I saw a picture of the fleet, and that’s a lot of models to go to waste. Are you going to refine them or not use them at all?
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For the majority of them that’s quite unlikely. The models would need to be partially or entirely remade, the engine now utilizes physical-based lighting which means that all the older textures are obsolete, the polycounts have increased, the models require normal mapping ( and not just the old bump-mapping, it doesn’t look good enough anymore ) etc…
There’s a handful of older models that we’re already planning on re-using, but we had to revamp the textures and do a lot of additional work to upgdade them.
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We’ve selected a handful of some older assets which we reworked to use in our crowd funding campaign video as props, but beyond that, no. We do not plan to use any of the old assets. As Flavien alluded to, they are obsolete in pretty much every aspect of the authoring pipeline.
The best way for those assets to be used in the future is via the MOD tools we plan to release at some point in the I:B development/shipment cycle. (exactly when those tools become available is dependent on the success of the crowd funding). The original authors of said assets will be able to bring their old content up to the new requirements and submit to whatever type of virtual marketplace we employ for use in official gameplay and/or private server usage. Having said all that, there is nothing written in stone concerning user generated content at this point in time other than we’d like to find a way to incorporate it in some fashion.
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Just a question, how many models for I:B do you have right now?
The assets we are working on right now are for our crowd funding video specifically. It remains to be seen what can be used for the actual game, as there is still a bit of pipeline iteration while the tools are being built. In a scenario like ours, when the art pipeline is developed alongside the engine/tools, there is a lot iteration/tweaking/reworking by the art team. Most likely, the majority (if not all) of the assets you will see in our crowd funding video will not be game ready, they will require further reworking once we go into production mode.
Hmm. Sounds ugly! Really, I think this is a very controverse decision. You should provide a path for contributors to get their models into the game. They spent days and even months of work and more important much love to your project. I know much has changed. I know you got your reasons. But you should keep the community (or at least what is left).
In my opinion this sounds as if you closed the initial project… It’s dead. Vaporware. Just by keeping the name it is not the same anymore.
However, this is still a great project and although I will never be able to play it I am still reading news here on a daily basis. I will keep doing so.
Good luck!
I agree, some of those models were really awesome…
Oh, so many problems with this that have been explained at various times.
E.g.
- As the devs have said, old contributions are not up to the new standards
- Legal issues of ownership
- Time
- Gameplay balance (It’s hard for the devs to control things if they don’t make the stuff themselves)
I see no reason why some of the designs can’t inspire new ships that will inevitably have to be created for Battlescape and beyond. But using the original stuff? No. Of course it’s sad that they will be left to gather dust, but that is the way of things… the way of the Fo… no wait, slipping into film quotes now.
I at least want some of the moddb concept art to go on login screens.
Those were seriously awesome. Why has Inovae stopped updating the moddb images?
Of course, the old models cannot be used. By saying “a path”, I’d suggest something like a forum post to the creators of a list of models.
They should get the chance to sign a contract for the Copyrights as well as get the chance to overhaul their models to meet the expectations of inovae studios. This will even work if inovae makes clear, that they can place their veto at every time.
What I had the feeling that it just didn’t pay of.
Yes there were some great contributions and great interest in those but it wasn’t ever enough to be worth investing time into working out all the legal and pipeline stuff.
Just too much overhead.
A mod friendly game gets the same job done, without all the legal issues and quality checks needed to get up to the quality I-Novae like to sell.
Great artists get an audience. Make mods easy to download and install and feature a mod once in a while and those artist get an even bigger audience.
Also the guys at I-Novae have high standards … really high. No matter how many and how good the community contributions would have been, without proper and close communications, it didn’t work out.
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In my oppinion, inovae wouldn’t exist if there were no people creating models all the years.
As I have said, we’d like to have a virtual marketplace. In conjunction with the MOD tools, that WILL be the path for contributors to potentially get their assets into the game. Said assets would of course need to pass quality and other various inspections to be included in any official capacity.
To put things into perspective, the current art team consists of the most talented/passionate artists the contribution system could supply. In just the last few years, the pipeline & quality of our own work has evolved to the point where work we spent 100’s if not 1000’s of hours on just a few years ago is already obsolete and has to be redone or not utilized at all. Remember, we were not starting with a mature engine/toolset, this type of process was to be expected via the iteration I discussed above.
You should not expect we include meshes & textures from contributions as old as 6 or 7 years directly into the game in any official capacity. That’s just not going to happen, they are obsolete in every capacity. The best we can offer is providing tools to the community affording them the opportunity to rework their original assets to increase the quality to be on par with developer created art, as well as adhering to the art style and any gameplay boundary conditions. For those contributors who do not wish to subject their work to such developer scrutiny, or have no desire to submit their work to the marketplace for inclusion into the official game, the MOD tools would of course allow the original assets to be minimally reworked and included in non official capacities. (non-official/personal servers, etc) The old contributions system assets need a lot of work, and it will be up to the original authors to perform that work, or hand over the rights to their original work to community art teams willing to bring them up to standards.
I do understand that many contributors put in a lot of hours on that original art work. I guarantee you, those of us on the art team have put in orders of magnitude more time on this project, and we have standards that simply must be met. Rest assured, we will provide some sort of path for community content as we feel that is paramount to the success and longevity of I:B as well as hopefully a roadmap for the Infinity MMO. Quite simply, it will take some additional resources on the part of the original authors to rework their art, we will not have the funding or the resources to do that work for them.
Thank you! 
That clarified things to me. Earlier in this thread, I got the impression that artists are left without any credit to their work. If I understand this correctly, the marketplace will honor high quality contributions by merging them to the next official release/iteration.
Would be great to read, how contributors (like you) grew with the game.
Not only that, but it is a way for those artists to profit from their high quality work, either monetarily or even with INS job offers, etc. The current art team was built via the old contributions system, and we’d like nothing more than to supplement the team with additional resources in the future via the second iteration of the community contribution system.
I think most contributors won’t want money for their work. They want to see their models being played, being liked.
If this game gets big, you could limit the number of models for each class and let the community vote which ones to feature in the next cycle.
It’s likely to not be many, look at the Star Citizen “The Next Great Starship” competition as a comparison pertaining to large/hero assets. I envision smaller “trinket” like assets whose quality is deemed sufficient will be subjected to the virtual market forces. However, as I said, none of this is set in stone, just doing a bit of dreaming atm 
But couldn’t players mod in super OP ships just so their faction would get them?
Anyway, how is that short vid going?
That’s a great idea. But I am sure it won’t make it in battlefield. However, we can hope that something like this gets featured in tqfe…
They absolutely can, in I: B. Convincing anyone to play on the servers they do this, however? That’ll be a bit harder.
(If mod tools are included, nothing set in stone, etc. etc.)