[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…
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.
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.
[quote=“INovaeFlavien, post:121, topic:582”]
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.[/quote]
The reception was worse with a more discriminating audience. If the Elite:Dangerous team had presented your video to their players, the players would have raved about it.
Remember that you presented something that was about rings. That’s the sum total of your product offering. There is no larger perspective to consider. We don’t have stuff to shoot at, or planets to visit, ships to make, or virtual trading accounts to manage. We have some procedural rendering technology to think about. So that’s what we focus on. The Elite:Dangerous crowd looks at popping in the rings and thinks “Pretty cool. Time to get back to work farming for my Anaconda.” We look at it and comment that “That’s ridiculous. The spectral lines of the bounced reflection from the Class G star off that small moon are off by 6% for Hydrogen.”
Set a timeframe for your Kickstarter and then jam whatever you can into that. If that means planar cirrus clouds and nothing more, fine. If that means that the stones in a ring pop when the ship is flying through at Ludicrous Speed, fine. If that means cutting out features wholesale, fine.
Just do the best you can. But do. Because time is not on your side.
Kichae we argue about huge things like Atmospheric Scattering and we argue about pixels in each screenshot we get. Until recently we as a community were being starved, we were getting a screenshot on bi-annual basis. And I’m perfectly aware of the definition of arrogance, for instance take our reception of NMS. That is s small team that managed to create a lot in a short time period, here it’s not worthy of mention though, because Infinity is already better.
Do you remember @INovaeFlavien posting on the forums on basically a daily basis, do you remember us actually having arguments with him concerning gameplay, do you remember what it feels like to have a community manager?
As long as the devs are fixing those pixels we are complaining about, we will be waiting, while players of ED argue about background galactic simulation and actually see an asteroid pop into view distance once in a week of gameplay.
I explicitly went back and watched your ring video and a somewhat comparable one of E:D, and in my opinion yours are so much better it is not even funny. E:D has visible view limitation (you can see where the asteroid models stop being loaded), no fog of any kind, plus your background of the planet and the way it is rendered set the rings in a vastly superior scenery.
Simply the move from the rings to the planet in one motion made your version seem so much better just from a scale perspective, plus your rings are actually made of multiple rings and aren’t just one huge donut of asteroids. And if the 2010 tech video still holds true the system’s light is actually distorted when passing through the rings, something which E:D seems to lack too (see here at 3:40).
That said, if you do manage to fix the issue of asteroid pop in reasonable time before the kickstarter, you’ll blow E:D out of the water just in terms of the ring graphics. That said, their style isn’t really my kind of thing anyway, so I might be biased.
It doesn’t matter if the rings are better @xamino, there is nothing more than rings being showed in that video, in ED rings are such an insignificant part of the game that nobody cares that INS has a better rings implementation.
If the whole “rings” setup is insignificant where does that put a popping asteroid on the grand scale?
I disagree somewhat. I think that there are still many gamers out there who are waiting for a realistic and beautiful space game, and in my opinion Inovae can offer that even now. And on the topic of gameplay: unlike E:D the team here has years of forum discussions to go back on where every concept under the sun was discussed over and over again. I feel confident that Inovae will manage to be better than E:D even in that respect, especially as E:D is a pretty boring game currently from all the let’s play videos I’ve watched. And to put that into perspective, I played the X games exhaustively.
EDIT: Basically, E:D fans have a game and are now discussing gameplay, where as we have discussed everything already and are now waiting for the game.
First, I get the impression the devs are fixing those pixels that they are complaining about, and it’s their project, so we’ll be waiting until they polish those things to the level they want.
Second, Elite: Dangerous is there to be played. People should be playing it, as opposed to hanging around here complaining about how people are comparing aspects of one game engine to aspects of another game engine if that’s what they would prefer to be doing.
[quote=“cybercritic, post:130, topic:582, full:true”]
It doesn’t matter if the rings are better @xamino, there is nothing more than rings being showed in that video, in ED rings are such an insignificant part of the game that nobody cares that INS has a better rings implementation.[/quote]
Maybe I-Novae cares about its ring implementation. Maybe they spent a lot of time and effort making those rings look the way they wanted them to look. Considering they’re building an engine and experimenting with aesthetic, that may actually be very important to them. Who cares what E:D players are doing in planetary rings? They’re busy playing E:D, like they should be. Meanwhile, the I-Novae engine developers are busy developing an engine.
Like they should be.
Define significance, because all I’m hearing is “I don’t care about it, so it’s meaningless,” while you’re simultaneously schooling us about arrogance.
I do praise your blind commitment @Kichae, the most sensible of us left years ago, I suppose from your point of view with your background this is the best game/engine there is. So there is not much point of arguing with you, you paint your picture, and that picture is very skewed due to your RL specialization. I don’t have the energy to engage in one of your famous quoting wars that lead nowhere.
I’ve been following Infinity for almost 6 years now. The only time I’ve seen the plan change was the move to launch a game called Infinity: Battlescape first via Kickstarter. I was always under the impression that they were building a realistic engine, and that it would take time. Infinity has been plodding along since before ED or SC were even in the radar. Just because they’ve turned up now doesn’t mean that INS should drop everything and rush to market. If anything, now’s the time to focus on what makes their product unique, such as the engine features Kichae refers to. It’s then up to the team to come to market at a time that best suits them.
Which is why they’re unwilling to confirm or deny that clouds will be part of the final game. If someone decides making them is a fun way to spend a weekend, they’ll get made, if not you use exponential height fog and some cool explosions to make gas giants and instead make something else that’s better than ED E:D (making something better than ED is easy).
To sell a game, you don’t have to make everything better than anything else. You need to make everything either to the same adequate quality or not at all, and then make one thing that some people think is worth buying the game for. See Thomas Was Alone. If that group of “some” people isn’t large enough to make money off, you make another thing that some other people think is worth buying a game for (now we’re talking Bastion).
Trick is to make sure the second thing you make isn’t something that stops a significant portion of the “some” people that liked the first thing, or at least try to make it good enough that it will add more costumers than it subtracts. Bad clouds wont bring in a lot more players, but it may well scare off some of the players that think being able to go straight into atmospheres is an important part of the game.
