I don’t see what that has to do with it.
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People are not expecting AAA quality from you and you shouldn’t behave like a AAA studio?
Indies can get away with simplistic graphics, but not bad ones. If there are no clouds at all, that’ll be somewhat disappointing but “oh well, can’t expect AAA quality from indies”; bad clouds with a potentially negative impact on gameplay, meanwhile, can affect ragequitting.
How are you going to do a gas giant without clouds?
Seems you are going in the opposite direction to what my intended meaning was, I suspect INS would not put in “OK” clouds, that they would rather put proper volumetric ones as a stretch goal. My perspective is, put them in as long as they are not utter rubbish, something a AAA studio can’t do.
The way the devs are talking about the present clouds seems that they don’t have a good opinion of them, it’s something that’s not good enough to fly through, meaning they will not be used in IBS and proper clouds are a stretch goal. Looks like these clouds are there to fill an obvious gap that not having them leaves.
Being an indie comes with an understanding, they should use this.
Right now we have multiple layers of the “experimental” clouds. However, flying a ship through the atmo of a gas giant is a good way to (edit: implode, then) blow up the ship, not the case when seamlessly landing on an earth-like planet.
^^this, kind of, but not exactly. We have our own quality standards that we desire to adhere to.
I really can’t wait until we have volumetric clouds, mostly for the fact that this discussion can go away 
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You can’t afford to ensure everything is perfect before release, other people’s tech will advance faster than you can develop with such a small part time team. And people aren’t expecting it from you.
Are they planned for the initial KS campaign, base IBS or are they a stretch goal?
I’m not sure anyone has ever said “perfect”…
Not something I can disclose at this time
The 2010 Tech Demo was pretty “perfect” to most of us back then 
I guess they wont be in by the KS, or there is some faulty logic with you showing off screens of inferior clouds…
Unfortunately I don’t think it’s that easy. Look at the poor reception of the rings video, and now compare it with Elite Dangerous’s ones…
Dan simply could not resist 
I’m not sure where your comparison leads, I’m in too deep in ED to know what your opinion is on the reception of ED’s rings videos, there were people that were screaming wow and others complaining that it’s nowhere realistic enough.
I don’t understand why you are positioning yourself in the same league with ED, Frontier is a AA studio with around hundred employees, in theory you can’t compete with that. It’s very ambitious to try and go head to head with SC and ED, maybe you should position yourself as an indie and compete against that market.
Realistically you can’t compete with ED or SC even with a 2mil budget, CR is pushing throwing money at game development and he has a lot of money, ED is pushing quality, experience and reputation. Not to mention that they have IPs from the golden days of gaming. You have an aging community of fanatics that were sold a long time ago, in a time when there was a void when it came to good quality space games, times are different now. And you promised a lot more than one system and an arena game.
Well that’s good news.
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Expectations are a funny thing, and expectation management is much more of an art than it is a science. Especially since people often don’t know what their expectations are in advance.
I thought the rings video was good, but short, especially given the time it took for it to come out (but the expectation that the scope of the resulting product scales with the time to release isn’t necessarily a reasonable one in and of itself).
I hadn’t checked out ED’s rings until now, but I can say, after a few minutes on YouTube, that they’re awful (Infinity’s 2010 rings were vastly superior), but maybe they met players expectations of what a ring system should be. After 8 years in public outreach, it’s become painfully clear that people don’t know squat about what the universe actually looks like (people, by and large, don’t even know that they can see planets in the night sky; when you tell them they can, they envision being able to see giant stunning orbs, and then are often disappointed when you point at a pinpoint of light and call it Jupiter).
People seem to expect ring systems to be very large, very dense, and made up of asteroid sized boulders. You presented a truncated ring system that looked to be made out of flying pea stone and wispy fog. The biggest sin there actually seemed to be that it was “nothing new”, even though everything about that sequence was brand new.
He didn’t position them in the same league as ED. He implied that their rings were better than ED’s rings (and he’s right), but their rings video got crapped on anyway, while people are by and large impressed with what ED offers up as planetary rings.
Quality isn’t everything is the message, as they out performed and still underwhelmed.
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[quote=“Kichae, post:120, topic:582”]
He didn’t position them in the same league as ED. He implied that their rings were better than ED’s rings (and he’s right), but their rings video got crapped on anyway, while people are by and large impressed with what ED offers up as planetary rings.[/quote]
I wouldn’t say our rings are better, but I thought they were more or less on the same level ( although we went for a more realistic look / distribution ). More specifically, we got a lot of criticism about the popping… which is even worse in E:D.
All I wanted to point out is that we only have a fraction of E:D’s budget, yet achieved similar results, and the reception was worse.
Really Kichae, if anything all we do on these forums when it comes to comparing Infinity to anything, we compare it to ED and SC, we should be digging up shit from Seam Early Access and then maybe people, including most of us wouldn’t be expecting Infinity to be an equal to ED and SC, maybe then people would say, wow, that is really good for an indie.
The fact that devs themselves engage in this just makes them seem arrogant. We are arrogant as a community, nothing is good enough, nothing was ever good enough, maybe that is why INS can’t engage in any serious discussion on gameplay or engine features with us…
Not 100% sure, but I think they worked on that.
There was criticism about popping (I was one of the critics) but I believe the vast majority of criticism was regarding the video (camera path etc) rather than the engine and the 'roids themselves.
Maybe they were expecting to create a buzz, bring in some more members, maybe get some media attention?
I think you’ve confused arrogant with impatient. Much of the community, I think, has grown impatient, since many of us have been here for what are now significant fractions of our lifetimes, and over that span the genre has seen something of a resurgence, while Infinity has remained as elusive as ever. I don’t see this perfectionism people have talked about, and I don’t see this arrogance you’re claiming. I see people who have set standards (with no references to third parties) that they want to meet, and whose goals are more complex than “release a game”.
There hasn’t been any talk of gameplay because there’s no gameplay. That’s actually been stated outright at least once. They’re not currently developing Battlescape. They’re developing the I-Novae engine. Public discussion about gameplay is premature, because it can set expectations that they may not be able to meet in the end.
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