It would be interesting to see some building concept artwork. Military outposts, mining structures, iconic civilian structures / installations, centauran monuments, planetary defense platforms (orbital / ground based).
Fan stories would be great as well.
I learned the hard way what you just said. It is so true. I will tell any modelers out there the same… Design it fully first. I admit I was partially satisfied with my design before modeling it. I thought I could model out the deficiencies later. Even today I am making changes to it. Sometimes large sections of ship may need to revamp. Valuable will be lost. Criticism is also so important… I need to spend more time in concept. However this is my First real attempt at Space Ship design. Until now, I have no experience in Space Ship designs I have only Modeled ships for Lucas and a few childhood sketches… I am a late comer and have only recently in the last 4 years got really excited about Space Games,
I guess I would vote for some sort of team projects. I really missed out on the Star Citizen contest. 1sr prize 30K for a team to build a small ship seemed pretty cool. Modeling a no-prob for me. Blueprint is what I need.
I am the same way. I can model anything usually, but I really need a “blueprint” yes, maybe that comes from my engineering background…
I will put my foot in my mouth and suggest coding prototypes.
Awesome work so far. I vote concept. Buildings and such is actually a nice idea.
Coding could be fun too. Not sure if I could contribute anything actually useful. 
(Space missile and active protection systems simulation?)
How many people would take part in a coding challenge? If it’s 3 or more than I would be interested to see such a challenge
Also… when we reach 100/100 members in the Guild of the First Hundred we will initiate a “corporate identity” art challenge here to design a logo/badge for the Guild and maybe even some other elements for the “corporate identity”.
A coding challenge is something that you would need to leave open much longer than an artwork or model challenge. Run it in the background until there are enough projects to actually judge.
Off the top of my head, we have about a handful [<10] coders that have contributed in the past in this community.
I might take part in a coding challenge but, as its my day job, only if it caught my interest.
Same here. What kind of subject do you have in mind?
Preferably something Infinity related. Perhaps a small prototype for some potential gameplay feature?
A gameplay feature prototype could be fun - although as already stated, it’d need to run for quite some time compared to other challenges. I’d also be interested in a collaboration (Buildings! Concept, texture, model - a group of buildings with a theme maybe? (e.g. mining outpost)) and lore.
I’d suggest presenting a challenge such as “How can we keep the screen with all those beautiful visuals uncluttered while still providing players with all the information that they need when they need it?”
The focus is on the solution, not the means of presenting the solution. That keeps anyone who can communicate a solution in the competition.
The means can vary from being a text description to a set of artwork to a working, public demo. That brings in the possibility of doing some coding, but it might be very simple coding, as with Irashi’s Flash program to demonstrate how warp intercepts could work. It might just result in a short video capture of somebody drawing stuff in Microsoft Paint.
Winners can be declared for both Best Solution as well as Best Presentation.
A good idea in principle but this is the tricky bit:
This would need to be defined so everyone was presenting the same information.
[quote=“hrobertson, post:162, topic:546”]
This would need to be defined so everyone was presenting the same information.[/quote]
I’m not sure how that’s tricky. Make the same information available to all players. Boom. Done. From there, how can the game ensure that a player can see the bits of information that they want - and when they want it? The goal is to avoid cluttering the screen with all the displays, or distracting the player with uninteresting information that they don’t care about.
The real tricky part is creating a game where the player isn’t obliged to have the screen covered in UI crap. It may seem like great fun to be able to designate a target for automated firing by a gun turret, but when the player is changing targets every 10 seconds for 10 gun turrets, it’s more a game of whack-a-mole than anything else. As ever, ignore the fiction and look at what the player actually does when playing the game.
But that’s far beyond the scope of a competition, given that it involves the design of an entire game.
I’m for narowing it down to just one pice or set of related pieces of information and having that as a design challenge.
Also allows for multiple such chalenges and allows for concentrated endavour without drifting off to more meta or dofferent problems.
I like the idea. Now we just have to figure out what information do we want to be included in the challenge. Any suggestions?
Ship status. Resources, damage, etc.
Identification and tracking information on interesting objects. Ships, stations, cities, etc.
I like the idea of coding something that I want to code in my spare time, something interesting, something a bit more juicy.
My suggestion is that you leave the subject of the prototype to the actual participants, think we’ll get much more interesting entries that way. Every coder has that “idea” they want to work on, not sure how many people find coding on “Information Presentation” (a GUI essentially) a fun way to spend a week or two of their spare time.
But should it at least be a gameplay feature?
It just needs to be Infinity related, anything from procedural tree generation to modular station design and everything in between.