high orbit
The remaining big-ticket items for the Alpha, and there are still a few, are radar, the resource system, capital ship weapons, countermeasures, win/loss conditions, carrier spawning, and getting our first battlescape up and running. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory except this idea of a “battlescape”. Originally, we were hoping to have a continuous battle take place across the entire solar system which would involve some amount of base building on the part of players. That game would have been a sort of semi-persistent mini-MMO. Unfortunately, this was a lofty stretch goal and we came nowhere near raising enough money to achieve it. Instead, bases will be pseudo randomly generated from a predetermined set of possible locations centered around a single planet and nearby moons. When a battlescape has been conquered the war will move on to another battlescape on some other planet. To win the war, thereby causing the server to reset, one of the 3 teams will have to conquer all of the battlescapes.
Under the watchful gaze of a gas giant
At least this is an outline of the current plan. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we will make significant changes to that as we go along but insofar as the Alpha is concerned we want to get a single battlescape up and running. This will involve a balanced set of factories, small space stations, large space stations (for capital ships), and land bases strategically placed around a planet and its nearby moons. The core gameplay loop starts with each team spawning at their pre-designated collection of bases. Due to being initially resource constrained the beginning of the game will involve scouting and light skirmishes as each team saves up resources to purchase more powerful ships and weapons. As the resource system kicks into high gear each team will be able to progressively acquire greater firepower until one team finally emerges victorious. The rate at which this occurs will be tweakable from one server to the next as it will have a significant impact on the length of a match.
Flying in the upper atmosphere over a large mountain range
This is just a rough, high level overview. We’ll be having a lot of core gameplay discussion over the coming weeks and as this stuff starts to get implemented for the Alpha we’ll be discussing it in greater detail. That’s all for this week, until next time!
Weekly Update 110 12-5-2018
Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. As we’ve mentioned previously our current focus is on implementing the core gameplay loop. Along with balancing the lethality and cost of weapons and ships there are some other design challenges we face due to the unique nature of our technology. Specifically, to-scale planets are quite large. So large in fact that until you’ve spent some time in our game it’s likely difficult for you to truly appreciate just how big a solar system really is. Where this presents a problem is encouraging players to congregate around certain “points of interest” within the solar system. Otherwise, with lifelike scales, you could easily spend the entire rest of your life in our game without ever meeting another player.
WIP carrier leaving a planet
One way of mitigating this issue is showing you where other players happen to be located. We already do this with our limited implementation of radar/sensors and that will only get better as development progresses. Another way is to give players objectives to guide them towards certain areas. These ideas and many others are explored a recent gameplay discussion we started on our forums.
A cruiser leaving an orbiting station
Aside from the ongoing discussion regarding gameplay we’ve also fixed a number of engineering and art bugs and made some improvements to our sound effects. With just over a month to go until our release of the Alpha we may or may not release an intermediate patch. That’s it for this week, until next time!
Weekly Update 111 22-5-2018
Greetings everybody, this is Flavien, taking over Keith for this week’s update. With a little less than a month left before alpha is out, we are working hard on the gameplay loop(s) and adding objectives such as destructible stations to the game. Last week, patch 0.2.8.1 introduced free-aiming turrets on capital ships. This part of the code was a dependency to make static stations and bases defenses fully functional. The art team is working on new station modules and sockets so that we can place defense turrets around locations. Later in the week we released patch 0.2.8.2 which introduced for the first time counter-measures for smaller ships. All of these new systems aren’t properly balanced yet. Our goal at the moment is to add all the missing gameplay elements and features to the alpha version, but we’ll keep iterating on every of these sub-systems and properly balance them around the beta, around the end of the year.
We added lights to bases
The next step now is to spawn turrets on stations and bases hardpoints. In parallel I’m also working on the match initialization and solar system “battlescapes” layout, generating planets locations, bases/factories/stations and assigning those to their respective teams. The last piece of the puzzle will be resources with factories generating credits for the team owning them. We want to spawn haulers at factories which have to be protected (or attacked by the opposite team) until they reach their destination somewhere else on the planet or solar system. As we haven’t experimented with haulers AI yet, it is a big unknown how long or difficult it will take to implement them, so there is a possibility that this feature will be in a pretty rough state (or even cut) until we can spend more time on its implementation after the alpha. The AI commander will also assign new objectives and missions to the players which in turn will generate credits bonuses once completed.
Carrier fight around Gemini station
In terms of contents the game is still far from being finished. After alpha we want to add new planet/moon types, more weapons, implement weapons custom loadouts, add back rings/asteroid fields, work on the final UI/HUD and much more. Once all the final gameplay elements are complete, we’ll focus on bug fixing, balancing, polishing and optimizing the game. There are also a couple of technical tasks that we want to revamp such as HDR, anti-aliasing (which is our 1º quality concern at the moment), better post-processing, better shadows and data streaming. We’ll get more in-depth about these tasks around the end of the year
-Flavien Brebion
1 año después
Buenas, hace mas de un año que no posteo novedades sobre el juego pero eso no quiere decir que el desarrollo este parado.
Una preguntilla... Por que solo postea The Force en el hilo? :S. No da mucha confianza, y tampoco la de que sea la primera vez que escuche hablar de este juego... Alguien me explica que le paso al juego?
#226 ¿Porque es el único que se digna a perder un poco de su preciado tiempo posteando las novedades?
No se, digo yo.
Este hilo es solamente para seguir el progreso del desarrollo, para todo lo demás esta el otro hilo. Oh wait...
23 días después
he creado un discord, esta sin editar ni nada, si alguien se anima y lo editamos y vamos entrando y tal, que este juego me da que requiere un buen grupo, saludos!
