Battlescape has been in development for ages now. I am wondering if it will ever get done so the team can move on to start the original idea they had.
I remember the original plan was for a game called Infinity - Search for Earth.
What happened to it? I was really looking forward to heading out into the galaxy, finding a quiet spot and setting up home, hiring NPC defenders and wingmen and arming my home to the teeth against players who got too nosey. Along with zipping back and forth to the central hub if I wanted to trade and running the gauntlet of player and NPC pirates along the way.
I remember the old forum posts about what the devs had in mind, it was what Elite Dangerous SHOULD have been. Braben decided against allowing players to build stations and planetary bases, so ED became a tiny game that revolved around a few systems in the hub, with a huge area purely for exploration and would never become populated. IMHO, a bit pointless having so many systems if they are only there for show.
The original idea for Infinity allowed for expansion of the play area by players. Farming materials to build a station or planetary base would have made the game significantly superior to ED in every way.
As for database size and HDD space:
If the original Elite could create our entire galaxy in 48K on a Sinclair Spectrum, I am sure that, with hard disks terrabytes in size and over 8 Gb of RAM now, it could be done with a lot more data stored for each planet. There’s no excuse for it NOT to be online with an official server, online with a player dedicated server and offline without any internet connection at all. At the same time, still being a far smaller database on the HDD than a few dozen Gb at most.
So you dig up a thread I made in 2015 to try to make me appear stupid. Yes, I do know about that one, but the thread is so old that I won’t necro it, that would only give you reason to ignore it.
I asked again because my impression was that Battlescape was supposed to be just a basic flight/combat model that would then build into QfE and from what I was told way back when the game idea started out, Battlescape wasn’t supposed to be a stand alone game, merely the PVP part of QfE. 4 years later and even Battlescape shows no sign of being finished since it isn’t even at the EA stage yet. At this rate, I’ll be about 90 years old by the time QfE is even started.
I feel like you may have missed a lot. Battlescape was always intended to be a standalone arena, using the same technology as TQFE. It has been marketed as such since the Kickstarter. It’s only us from ye olde forums that even remember TQFE!
Also, Early Access is up on Steam. It’s slow going, but that’s to be expected from a small team with a small budget.
The future is very much dependent on I:B being a success. It has to sell well, which is still going to take some serious work as interest is still pretty low (although reactions are positive).
A) Don’t make TQFE because not enough funding/manpower.
B) Don’t make TQFE, but make Battlescape to develop the engine and get monies. Non zero chance of TQFE or something in it’s spirit down the line if the studio survives.
Actually, I was searching for official info from I-Novae on TQFE, which would be handy, and bumped into your old thread which already had the answers, though not from I-Novae. And you ended the thread with a wall of statements without a single question. You are asking the same original question here, so why waste time?
In short. For I-Novae to survive it will need a new Infinity product that includes major gameplay implications be it mining, trading, building or whatever. Battlescape hasn’t even reached v1.0 to proceed further.
I doubt the Battlescape star system will be within TQFE as it is human designed, while any procedural generated star systems won’t get as much scrutiny.
