The I-Novae engine has NEVER been designed primarily as a flight/space-sim engine. It’s an urban legend simply due to the fact that our major project is a space sim, so people assume we’ve created an engine that can “only” do that.
The I-Novae engine is a general-purpose engine that aims are doing all sorts of games, including first-person shooters, RPGs, strategy games, you name it.
However you shouldn’t confuse the engine and the game. Infinity, and Battlescape as a consequence, will not have FPS elements in it, like walking on planets. It’s not a matter of engine, it’s a matter of design, content and time/budget restrictions. But maybe one day…
Was just reading through this and cracking up over how quickly it got shot down in flames… again…
This was the thing that grabbed me. Although the devs have already given their feedback on it, I just wanted to say: It’s not that easy.
There simply would not be any point in even trying. Procedural generation - and in particular what the I-Novae engine is capable of - is a powerful enough tool for what they need it for. And to be honest, what we have seen so far already looks fantastic, so I don’t think there is any need whatsoever for “unlimited detail”.
Mainly for this reason.[quote=“INovaeFlavien, post:21, topic:80”]
It’s an urban legend
[/quote]
Btw, I love the fact your engine already has urban legends attached to it.
I’m not so sure. How easily will you be able to migrate “legacy” texture maps to this new tech? Will there be another toolset required to create these textures, and if so how easy is it to do? IN have found it hard enough to get community art contributions of a sufficient quality without fundamentally changing the way graphics are generated and presumably triggering a change in toolset to something practically no-one in the community will have experience with. So if IN continues with their plan to commercialise the engine then implementing something that no-one knows how to use with very limited options in tooling it’s more likely to detract from the engine’s value, as it’ll require more investment from any potential customers to actually get to work with it.
No, pixies are the future. The present is stuff that developers can actually use to make their game. Even if Euclideon’s tech could be implemented in the I-Novae Engine, it still wouldn’t be able to make Infinity.
That’s alright, it’s not really going to happen, you’ll be in a spaceship most of the time. You can have seamless planetary transition in this game, I highly doubt anyone will care about the look of an individual speck of soil on the surface.
If those videos are anything to go by, Euclideon’s tech is not production ready. The IN Engine almost is. The Space genre is already making a bloody hard comeback with at least 3 or 4 major contenders, most with a multiplayer/psuedo-MMO component, coming out in the next year or so. If using this new tech adds another 4 years to development time then any PR boost that arises will be too late and Infinity far too stale.
There’s also the other, less talked about issue. Most serious people in the gaming industry don’t regard Euclideon that highly at the moment. A similar crowd of people don’t regard I-Novae too highly at the moment either. To put it bluntly (apologies @INovaeFlavien, I love the work you’ve done so far), both companies have promised something potentially amazing but failed so far to deliver. This is what we call “negative PR”. Should these companies then announce they’re collaborating on the same things they’ve so far failed to deliver, do you really expect that the PR will be good?
What was the PR like for Duke Nukem Forever after 6 or so years?
Oh bollocks, I should know better than to reply without reading all the other replies first. They’ve rendered my last two posts virtually useless. Especially given that Discourse specifically makes it easy to draft a reply and grab quotes whilst viewing posts… something it helpfully reminds me of as I’m making this one.
Ray tracing isn’t necessarily an advanced global illumination technique… hah. It’s just more generic and more accurate than some of the most common hacks used in the industry. n-reflection path tracing can achieve any frequence of GI (if you can contain it), whereas most games use a number of GI techniques corresponding to various frequencies.
“None of their demo’s contain any dynamic lights, dynamic shadows, specular reflections, or any reflections of any kind”
That’s false. They have already implemented real-time shadows (without any sample interpolation) and animation. I’ve seen specular reflections in some of their very old demos which are hard to find (created before they became widely known as UD)
“Secondly they are using a laser scanner to scan in everything. This scanner seems to be capable of sampling the diffuse lighting only.”
Regarding game dev, they’ve used a scanner in only their 2011 demo. The scanned data demonstrated for their geospatial solution is perfectly appropriate. Who is to say their clients can’t use different scanners or work with different tools? They have built some of the utility necessary to support artists working with mesh tools. I suspect these tools have lacked a number of features (like interpreting animation data), but they’ll probably get to those soon; or they might already have implemented since their last announcement but they’re not ready to roll it out. Their previous demos which supported these important features, like animation, used tools that Bruce Dell made directly for UD himself.
I’m more concerned about some of the points Flavien made. Regarding their already proven tech for real-time shadows and animation, I suspect the greater issue is not implementation complexity: it’s performance. The old demos they had did have a pretty low resolution of content compared to what they boasted in their 2011 demo, and almost nothing else present within the scene. The reason behind this bottleneck is probably similar to why raytracing has recently received (A LOT) more favor than radiosity techniques in R&D. I suspect they’re trying to crack down on these bottlenecks.
Thanks for the replies devs, and everyone else too. I feel a lot more informed now. Although some of you might be undervaluing what UD is capable of doing, you’ve convinced me that merging their point cloud magic with IN is just not feasible. My nerd-dream has been shot down…
You are not the first, nor (I suspect) will you be the last.
Perhaps one day the computers will be capable enough and the software well-designed enough to make unlimited detail properly useable. At that point, they may as well connect it to Occulus Rift, plug all of us in, and call it The Matrix.
This does fall under “The next logical bla bla bla…”
Is the quality of Infinity good enough for Hollywood?
“Maybe sometime but not now” or “We wouldn’t wast our time”
Seeing how much time and money the film industry waste on reinventing the wheel I was wondering if you considered that.
Hollywood uses trillions of rays to ray trace their scenes so no, it’s not however if we wanted to ray trace it we could certainly achieve that level of quality. You could certainly use our tech for Machinima though.
