I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but if that’s an accurate portrayal of your plan then you really need to add some professional business-sense to the team. I’m assuming that your publicity budget will not cover a large-scale banner- and youtube-ad campaign? There are alternatives, of course:
Word of mouth requires two things to work: people having something to show their friends, and having the time to do it in. It’s effect grows exponentially over time as long as there’s stuff to show. One month, starting from a few dozen people, will not result in a whole lot of buying-power (or pledging-power, as the case may be).
If you use Kickstarter, there’s a fair chance a lot of people will look at it. How many of those people - people who choose to spend their spare time looking through random Kickstarters, mind - do you expect will pledge without so much as having a look at your website? How many people will pledge after seeing that everything on that website except a single blog update was put there immediately before the Kickstarter started?
Keeping the website as-is is probably a worse idea.
Oh, as for this:
Capabilities, performance stats- and projections, common algorithms used, these are all things that you’ll have to tell potential licensees to get them interested. You know, to get people to consider giving you money? The thing you want all of us to do?
I’m not saying you should tell us how the engine does what it does, just what it does. Maybe the why would be good, too, to help the less tech-savvy. Or just screenshots. Lots of screenshots. Maybe some more videos. Better to have visible bugs and crashes (with a large WORK IN PROGRESS banner, of course) than no content at all. No such thing as bad publicity.
As I have stated before, we do plan to have a PR campaign pre-KS. We do not intend to start the crowd funding without any prior PR campaign. What I was talking about was community involvement in terms of what we’re currently spending hours on.
I am following this project for a while. I do think however that the focus is currently almost only on the visualization of the planets. Of course rings are nice to have, but spending almost a year on this seems a little bit over the top. There is also need for collision with the planet, space physics, multiplayer networking, client-server, modding, sounds, etc etc. And I have not seen anything done in that area. To make a game of this scope would require at least around 40 million dollars. I am not sure if this kind of money can be raised with a Ks.
Given the lack of progress in 7 years I think the team should also be fair to admit that what they want to achieve is not possible without a larger team and lots lots more money
I suggest they put everything on Ks now, make a nice interview of the team, generate a hype and hope for the best. Developing longer will only hurt the case and after the Ks is successful they still have enough time to develop further, but then with a larger team making it more realistic to reach their very highly set goals.
Back in 2007 we released the Infinity Combat Prototype, which although ran on a much earlier version of the engine, had everything you mentionned ( collisions, space physics, networking, client-server, sounds, etc… ). Though it did not have modding.
I spent most of the last two weeks revisiting physics. I don’t particularly want to chat / explain about it, because there’s nothing new or fancy in it; just code reorganization and cleaning so that it’s ready for our KS video. All this upcoming month ( november ) I’m going to work on improving performance, by implementing a deferred shading renderer. I doubt anybody other than programmers would understand what I’m talking about.
[quote=“asimo, post:183, topic:524”]To make a game of this scope would require at least around 40 million dollars
[/quote]
I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers from. Infinity Battlescape is not an MMO, it is a relatively “simple” game by industry standards ( which will still require at least 2 years of development post-KS ) with a limited amount of content. There’s no way that would cost 40M$.
Hmm, that’s exactly the reason why we’re making a KS. To get funding, work full time and expand the team. There’s nothing “to admit” there, we’ve been saying and explaining that for 3 years now.
I am not sure why you would want to spend time optimizing using deferred shaders when your goal is making the KS video. These kind of things should be done when you want to make an actual downloadable release of the engine itself I think.
With 40 million you can spend 3 years developing with about 80 designers and 20 programmers. I think those are realistic numbers for a project you are aiming at.
So I see you joined about an hour ago there Asimo and it kind of shows that you don’t know the full history of what’s going on here.
Their Kickstarter is for a space combat simulator that they’re calling Infinity: Battlescape and they are looking to get a minimum funding of around $500,000 if memory serves me correctly.
Please do not confuse this with their previous goal of making an MMO called Infinity: The Quest For Earth, which would require multiple millions to complete.
They decided on the combat simulator as a stepping stone for various reasons, all of which were ground in good common sense and principles. There’s some threads around that talk about it.
They are perfecting their engine so that they can work on the game full time if they get a successful kickstarter, which is good because the less time they spend fixing any problems with the engine, the further any funding they receive from the kickstarter will go.
The current gripe from people was just to get some consistent level of communication, even if its not game or tech related. (That should take minutes, not hours…)
Please feel free to ask any other questions if you don’t understand.
No. Flavien is a developer, not a maker of videos. Given that INovae’s goals are to have a commercially viable engine and a game built on said engine, working on the engine performance is important. It’s also a better use of Flavien’s time.
I really don’t understand how you came up with those figures…
I was indeed confused with the quest for earth project. But the combat sim was released 7 years ago. Why do it again? A Ks project should bring something new. I gladly offer the team some funds if they would offer something more than just another space combat sim.
With 500.000 dollar you can only hire 8 people for a year. That cannot speed up the process. They should aim higher in my opinion. Planets you can discover, cities, space travel, that is what most people would love to see.
That was a testbed prototype. It wasn’t even a full game. They have since revamped and upgraded their engine quite a bit.
Yeah, they’re starting at a lower, more realistic goal as they don’t have an established studio or “street cred,” and that number is probably the minimum they could reasonably get away with. An MMO would be a heavy learning curve to try straight out of the gates, not to mention that there’s no guarantee that they could raise that kind of capital.
These would be traits associated more closely with an MMO than a space combat simulator. Yes, people would love to see them, so would the devs, but they’re keeping it at a manageable level for the time being. If they’re successful, they’ll probably move on to creating the MMO.
For making a video the engine does not have to be fully optimized. Optimization is only needed at the end of the project. Deferred shading will only hurt the graphics quality, so it is not usefull for making a better video.
I seem to recall them mentioning an exploration mode for people that just wanted to fly around. Of course Infinity Battlescape will probably not be featuring a fully generated galaxy, but rather just a solar system.
That is one of the problems when almost everything is procedurally generated: The high starting costs. Once its ‘built’, upkeep is really easy. Making good things takes time.
Cheers for continuing on working on a fantastic engine and generator.
Deferred shading has nothing to do with graphical quality.
We originally thought we’d delay its implementation after the KS, but during our internal testing we realized that adding hundreds of small lights to our scenes/ships made our forward renderer go into non-interactive framerates which isn’t acceptable. Recording the entire KS video would take hundreds of hours, and the testing/debugging workflow becomes very complex/hard.
See, I think that example perfectly illustrates why we’re can’t post what we’ve been working on recently. There’s too many things, most of them are very technical, and most people wouldn’t understand the reasons why we’re working on them unless we explained it in details. Which we can’t/don’t want to at this time.
I think you underestimate your public. If you had said: We are busy adding a lot of lights to the spaceships to make them look better, most people would understand. Because you were talking about deferred lighting in a solar system with one light source it got me somewhat confused.
Funny I thought you had Deferred Lighting done years ago, there was some article on the old site where you were explaining how to light procedural space station interiors with many lights, the “solution” was deferred lighting.
I have coded a Deferred Lighting system myself for XNA, it took about a week for a basic implementation…
Also I’m wondering why are you concentrating your replies on somebody that has been a participating member of the community for a day? No offense asimo, but we rarely get dev time, it could be much better used, like creating a dev thread and a dev posting something in it.
I think this is why game engine developers generally do not interact with the public while in development, and write papers once the tech is completed/optimized to explain the development process/implementation.
Yes, but that was in an earlier version of the engine and it was experimental. Nowadays our systems are a lot more complicated, including a material-nodes system similar to Unreal Engine 4’s, which we did not have at the time. Trust me, the complexity has increased tenfolds since then.
Sounds about right. But we’re talking about an advanced implementation here, not a basic one.
There are many challenging things that your “basic” deferred renderer probably did not handle, and that we did not have in our implementation years ago. Like, how do you handle massive depth ranges ? Storing Z in a component of the GBuffer isn’t enough in a realistically scaled solar system. Then there’s the whole topic of atmospheric scattering that needs to work with the deferred renderer, which is also pretty complex. Then there’s IBL ( image based lighting ). That’s not an exhaustive list, I could go on for a page.
Anyways, I will stop answering this thread. I don’t think anything productive is gonna come out from it if anything I write/explain has to be justified.
