I will not take this with out responding! I have been called a lot of things but mature isn’t one of them! I won’t hear of it!
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Had to actually log in for once during on this one of my tri-weekly check-ups to post the following serious and incredibly mature statement in response to your comment:
LOL-WTF-ROFL
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I can raise you $$$, enough to get your KS video completed professionally. I sent you a pm early this year but you continue to ignore meeeeeee… I detect a certain combination of uncompromising pride and intelligence, IMO unhealthy for an early stage company.
Time is overtaking you. That is the ugly truth. You should swallow your pride and allow me to assist.
Then again, what’s another year? Or two?
Good luck.
I wonder why. It’s just one of those great mysteries of the universe I suppose. ¬_¬
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All I ask Inovae is to stop with the teases, and the “It will be done soon” posts, messages and so on. You guys have shown time and time again that this company is far from being in a state where you can meet any sort of deadlines.
And considering you have 5 art guys in the team, why would one of the programmers(who is in the process of moving) have to edit the video? This one month delay on an already recorded video makes no sense. Was the video guy working for free and there is no money to hire someone else?
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They did. There wasn’t a sigle date set since the first said there would be a video.
See:
Considering that the video guy didn’t do anything I think it’s highly unlikely that he was paid or would have been paid anything. Here’s what Gene said about the situation:
Also answers why the art team doesn’t want to touch the potato.
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You’re right, it’s time to get a move on. I believe that the success of the Kickstarter will NOT be determined by the quality of the video. It doesn’t matter if it’s rendered in 4K or 1080p. It doesn’t matter if it’s in .AVI or .WMA. These things will not be the reason that the Kickstarter fails.
If it fails, it will be because of the same problems we’ve been seeing for the past seven years: no sense of urgency, and little organization.
Also, people are just getting tired of waiting. I went back and watched I-Novae’s latest video (the rocky planet one), and guess what, it’s already almost a year old! How did that happen! And I remember them acting as if the Kickstarter was right around the corner back then.
Will the Kickstarter even happen in 2014?
You bring up a good point.
It seems unlikely. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I think this is the heart of the issue right here. Whatever happened to the Keith that posted this back in march:
[quote]
Like I’ve stated before we’re planning on releasing one more video
before we launch our Kickstarter. If we can finish that by the end of
this month, which we’ve been crunching really hard to do, then we’re
going to be aiming at launching our Kickstarter towards the end of May
or early June. If it looks like we’re going to slip again then I’m
likely going to start cutting scenes from the Kickstarter video until we
arrive at something we can ship. Sometimes I think we’re a little too
obsessed with perfection.[/quote]
I’ll wont be suprised if after Kickstarter reveal crowd will go “their pitch is nice looking planet? meh, I’ll just keep throwing money at Star Citizen’s PvP module”.
I’m of opinion that peak demand has already happened. Two years ago they could have tried to ride on that “woohooo, space sims are coming back!” wave together with Elite and StarCitizen but today those games are already in the wild. If I want space sim, I can give my money to either of them and be smuggling in Elite or shooting in StarCitizen right now. How do I-Novae plan to make their Kickstarter be competive with this, and how do they plan to deal with their notoriety amongst space sim players for terrible track record on shipping?
Most people don’t know about that or probably forgot about it because they ether lurk on a verry low basis or don’t even know I-Novae yet.
Anyway the kickstarter video is important for exactly showing what makes I-Novaes Engine unike and Battlescapes pitch worth putting out.
I agree that I also would be disappointed if they hadn’t at least finished on the draft of the Kickstarter (Video choreography, rough Kickstarter text and rewards) because that’s something possible to iterate over even with just having one hour of free time each week.
I hope they keep restraining from the urge of posting dates, like Andre suggested. Giving dates never worked out.
It is funny to see, that after such long time more and more people are doubting about the realization of this project.
Come on guys, look at this whole development from a point of view outside this community.
The whole thing went ridiculous so many years ago, I remember that I started to look at Infinity after the Tech Demo from 2010 (was it this year?)
And even there it was like, that the development is going on and 2011 (?) it started with the rumours about kickstarter, where the community was forcing that it should go the Kickstarter way.
After this point, all comments were, coming soon, we will start kickstarter in spring/autumn.
Forget it guys, this stuff is never going to happen, they are going for no risk, so they will never achieve something.
I can promise you now, the Kickstarter is not going to happen this year, they will start arguing that XMas is coming and there is no money left that backers could spend (remember, it was the same for the last two years!)
Back in 2010, Infinity was promising since it was the only big SpaceSim that were in development.
But now? Look around you, what is really special about it? There is Star Citizen, Elite and also Limit Theory (where one guy made a KS after 6 month of development and is doing amazing progress)
Serious when you take a look at limit theory, what one young guy can make, you have some problems to understand that development here. How can it be that one little guy is outrunning a whole team?
Or take a look at Space Engine, ok, its not a real game, but its developed by a russion astrophysicist, who started this project without a big knowledge and look at it now, the guy is still making a great progress and got permanent funding since he opened that possibility.
And he also made a stretch goal, that it will be becoming a SpaceSim game with the time.
What is Infinity doing?
Mostly nothing, you can watch every 3 month in this forum and can see the same statements like in the month before and before.
Nothing is going to happen, sad but true…
Our original plan was to provide the video file uncompressed on a physical external hard drive that we’d hand out to the video editing guy. As you know, we’re all working from different places, so transferring such big files isn’t exactly easy. Or we’d have to compress it, and after video-editing it’d get compressed again, which isn’t exactly good.
You’re right that we have many artists on the team that could do it, except that they’re busy with their own things for the KS preparations and don’t necessarily have video editing experience. We wanted to use a professional video editor, also as a test before the KS video gets done. Unfortunately he kind of let us down ( although he said he’d do it for free, so we can’t complain all that much… but we were still relying on him being able to do it ). That plus bad timing ( Keith relocating to New York ) explains the recent delays, and we apologize for that.
Keith and I have invested about $100K of our own money on this project, and we haven’t got a single cent out of it in all these years. I’ve also been working full time for 2 years on it, on my own savings. It’s really heart breaking to see that some people think we’re just lazy / doing no efforts / taking no risks.
Both of these projects are nice and interesting, but with all respects due to them, they aren’t creating a general purpose engine. Space Engine is very good at what it does, but it’s also ultra specific. I don’t think you could use it for other types of games.
We’re building an entire technology and platform, toolsets, in order to make not just a one-time project ( Infinity Battlescape ), but multiple projects, with third-party licensing and modding for the community. You may not agree with our company strategy, but nevertheless it’s been our choice, and we’re sticking to it.
Listen, progress is going slowly because most of us aren’t working full time, but have full time jobs. It was the situation a decade ago, and it is still the case today. This won’t change unless we can launch a successful KS or we get external funding. Comparing us with other projects that got funding before their KS ( like Elite or SC ) is like comparing apples to oranges. I understand that a lot of members of our community are tired of waiting, but really, there isn’t much we can do about it. We’re already doing as much progress as we physically can given our availabilities.
As for communication, I agree that it’s bad and that we should do more efforts on that. Unfortunately we’ve been holding out a lot of the new content for the KS launch, so we can’t really do a massive content update with new pics. It’s pretty likely that our upcoming video will be the last big thing before the KS launch.
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Content is not required for communication. You guys have a track record for literally not saying anything for months at a time. At this point, you could literally start discussions on bowel movements and I would at least know you guys were still alive.
I know the inner workings of an engine are probably outwardly boring to most and would be incredibly time consuming to talk about. I’m also willing to bet every last one of you guys are introverts to the core. I know I am. I don’t even have facebook or twitter, because I just don’t care about them. If I want to talk to my family and friends, I either pick up the phone or go on over and hang out. You guys, however, are approaching the need to do an inherently extroverted activity - a kickstarter. That is going to depend a lot on having good community involvement. You need to develop and engage that community sooner rather than on the cusp of the kickstarter.
As others have pointed out, a lot of attention has been taken by Elite and Star Citizen, and subsequently a lot of higher expectations by the average gamer will be there. That’s probably not something you can match at this time, and that makes a strong community all the more necessary.
As far as involvement goes, you might try to foster fan-made ship concepts again. Back when you were doing the contribution system, I myself tried to model my own ship out (not that good, but I did learn a bit while doing it). I tuned into Star Citizen more just to see how their next great starship competition was going. If you’re at least still planning on having modding available from the beginning, then have fan art/assets that you can point to as something that the community is already doing. You might get an amazing amount of support just from that alone. Just a thought.
This isn’t meant to be overly critical or anything. I know how life gets sometimes, and on introspection, I’m clearly guilty of bad communication myself. I think what you guys are doing is awesome, and I want you to succeed. I’ll still be checking in on you from time to time. Just let me know you have a pulse, alright?
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I did say “teases”, not “release dates”. Right?
And I was mostly referring to what Keith said on twitter about the video being fully recorded. He just then up and vanished and never posted anything else about it(outside the forums). We had to come here and complain about it to get an explanation, and that is just not how it should be done.
Exactly. Although taking 10 pictures one day and posting one every week would take only a few minutes, not even that is required. Keith spends time retweeting things about google voice or venture capital graphs, so I suspect he has time to post things like “hey, our video guy vanished, so the video might take longer to come out”
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Thelazyjaguar made a fine post. I’m just a curious guy without any internal knowledge about video games, but I can understand that you guys are not handling well the social and promotional aspect, which is a worrisome realization in the brink of a… kickstarter. Again, I have no idea how hard it can be creating such a huge project while working on a full-time job, but I know that if you don’t have 15 minutes at the end of each day to write at least one forum post, you’re doing it wrong. You guys don’t even post in your twitter accounts, ffs. This unfortunately reminds me of myself when I’m slacking in front of the pc; I will close phone-calls in 10 secs saying how awfully busy I am and asking people to phone me later, while I’m not even doing a step forward in finishing the god-damn work.
Things just don’t happen nowadays; you will need full-time promoters to push the kickstarter and the company in general. If you don’t have the budget for that, the community itself is the only one that will do it other than yourselves. You can’t afford losing members at this point. So, as lazyjaguar said, just let us know that you’re here; start conversations, reveal anything that can be interesting but not essential (be it technical, scientific or even philosophical; I love the science discussions that happen from time to time), make us sure that there is content, quality, pioneer work done at all times here. I’m sure all people here that have stayed “loyal” to Infinity have a great deal of patience, which is a requisite for interest in such huge and epic projects (I’m also pretty sure that most posters have a little such project for themselves too) but we want to see these projects happening, not looming in limbo forever. Catch some optimism for ourselves too, you know.
And maybe place an ad for that video editor? This is a crucial point, don’t leave the community hanging at the worst possible moment.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds seeing this sort of thing constantly showing up on the front page of the website, in place of anything remotely related to the project, at least a little bit aggravating.
I didn’t vanish, I tweeted that I was moving to NYC and I have posted on here a couple of explanations with regard to what has happened to my time, and the video, since that move. If you look at my posting history on Twitter you’ll notice I really haven’t tweeted hardly at all since the move either. I’ve been quite distracted getting settled into a new job, a new city, and finding a new apartment. All of my stuff, including my desktop computer where I do the majority of my dev work, is still stuck in a semi trailer moving across the country.
I had everything set up to be handled by our video guy while I was getting settled in NYC. When he flaked it created a perfect storm where we had no backup plan and I was in the middle of a massive transition.
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