The art team continues to iterate on space station, land base, and factory meshes. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in seeing how various pieces fit together both aesthetically and functionally. So far we’re pretty pleased with our ability to reuse and recombine large pieces of architecture in ways that creates what appears to be completely unique structures.
Work continues on improving our physics engine. It has become a bit more complicated than we had anticipated due to lack of 64-bit precision in some physics libraries and poor GPU support in others. We’ve concluded that we’ll probably have to write our own physics engine at some point in the future after Infinity: Battlescape ships to retail due to the unique requirements of our technology.
A smaller, uniquely different space station made from reusable parts
We’re also beginning to wrap up work on our new installation system and the next version of our I-Novae launcher. At first glance not a whole lot will be different between the current installer and the next one. Our launcher UI is going to get a serious upgrade and it will be able to auto-update so that you don’t have to manually download new versions of the game from our website. Under the hood everything is completely different as we lay the foundation for our future optimized patching system and mod distribution.
Absolutely brilliant! Nice work everyone. Maybe you should take this idea to ships as well; we could customize them according to our needs. Probably a lot of work but what you have for stations is perfect!!!
Perhaps it would be best to make a compromise and make a somewhat arcady physics system with fun gameplay and announce a “PATCH 1.1” with a physics overhaul as one of the main features of it. Or can you guys make the physics work well enough until then?
The only thing that comes to my mind is bringing back the previous “less-auto” mod, where you tell your ship where to point toward, instead of having everything done manually (as an additional mod, as others like the full manual mod). But that’s control, not physics.
I think the challenge lies not in the physics mechanics but rather how it works in networked latency-based competitive matches. Especially at the edges of a “map” where math inaccuracies and latency can really “break” in the sense of whether or not your torpedo hits the target.
I haven’t evaluated it, because it’s proprietary (closed source) and only seems to support fp32 precision. At least PhysX has clear plans to add support to double-precision “soon”.
