Well, that is very exciting! I hope the play test runs smoothly!
I’m still rocking “barely surviving via self employment,” and just found out that I didn’t get yet another job I really wanted (people don’t seem to hire physics grads out here; it’s the 5 years experience paradox) so it’s looking more and more like I’m going to miss out on the Kickstarter, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Quick update
As I suspected, there aren’t that many regular members ( trust level 3 ) that have high system specs, so I’ll open the application to normal members ( trust level 2 ) too.
I don’t want people to reserve their week-end next week for no reason, therefore the application will be closed tomorrow, and I’ll contact the selected people on tuesday.
As for GPU system specs, if you have a Geforce GTX 680 “enhanced edition” at 4 GB VRAM, although the card is now 2 years old and is a bit weak in terms of performance, you’ll still be considered. Unfortunately, The older 680s or GTX 680M or the 660 have only 2 GB and that won’t be enough to test in good conditions, so I’m afraid that won’t do.
Congratulation on the blog post, it’s a great achievement when you have so much invested in this project just to release what you have. The videos are fantastic, the look of Infinity and the way it plays still feels “just right” to me. Love the contrails especially.
Not sure I completely like the way the trust level is calculated. I’ve just dropped off level 3 after being on vacation for two weeks. I like the idea of limiting the field to only trusted members of the community, it’s just the way that is calculated I find problematic and potentially unfair to some who deserve to be considered. It’s probably the criteria to have visited the site at least 50 times in the last hundred days which will be hard to keep up for a lot of people (especially if they go on vacation 
).
There was also a comment made in the blog post itself that made an alarm bell ring:
To give an example, the Hellion has a polycount budget of 11,000 triangles. But this number was set many years ago and is outdated. In recent tests we’ve pushed this budget to around 200,000 triangles for a small ship like the Hellion, and much more for bigger ships like a carrier.
I hope you’re taking in to account the scope creep that such a rise in detail level entails It will slow down your art pipeline considerably. I don’t see how an indie team can create a game at that detail level and have the requisite number of assets for a game of any depth. I’d certainly need to see a side by side comparison of an old 10K poly asset compared to a new 100K poly asset to be convinced it would be worth quadrupling your development time and costs.
Looking great. Looks like after all those years, we’ll have a short lived ICP 2 :). Too bad I don’t have the hardware needed to apply. But, I’ve waited all those years, I can wait a few more days to throw you my money.
Would it be a problem if participants recorded the playtest so they can show it or parts of it after the Kickstarter starts? Have your testers encountered any slowdowns when recording videos? Because I think some of those recording software tend to consume memory and slow down things a bit.
That’s not necessarily true, it’s sometimes a lot harder to get good fidelity and detail doing a high to low poly rip than to be afforded more poly budget to play with from the get-go.
Either way we already have building high poly models in our pipelines for ripping normal purposes, so being afforded a higher budget shouldn’t change things much from a production standpoint.
Just a question: how does the damage model work right now? Do you have any kind of internal systems, or is it just a health bar? Will you be adding a damage model in the future?
I’m with you. Reading a bit on how the trust levels are calculated only got me to rolling my eyes. Note that I’m not going to “like” your post, despite that being the Discourse way of doing things. I quoted the bit of your post that I agree with and am offering what I hope are constructive comments. That’s the way discussion forums should work, and that’s what should determine “trust” in a forum.
So, as far as I’m concerned, what’s ultimately needed is for the forum operators to decide which posts they like. Take those posts, train a neural net to identify them, and then rate all forum members against that standard. Refine the net as the operators continue to like posts. Ideally, they’d provide more information than that by highlighting sections of posts and saying something about the likability of those sections.
Someday.
I know that artists love to art, but gamers love to game. I’d be much happier with more detailed gameplay than more detailed models. I’m assuming that I cannot have both.
I’m not sure why you’d make that assumption.
Danun danun danun nunnun! It’s time for this week’s newest breaking news in the Infinity Universe!
Battlescape’s reign of terror approaches and the coming is nigh, experts say.
There are still tensions in the far east of the forum where the Legion of JB continues their tirade against likes in minor clashes with Ark’s Army over forum etiquette.
Inovae’s new "super awesome prototype thingy for troops" program is online, but they are having trouble finding volunteers. Many suspect dangerous genetic testing is afoot.
Our researchers couldn’t find anything more exciting so here are two things we know our viewers love! 
See you next week Space Pilots!
We’ve reached an agreement. I am to receive payment in fuzzy dice and bobbleheads…
No, it was fuzzy heads and Boggle dice.
Woops. I don’t know why I messed that…maybe Inovae has started their genetic testing program on unwilling people unbeknownst to them!
/Sky puts on his tinfoil hat for protection from the dark ones.
Ah, good point. I remember the pain of creating normal maps from high poly models. Anything to reduce the work needed there could indeed help the development process rather than hinder it.
Thanks for the reply and setting my mind at ease Andre
Got home and found I have a 1GB GTX 560 Ti so not eligible 
I wasn’t sure what I had as I got it from a friend after my previous card died.
I hope you get some good testers 
Yes it’s a stretch goal and yes Vulkan (from what I’ve seen so far which isn’t the final spec) is very similar to D3D12. We are cautiously inclined toward Vulkan due to cross platform support. I say cautiously as cross platform support was the primary incentive for OpenGL however OpenGL evovled into a truly terrible API and we’re a bit worried that could happen again with Vulkan. That being said if we want Android support we’ll have to implement it eventually so… Vulkan is definitely what we’re leaning toward.
While I havent been following its actual specifications, I have been following a technical news site that has said as much. With large companies such as Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, and Google a part of its design, I doubt it will turn into a big ugly monster that OpenGL sorta turned into. Its also why there is a big push in the open source world for wayland instead of Xorg for its window server. Modern programming practices makes such library switches necessary every once in a while.
Also, AMD and NVIDIA plan on having near-same day drivers for Vulkan for the linux platform once the specs are released a bit later this year.
I would be a happy camper if the game engine eventually supported Vulkan.
So would we =D
Well… I would love to apply
I have a HD 7950 with 3 gigs. Hopefully that will be good enough. 
