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0.5.1.0 ( Saturday, 17 August 2019 ) originally posted by INovae Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder A major balance patch. Half the changes are experimental ( especially movement tweaks to the interceptor, and gimbaled weapons ). This patch also includes major NPC/AI updates, hopefully making dogfights with AI more dynamic. NPC carriers will try to stay away from threats while NPC corvettes will try to resupply nearby allies. Balance Interceptor got a +50% linear thrust increase. Originally I wanted to double the values, but it was a bit extreme. +50% is very significant ( in fact iirc that’s the highest it’s even been since the start of the project ) but it’s not so fast that it feels too fast ( at least that’s my personal opinion from my internal tests ). Bomber got a +30% forward thrust increase but a slight nerf on the side propulsion. So it can reach higher speeds faster, but its strafing abilities are nerfed. Other ships ( corvette + capships ) have no mobility changes. The turn rates / angular accelerations are also unchanged for all ships. Speed cap has been slightly increased for interceptor and bomber but remains the same for other ships ( Interceptor was 360 m/s before, now it is 400 m/s ). Fixed weapons are now gimbaled ( aka. convergence on the target ). Gimbal angle is set to 2 degs. Shooting targets is now much easier ( in terms of having to be super accurate to keep your navigation cursor on the lead reticle, which was quite hard ). Since it’s so much easier to land shots, I had to rebalance long-range accuracy by making the interceptor guns less precise ( aka. increased the random spread ). It’s not super big ( 0.3 degs ) but significant enough to want to attack at close ranges ( although hitting at 1-2 km is still easier than before ). Interceptor gun shots are also now less deadlier ( reduced their damage ) and the interceptor has +50% more hitpoints to allow it to survive more easily. Keep in mind that even with all these changes, an inty can die within a dozen seconds if you don’t pay attention and dodge / boost vs concentrated incoming fire. Nerfed a bit the regen rate of shields. It was pretty high, so sometimes it felt frustrating that you landed a couple shots and the shields regenerated in a few seconds, like nothing happened. Shields regen rate is still significant but not as high as before. Increased weapons hitpoints for MK5 / MK6 / MK7. Doubled the hit box size for all weapons ( including small ship’s ). Damaging weapons is now much easier. Another change is that weapons can be damaged even when shields are up. This now gives a good purpose for interceptors to make a difference in battles by disabling capital ships weapons. Revamped missiles / torpedoes sockets on the Destroyer and Cruiser. All torpedo launchers are now frontal / forward facing. It was awkward on the destroyer how torpedoes launched vertically. Also, there are now more missile launchers. On the cruiser they have an X profile, similar to the carrier. Tweaked projectiles velocities for all weapons. In general: interceptor weapon guns have slightly slower projectiles, while large capital ship guns have faster projectiles ( up to 2.2 Km/s for an MK7 ). Blaster damage increased. As many players noted, the blasters were considered next to useless. Kinetic guns are easier to use and guaranteed damage, whether on shields or hull. Blasters however can only damage shields, so if they made as much damage as guns there was no incentive to use them other than ammo vs energy usage. Implemented weapons convergence. Since we want to test gimbals on the interceptor, I assigned the bomber’s shotgun to be converging. Distance calculation is automatic and based on distance to lead reticle of target. Revamped collisions damage. We’re also going to experiment with ramming damage for the bow of the destroyer ( aka. it’ll inflict damage bonus when hitting at the right location ). Nerfed and reduced curve agressivity for explosions splash damage. Manually killing proximity mines in an interceptor should now be far easier. Gameplay Added a braking mode ( default: hold space ) to input controller Weapon groups are now toggleable via keys ctrl-1 to ctrl-0 Fix for disabled the speed cap not allowing to set a target speed higher than the speed cap Removed global damaged state for weapons ( weapons can be individually broken now, so the global state was redundant and annoying ) Switched to server-side collisions for large ships colliding with small ships. That means that capital ships, in particular, will no longer go crazy when getting rammed by small ships. Capships vs capships collisions will also feel much better. This comes at a cost though: by ignoring client-side collisions in these scenarios there can be some inter-penetration of ships for the duration of the latency between the client and the server; so at high latencies, you can potentially see ships get into other ships for a small amount of time. It’s still a much better solution than the crazyness coming from client-side collisions. Aim-at cursor on capital ships now performs a ray intersection to determine the cursor’s depth along the ray, making it easier to hit nearby geometry. Speed cap is now increased when overcharging propulsion Weapons damage model now bypass shields (weapons can be damaged even with full shields) Corvettes can now repair damaged weapons on all capital ships Corvette aura no longer repairs or resupplies the destroyer HUD Target indicator icons were revamped. They’re now thicker and more opaque. The currently selected target icon should now keep clearance over the target. An arrow with the target’s name, distance and speed will appear next to the selected target Moved energy emissions to top-left corner of the screen, next to weapon stats Improvements to HUD weapon groups, now color encoding the weapons state ( active, firing, disabled, out of ammo, broken… ) Players are now notified when they destroy target weapons. They also get a small credits reward. Tweaks to external camera view range AI Revamped AI routines related to flight, dogfight mechanics and introduced new tactics (barrel roll, staying in a blind spot, strafing, etc… ) NPC corvettes will now try to repair/resupply nearby allies Added threat avoidance. Carriers in particular, will try to stay away from enemy capital ships Added static scenery avoidance. All ships should now try to avoid infrastructure modules Added a way for allies to temporarily form-up / regroup on nearby allies, when the target is far away NPC capital ships now have a team indicator (HVK = Havok, SCR = Scoria, CPL = CPL Tech) Bug fixes Fix for tabbed buttons in game menu, incorrectly positionned in wide screen ratio Game now pops up an error message upon failing to initialize engine Misc Tweaked starfield density so that bright stars are less uniform Tweaked battle smog effect ( colors, distribution ) Added support for overriding font charset in engine Localized string arguments now use $(ArgN) syntax instead of %s / %d ( which could cause crashes if badly used ) Tweaks to camera vibrations and some particle effects; All ships now default to cockpit or internal view upon spawning How to manually clean up all I-Novae installation files and start freshand the installer: https://inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/deployment/INovaeInstaller.exe

Infinity: Battlescape - Scenes from the Asteroid Backer Weekend source

Hotfix patch 0.5.0.2 A small hotfix to address some of the most pressing issues from last patch: Fixed flickering of warp tunnel effect Warp tunnel opacity is now a function of speed. At “low” speeds ( < 1000 Km/s ) the view shouldn’t be as obstructed as before Tweaks to camera vibrations for flak canons Slight balance update on flak canons ( increased splash radius but decreased precision of flak canons ) Added back ship contrails in atmospheres Increased albedo of contrails for missiles / torpedoes Fixed HUD’s corvette “nearest resupply” indicator ( nearest was itself, so the indicator didn’t show up ) Capital ships auto-turn is now a toggle ( default: space bar ). It’s disabled every time you respawn to avoid collisions with the docks Reduced by half the “dying” time for Interceptor and Bomber ( and slight reduction on Corvette ). Death will feel more instant Increased probability of “CRITICAL” battles in game so that the match doesn’t last forever. Note that probabilities are adjusted in favor of the losing team as a way to “balance” the game and allow turn backs. That means that if you’re on the losing team, you’ll have a higher chance of seeing critical attack missions, while your own defending missions will have a lower chance of being critical. source link: https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/patch-and-updates-notes/2996/52

How to manually clean up all I-Novae installation files and start fresh and the installer: https://inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/deployment/INovaeInstaller.exe Asteroid backer week-end and patch 0.5.0.0 - FEEDBACK

Screenshots thread over on the IB forum and Tutorial for Beginners

Visual improvements - Asteroid backer playtest weekend https://www.youtube.com/user/InfinitySupport/videos

Game Patch 0.5.0.0 ( Friday, 26 July 2019 ) Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link Hey everybody, welcome to Infinity: Battlescape patch 0.5.0.0 and to our very first Asteroid backer week-end ! If this is your first time playing, make sure to report any problem you encounted, bug, technical issues or general feedback on our forums. We will record footage for our upcoming Steam trailer during this week-end. Two “community events” ( players assembling together to play ) will be hosted on Saturday the 27th at 19:00 UTC, and Sunday the 28th at 19:00 UTC. Make sure you join if you’re available and if the game runs well for you ! For more information please read this thread: I-Novae Community Events The game is currently scheduled for Early Access release on Steam around the end of September 2019 ( two months left ). We’ve iterated on visual polish; all ships are now textured; we revamped most visual effects. The new OST composed by Markus Zierhofer is also in. We’ve also iterated on the UI menus, added capital ships missiles/torpdoes and new flak canons. For the full patch notes, please see: Patch and Updates Notes Keep in mind the game is still in development and is still lacking, especially in terms of content ( we’ll add more environments, ship upgrades and missions at a later stage ). Enjoy ! -The I-Novae Studios team Visual and Audio Polish Added corvette and carrier textures and skins. Note that the carrier one was rushed (uv-mapping is basic in many places) and the hangar entrance was close visually (you can still fly into it like a ghost) for the purpose of recording the Steam trailer video Added a sun glow effect around the sun. The effect is volumetric: the closer you are to the sun, the larger and brighter it will become, to the point of making your entire view go white. Inversely, the further away you go, the small the sun and glow will appear Various improvements to the sun’s shadow maps. In general, the maximum range at which shadows can appear has been increased. In extreme settings mode, shadows can appear at up to 120 Km Added Original Soundtrack from Markus Zierhofer and removed all the old placeholder music Added doppler limit to avoid high-pitched sounds due to relative high velocity difference (ex.: warp) Implemented Soft-Z transparency for various particle effects, avoiding sharp Z-intersections with surfaces Weapon projectile impacts now use accurate hull intersections instead of hitting on the bounding box of the ship (Note: as a side effect, it’s become slightly harder to hit a far-away ship since the actual mesh is like half the volume of its bounding box) Revamped projectile impact effects, using directional sparkles Projectiles can now bounce based on the angle of incidence on the target hull surface. Armored hulls also cause a lot of bouncing (ex.: interceptor shots on a destroyer) Projectiles can now pierce through a ship when the amounts of damage is significant compared to the total ship’s hitpoints (ex.: interceptor getting hit by a capital ship MK6/MK7) New torpedoes and proximity mines explosion / impact effects Revamped or added smoke contrails for missiles / torpedoes Revamped damage trail smoke when a ship is getting low on hitpoints, or has major systems damage Added “battle smog” particles, that get dynamically generated in a battle based on impacts / explosions. Smog disappears are 30 seconds. Smog effects use lit particles, meaning they’ll reflect light from explosions or other events happening Massive explosions / shockwaves (capital ships exploding, mines exploding) now cast shadows around the area Added shrapnel and debris to exploding ships. Individual debris can be bumped on by the player’s ship Added an animated warp tunnel effect when flying in warp. Removed the old entry/exit effect placeholders Added sparkles effect in cockpit when ship is damaged or on heavy impacts Added new thruster effects, which dynamically change based on thrust intensity or turbo-boosting In cockpit views the external hull of the ship is now rendered at a lower LOD quality level (slight performance improvement) Uprades to various station modules. It’s still in a bit of an incoherent state: most stations will have a mix of old / new modules. A new “Odyssey” station was added, which only features the new modules Added new splash loading screen Gameplay and AI Kinetic damage model is now deterministic (but still probabilistic). This means that if your shields are at 75%, then every 1 out of 4 projectiles will reliably pass through the shields and hit the hull Fixed bug with near-depleted shields absorbing all kinetic damage but not leaking the remainer damage to the hull ( ex.: missile hit on a 1 point shield ) Added environmental radiation damage (from sun and gas giants, when you get too close to them) Implemented hardpoints / weapons damage model. Weapons now have hitpoints and a hit box, and can be destroyed, especially on capital ships. Note that shields are still protecting them. Destroyed weapons emit smoke Increased repair rates on capital ship docking spawns by a factor of x3 Implemented missiles and torpdoes for capital ships. Note that locking is done by keeping the camera on the target Implemented flak canons (available on Destroyer and Carrier). Flaks deal a moderate amount of splash damage. A single nearby exploding shot is usually not much of a threat, but a large barrage of 4-5 shots can be deadly. They’re more accurate at 1-2 Km range, and less effective at 4-5 km unless the target is very big. Max range is around 5 km. They can be deadly against interceptors that wander too close, but they’re bad a deadling serious damage against bigger targets AI bombers can now use torpedoes against capital ships AI commander now takes into account ship status (hitpoints remaining) when recalculating battle odds/chances of victory (previously: was all-or-nothing, even if a ship had 1 HP left, it was still considered “alive” and add a full weight in the odds calculation) AI capital ships can now fire missiles and torpedoes too ! Weapons balance tweaks: slowed down turning speed of corvette’s turrets; Menus and general UI Added battle missions list to the mission menu tab. The missions are colored based on the importance and chances of winning. Critical missions are usually displayed in deeper red Starmap menu now shows unsorted list of targets. Note that the starmap isn’t functional yet - we’ve had to drop that feature for this patch, but hopefully it’ll get refined in the next one!) Reduced default tooltip delay in UI (from 0.5s to 0.25s) Added 2 more slots for weapons radial menu Added HUD help screen (available in ESC system menu) HUD, Controls, Input Fix for auto-warp speed limit alert, now based on speed cap and checks for engage conditions (basically, the alert was too intrusive before) Unified “SetCursor” and “AddCursor” events into “Cursor”. This new event automatically detect relative versus absolute mode now (based on the type of input attached to the event. Ex: a mouse will be relative, a joystick absolute) Added check for mouse and joystick input event conflict (you can’t use both mouse and joystick for the same input event) Fixed warp failure message, now displays correct target entry speed instead of always “500 m/s” Fixed damage localization (“blood reddening effect around the screen edges upon taking a hit”) to work in relative camera orientation (previously: was related to your ship’s nose. If the camera looked in another direction, like in capital ships mode, the damage localization was incoherent Ship systems / states do not show up at the top of the HUD anymore in their “normal” state, to avoid cluttering the HUD. They only appear when there’s a warning (orange) or when broken (flashing red) Removed old HUD 3D “trailings” effects for threats. This was kindda made obsolete by smoke damage and other HUD helpers Experimental feature: reverted auto-turn controls on capital ships: turning is now automatic unless you press space to disable auto-turning ( aka. brake ). Note that manual turning still overrides automatic turning (or brake ) General Bug fixes and Improvements Fixed leaderboard in team stats menu, which was showing a mess instead of a proper list of player names Fixes for automatic upgrade of input profiles, many things were broken Physics fix for ghost collisions spawning at world origin during the initial frame, right after an object has been created Fixed random crash bug when opening debug graph stats Fixed client crash at startup if user config xml was corrupted / messed up Misc Added name randomization for NPC ships. Names are drawn from a pool and then some characters are randomly “mutated” according to a set of rules Added FPS limiter setting as an alternative to V-Sync. The problem with V-Sync is that it’s all-or-nothing. For example if your monitor refresh rate is 60 Hz, then you’ll get a butter-smooth 60 Hz if the game can render at above 60 fps, but if it dips below 60 fps it’ll immediately cut the framerate in half (to 30 fps). This can happen multiple times within a second (due to the quick change in amounts of stuff to render), resulting in worse visual stuttering. This FPS limiter aims at limiting the framerate to a certain threshold (ex.: 60 fps), but not cut the framerate in half if it dips below (ex.: it can still render at 50 fps), which should lessen the stuttering in quick-changing loads. If you are streaming on the same machine than you’re playing, you might want to give this setting a try: Disable V-Sync in the launcher dialog. Edit UserClientConfig.xml in C:\Users\XXX\Documents\I-Novae Studios\Infinity Battlescape Add or change “FPSLimit” to 60 under the “Graphics” node Added ability to override individual quality settings from global quality level. Also requires a manul editing of UserClientConfig.xml. Under the “Graphics” node, add or set the following values from -1 (automatic), 0 (low), 1 (medium), 2 (high) and 3 (extreme): “TexQuality”, “LightingQuality”, “ShadowQuality”, “GeomQuality”, “TerrainQuality”, “PlanetsQuality” Added a /Stats command in chat to display global ships statistics on the server Download the patch from the Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

Installation runtime v0.1.17.0 releasedPosted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source linkThis release includes a number of bug fixes however there are 2 major new features. The first, and probably the most important, is that the installer now caches uninstallation instructions instead of a full package upon completion of a successful installation. What this means is that instead of caching the entire ~8gb I:B package it now caches ~3.6mb instead.The second feature is the ability to auto-launch applications once installation or an upgrade is finished. One of the problems we noticed with new users is that they would download the installer off of the website with the expectation that it installed the game. When the installer finished and nothing happened they would look for the game and, not finding it, would assume something was wrong. Now, once the installer for the launcher runs it will automatically start the launcher which should give new users a much better idea of what they need to do next.If anyone encounters any problems please post a bug report in this thread. https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/installation-runtime-v0-1-17-0-released/8690

Countdown to Asteroid Backer week 26th July Asteroid Backer Weekend (Fan Made video) uploaded by SpaceJay

Weekly Update #140: Visual Polish and Asteroid backer week-end Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link It’s been a while since the last update, clearly we cannot call these updates “weekly” anymore It isn’t entirely a surprise though, as we’re getting closer and closer to the Early access launch ( September 2019 ) so I’m getting busier and busier. A few weeks ago we released patch 0.4.7.0 which contained the first version of the UI. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish the star map in time, so it’ll be delayed until the next patch, end of July. Asteroid Backer Week-end: 26th - 29th of July We’ll organize our first Asteroid backer week-end from Friday the 26th of July ( around 19:00 GMT ) to Monday the 29th. This means that pretty much everybody that participated to our crowd-funding campaigns on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo ( or our own website at the $30 tier ), will have access to the game. Visual Polish Our goal is to start production of the game trailer for Steam around the end of July. We’ll use the asteroid backer week-end as an opportunity to record the new footage. In the past 2-3 weeks and until mid July, we are focusing our efforts on visual polish for this footage, to make the game look as attractive as possible, within our limited time and budget of course. We’re doing a pass over all the placeholder effects and replacing the worst offenders to improved versions. There are a number of effects that we think are good enough for now ( like the warp jam or the ship explosions ) but there are many others that we are upgrading. Here’s a non-exhaustive list: We are adding a glow / haze effect around the sun. It is a volumetric effect, which means that as you get closer to the sun, the “size” of the effect starts to surround your entire ship - to the point where the entire screen goes white. In terms of gameplay, getting too close to the sun causes radiations damage over time. Note: capital ships have more HP, so they can get closer to the sun before dying… We are playing around with a warp tunnel effect. It looks pretty generic, but sometimes simple is good. It is fully animated; we’re still working on it. We’ve experimented with a white spot in front of the tunnel ( and black behind ), but although it does look nice, it quickly becomes annoying in terms of gameplay ( you can’t see where you are flying in warp ). In the picture below we’ve tried adding a hole at the tunnel center. It helps a bit, but it’s still not good enough. We’re going to play with a smoother fade and a larger “visibility” spot at the center, next. Note: we’re also playing with the idea of twisting the tunnel around the ship dynamically, and maybe add a purple-ish light to make the ship feel more integrated to the tunnel. Battle smog: we finished implementing lit / volumetric particles. We’re going to upgrade most of our smoke-like effects to use it ( ex.: atmospheric clouds, smoke damage, contrails… ). We’re also adding a new battlefield effect, kindly called “battle smog”. The idea here is that damaged ships and explosions leave smoky remnants that linger on the battlefield. Their lifetime at the moment is around a minute. It looks a bit like clouds-in-space at the moment, but it does look pretty nice, especially as the smog particles reflect nearby explosions. In my opinion, the best thing is that the effect isn’t just an artistic / static backdrop, but fully dynamic. The smog particles tell the story of the battle due to their nature. They even inherit a bit of the velocity of the original explosion and spread in various directions randomly. Smog particles WIP The max shadowing range was increased, for roughly the same performance cost. The previous maximum range was 8 Km ( so any pixel further away than 8 Km was in direct light, even when occluded by a mountain ). The new range is 26 Km in high quality and 120 Km in extreme quality. We’re also revamping / thinking of revamping the following effects: Projectiles are currently a billboard; we’re experimenting with 3D particle meshes instead. They should look a lot better, especially at narrow angles. Missiles, torpedoes and proximity mines effects have all been replaced. We’re trying to stick to a color theme in general: red-orange for kinetic weapons impacts / explosions, green for laser / beams ( not implemented yet ) and cyan / blue / purple for energy-based weapons / shields. Oh, and be happy: bomber AIs can now use torpedoes against capital ships ! We’re reworking the projectile impacts. They’ll use the actual mesh of the ship instead of the bounding box; at low angles they’ll be bouncing / causing a reflected sparkles cloud. We’d also like to have large projectiles pierce through small ships, instead of just having the projectile disappear. We’re also looking at implementing particle ribbons for contrails and similar effects. More battle smog. The smokey effect is a placeholder, we’re working on higher resolution ones with more variations. Ships texturing Kristian has finished texturing the corvette. In the pictures below you can see the Scoria default skin. He’s started texturing our last ship, the carrier. It is unlikely to be 100% finished by the end of the month, so we decided that we’d concentrate on the major areas of visual interest for the trailer, and apply some basic texturing on details, and revisit the details texturing properly at a later stage. Final words In terms of gameplay, we are ( admittedly at a lower priority, since we’re focusing on visual polish ) iterating on the UI / menus, AI, cleaning the HUD / making it more intuitive. I am also hoping to get the ( finally ! ) capital ships missiles / torpedoes / counter-measures / flak canons in, for the next patch. Ideally, we’d also get the ship upgrading system in, but I’m not sure there’s enough time left in July to do that. We’ll see where we stand at the end of the month. Note that I will be leaving in a vacation trip to France next week, for a couple days, before we enter the final stretch to the game’s launch. I’ll be very busy on producing the next patch when I’m back in mid-July, therefore there will be no more development update until the next asteroid backer week-end. -Flavien Brebion

Patch 0.4.7.0 Feedback Thread

Beta Game Patch - 0.4.7.0 ( Saturday, 15 June 2019 ) Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link This patch focuses on two things: first of all, reverting the flight model anti-drifting change introduced experimentally last patch. Secondly, the new menu interface system. The menu system might have introduced a lot of new issues and bugs, please report them as usual on the forums or on Discord, thank you. Please note that the menu system isn’t working with gamepads / joysticks just yet, so if you’re using of of those you might encounted a lot of issues and might have to revert back to keyboard & mouse until proper joystick support is added in a future patch. Menu system A main menu was added to exit the game to windows or open the help screen. Later on it’ll allow to change graphical/audio/gameplay options or rebind controls. This menu can be opened via escape. Added placeholder for star map. It is currently empty Added ship selection menu. It replaces most of the functionality that was previously available in the escape menu. It allows you to cycle through ships, see their credits cost, and has buttons to select the ship type for the next respawn. Once the menu system is more advanced, this menu will be split in two. The ship selection/upgrades will be available when you’re spawning only. In-game, this menu will get replaced by a similar screen, showing the status of the ships systems, weapons, and allow on-the-fly weapons management/reconfiguration Added team stats menu. At the moment it only shows the list of player names on both teams. Global team stats as well as more player data (ranks, death/kills etc… ) will be added later on Finally, the mission menu is currently empty All these menus can be selected through a tab system, which can be opened with the tab key (default, previously assigned to leaderboard) The new menu system uses a brand new, vectorial rendering system which should allow for a higher quality, especially for text and icons (which are now vectorial too). It supports multisampled anti-aliasing (x1, x2, x4 and x8 based on the graphics quality setting) Flight Model Rotational speed limitation based on speed has been removed for all ships (except in warp) The anti-drifting system was removed for small ships (interceptor, bomber and corvette). It remains active on capital ships as an equipment Small ships were given back their original side propulsion. Capital ships still retain some of their improved cap speed thanks to the anti-drifting system, allowing them to change course more easily Bug fixes and improvements Fixed a deadlock (freeze) related to the mouse cursor Misc splash screen rendering (when the game is loading) has been decoupled from the main/loading thread Download the patch from the Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/BattlescapeInfinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.comPledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

I-Novae Community Event Saturday, June 15th 2019 Event Time… 19:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) World time Buddy for this Event : http://bit.ly/2MGQrYu You’ll need access to the Beta to participate in this Community Event. See all the FAQ for the Beta Here Original post on the IB forums https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/i-novae-community-events/6523/77

Weekly Update #139: Bomber, UI, Next patch Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link Steam store page Hey everybody. It’s been a while since the last weekly update, as we’ve been pretty busy on a certain number of topics. First thing first, we are slowly preparing for our Steam launch in Early access. We’ve set up a store page, which you can see here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079620/Infinity_Battlescape/?snr=1_5_1100__1100 You’ll notice a bunch of new screenshots on it, however the trailer video is still the Kickstarter’s. We’re not ready to produce a gameplay trailer just yet as we need to finish texturing all the ships and replace some of the placeholders before we can do that. We’ve planned to work on the first visual polish phase next month and work on the trailer will start around July. In parallel, we’ll keep iterating on the gameplay and content. Needless to say, now that we have a store page, even if it’s rough around the edges… it’s time to gather WISHLISTS As you may know ( or not ) Steam’s visibility algorithms on release are mostly based on the amount of wishlists, therefore it is of utter importance to our success to get as many wishlists as possible. We have ~4 months until the Early access is launched, so from now on, we’d like to ask everybody who references us on websites, content creators, youtube / twitch streamers etc… to add a link to the Steam store page along with a small typical “Wishlist Infinity: Battlescape on Steam” message if you can. If you already have a direct link to our website, you can keep both of course. On a side note, since we now have a Steam store page we decided to stop our IndieGoGo on-going campaign so it shouldn’t be referenced anymore either. Thank you for your support ! Hey everybody, time for another update. Before I jump in to development news, I’m happy to announce that we’ll be collaborating with Markus Zierhofer to produce Infinity: Battlescape’s soundtrack. Markus is incredibly talented and the quality of his work so far gives us full confidence that he’ll be able to nail down the musical style for Battlescape. You can listen to some of his work on his website: https://www.audiocreatures.com/ Markus has already completed the main menu theme, and I can safely say that the entire team is in love with it. In the coming month or two he’ll be producing a couple of ambient soundtracks, anticipation / thrill and finally battle tracks. We’re in the middle of figuring out how to seamlessly blend all these tracks together based on the game’s context dynamically. We haven’t determined yet if we’ll patch the tracks into the game one by one as they’re produced or if we’ll wait a major patch in July / August to make them all available at once. More news on that in the coming weeks. In other development news, Kristian has finished texturing the bomber. The bomber textures that were available in the backer’s beta patch 0.4.6.0 were still a work in progress, so now Kristian has been able to finalize them - especially everything related to rusty edges, roughness and small scale details. Here’s a screenshot of the updated bomber: On the UI side, most widgets have been completed and are now functional. The UI code is getting integrated into the game and we’re now ready to build the new star map or ship selection / upgrade screens. The goal is to have a first version available in the next patch, next week. It’ll look pretty ugly at first, as we’re spending no time on “making it look good” - functional is the keyword here. The first version will be very simple and will definitely be lacking, but in the next few months we’ll continue to iterate on it until it’s ready for Early access. Speaking of the next patch, we’ll probably be reverting the flight model experimental anti-drifting system introduced in the last patch. We didn’t feel comfortable releasing the game without at least testing it once. It’s possible that we’ll keep it in a reduced form as an equipment, for capital ships only. Another change that we’re thinking of introducing is aligning warp-out velocity to a target ( within bounds ) when a player disengages the warp drive. This should make it easier to catch up with a fleeing ship, which at the moment can be a frustrating experience. That’s it for now, more news next week for the new patch, and (hopefully) the first pics of the star map ! -Flavien -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/BattlescapeInfinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

0.4.6.0 Feedback Thread

Beta Game Patch - 0.4.6.0 ( Saturday, 25 May 2019 ) Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link This patch mostly focuses on two things: some new flight model experimental refinements and the first iteration of the textured bomber. As usual it also includes a number of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. Gameplay Turbo boost minimum energy requirements increased from 5% to 25%: a slight nerf to players abusing micro boosts with their energy depleted. It is still possible to chain micro boosts, but only with enough energy Shield damage model is now probabilistic instead of splitting damage between shield and armor points. In the previous versions, upon getting hit by a physical projectile, a part of the damage was absorbed by the shield and the remainer was passing through and damaging the armor points. In the new model, the shield acts as a probability to determine whether all the damage gets absorbed by the shields, or if the projectile passes through the shield and hits the hull. This will be improtant in terms of visual effects later on when shields will no longer match the hull’s shape Added the ability to spawn at neutral stations. Neutral stations are invulnerable. Added one neutral station around Rethe Prime (the gas giant). Players in different teams that want to train / dogfight can do it here. The AI will not generate a battle around this area The bomber’s missile launchers are now slightly sloped upwards Flight Model Fix for rotation assist mode off which wasn’t providing 100% of thrust capabilities Target speed / throttle can no longer exceed speed cap Increased forward/backward linear thrust on most ships. Interceptor went from 3.6g to 4.0g. The main difference is on capital ships, that can now fly a lot faster. For example the carrier went from 1.2g to 2.0g. Added a launcher dialog option (default: on) to enforce the soft speed cap with flight assist mode. It is no longer possible to exceed the speed cap via manual thrusting, unless turbo boosting (in which case the speed cap can be exceeded as long as energy remains) Added a side boost anti-drifting system. It increases side propulsion temporarily in order to let the ship change its course faster. The boost is stronger as speed increases and approaches the speed cap. This change should make the dofights more dynamic and make capital ships far more maneuverable. It also helps with dodging or manually orbiting targets. Fixes and Improvements Asteroid ring fixes / tweaks: rings can now be tilted compared to the sun angle, so it won’t shadow-flicker with itself Fixed an issue which caused dust particles to not appear in certain ring locations (the asteroids were correctly appearing but the dusty particles were missing) Fixed a client crash when switching control schemes in spawn mode Trade routes no longer show up when the source or destination have been destroyed Main propulsion sound is no longer played on other ships when they’re powered off Weapons will no longer lock when safety lock is toggle off but the target stays within lock range HUD / Input Improved highlighting of shield / armor / energy bars when their values are depleting. The bars should be flashing and become brighter to warn the user that their values are decreasing Added an internal “no-cockpit” camera mode to small ships. You can toggle it by pressing F1 (will switch from cockpit to internal view and vice-versa) Trade routes are no longer showing when HUD is disabled Fix for saving an incorrect input profile version when editing the input profile. This bug was introduced in the last patch and could have caused some key conflicts and/or some keys being set back to their default values. The input profile config files should now upgrade correctly Added griefing message when destroying minor infrastructure Added a locking icon (circles with a dot in the middle) to represent the launch direction of missile / torpedoes. It’ll switch to red when the weapon is locked Graphics / Optimizations Added the textured bomber Recording screenshots (F11) is now written to disk asynchronously and will no longer freeze the game for a few seconds It is now possible to record screenshots at a higher resolution than the screen’s (see the Screenshot section in ClientConfig.xml). Note: HUD might not render correctly if using a different resolution than the screen’s Made space background darker and increased stars brightness. The amount of visible stars in sunlight should’ve increased tenfolds. The idea here is to get away from mostly-black backgrounds, while keeping a realistic look Reduced intensity of small ship’s floodlights Misc Tweaked min/max distance to sun of Battlescape generator. The sun in particular should no longer be too close to the Battlescape Battlescapes are now titled compared to sun angle Added minimum client requirement check to game server: there was a check on the network version, but not on the client itself. This means some players could’ve logged on a server with an upgraded version and get no warning. The game could go on but feel desynced, or using different gameplay parameters… Enabled minidumps (crash reports) on the client. If you get a crash, the game should now generate a .dmp file along the log files. Make sure you send both the .dmp and the usual log file if you get a crash, thank you. Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

I-Novae Community Event Saturday, May 25th 2019 Event Time… 19:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) Original post on the IB forums https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/i-novae-community-events/6523/75

Weekly Update #138: Steam Store page, Asteroid rings Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link Steam store page Hey everybody. It’s been a while since the last weekly update, as we’ve been pretty busy on a certain number of topics. First thing first, we are slowly preparing for our Steam launch in Early access. We’ve set up a store page, which you can see here: link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079620/Infinity_Battlescape/?snr=1_5_1100__1100 You’ll notice a bunch of new screenshots on it, however the trailer video is still the Kickstarter’s. We’re not ready to produce a gameplay trailer just yet as we need to finish texturing all the ships and replace some of the placeholders before we can do that. We’ve planned to work on the first visual polish phase next month and work on the trailer will start around July. In parallel, we’ll keep iterating on the gameplay and content. Needless to say, now that we have a store page, even if it’s rough around the edges… it’s time to gather WISHLISTS As you may know ( or not ) Steam’s visibility algorithms on release are mostly based on the amount of wishlists, therefore it is of utter importance to our success to get as many wishlists as possible. We have ~4 months until the Early access is launched, so from now on, we’d like to ask everybody who references us on websites, content creators, youtube / twitch streamers etc… to add a link to the Steam store page along with a small typical “Wishlist Infinity: Battlescape on Steam” message if you can. If you already have a direct link to our website, you can keep both of course. On a side note, since we now have a Steam store page we decided to stop our IndieGoGo on-going campaign so it shouldn’t be referenced anymore either. Thank you for your support ! Development news In other random development news: the asteroid rings are back. A patch will go up next week ( ETA: Friday the 24th ) with a bunch of fixes related to rings. This patch will mostly contain bug fixes and small gameplay adjustments, nothing major. Most of the programming effort is still going into the UI. I should be able to start on the star map and ship spawning / uprade menus next week. It’s been delayed a little bit due to the recent focus on the Steam store page. Kristian is wrapping up the textured Bomber. It should be available in next week’s patch. After that, the Corvette is next and should take ~3 weeks of work. The remaining time ( until the trailer ) will be focused on the Carrier. Jan is finishing up the upgraded station modules with ambient occlusion. We haven’t put an entire station together, so there’s some amount of surprise on how it’s going to look like with all the upgraded modules fitting together. Expectations are relatively high, with new geometric details, more material variations / cuts, decals, emissive windows, colors and it should look a lot less flat in shadowed areas with ambient occlusion. Dan is on a judo competition in Japan and should be back next week. Since he’s away, things have been going slow on social media / updates. We’re planning on hosting a new Community event on the 25th to celebrate his ( victorious? ) return. As usual Keith is working behind the scenes on various backend / website related tasks; last week, he upgraded our payment system to support a wider range of payment types. We’re also starting to figure out Steam’s authentication and the backend changes needed to support a smooth user experience. More news on that in the upcoming months. -Flavien ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

0.4.5.0 ( Saturday, 27 April 2019 ) This patch (re)-introduces Asteroid rings around Sarake, the gaian planet. It also includes asset updates, like the new textured Destroyer and an update to the small ship’s hangars. Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link Link to full post and changelog: https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/patch-and-updates-notes/2996/48

I-Novae Event Announcement Saturday, February 16th 2019 Infinity Battlescape Community MeetUp 20:00 UTC Saturday, (Coordinated Universal Time) Full event details posted on the forums here. https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/i-novae-community-events/6523/67

Weekly Update #137: UI and planet props Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link Hey everybody. As you might be aware we are currently focusing on the new user interface / menus system which means that weekly updates and patches have been less regular than in the past months. Our goal is to finish the UI building blocks by the end of April and start implementing the star system map and the ship spawn / upgrades menu during the first week of May. For this reason, this weekly update will be relatively short, until we have more to show. In other development news, Jan is doing a new pass on space station modules. The idea here is to improve geometric details, revamp materials / colors and add paint sections and various decals. More importantly, we’re adding ambient occlusion to the modules which should help to make the lighting look less flat, especially in shadowed areas. Here’s a bunch of random modules stitched together to give you an idea ( note that there are no lights on them yet, and those are relatively small modules ? We’ll give the same treatment to all the other station modules; the work is huge ( there are 50+ modules iirc ), so Jan will upgrade a bunch of them every week until the release. Dan has completed collision meshes for the Interceptor, Bomber, Corvette and Hauler. During the visual polish phase we’ll use these collision meshes for more accurate projectile hit intersections with the hull of the ships, and not the bounding boxes as we currently do. Dan has been working on crowd-funding rewards for a while too; the mercenary spec ops model variant is already done and awaiting integration in game. Kristian is completing the textured Destroyer this week. It should normally be available in next week’s patch. After that, he’ll move on texturing the Bomber, then the Corvette, and finally the Carrier. Speaking of which, we still need to figure out the hangar interior for the carrier; there’s a good chance we’ll run out of time, and it’ll have to go into early-access “as is”, but eventually we’d like ships to spawn in the hangar bay and launch through the “tunnel” traversing the carrier. Keith is working on website improvements, new payment options, customer support and business / company management. The last piece of news is that we’ve started to collect some generic assets for planetary props. These include rocks in various shapes, forms and styles, vegetation and new surface texture packs. These will be used during the visual polish phase to add more surface details to the planets, give a better sense of scale, and have more interested / varied biomes. Oceans will also make a come back sooner than later ( I already spent a day last week to fix some quality and performance issues with them ). In terms of schedule, this is more or less what it looks like until EA in september: April: UI / menu system, patch with asteroid fields and textured destroyer May: Star map and ship spawning / upgrade menu ; capital ship iteration ( missiles, torpedoes, lasers, flak canons, control scheme ) ; shields June: Visual polish phase: projectiles hits, effects, assets streaming, planet upgrades, etc… July: Gameplay trailer production, backend / database updates, store(s) integration and authentication, Kickstarter rewards, progression system / unlockables August: Final gameplay balancing, tweaks and polishing phase ; adding more content to the game as time permits ( missions, new planet types, more ships upgrades, skins, etc… ) Mid-september: Marketing push + Early access As you can see, we have plenty of things to do before we can release the game ( even as Early access ), so there’s no doubt we’re gonna have to prioritize and focus on the important things, and delay what we can after EA. Tough times and hard work ahead !

Beta Game Patch 0.4.4.1 ( Friday, 29 March 2019 ) Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link This patch focuses on performance improvements in large battles. It should bring about a 50 to 100% fps boost in large battles at Glimmerfall and Hebellos, and a lower but still significant fps boost in smaller battles. In addition to performance improvements, the patch includes a couple of fixes related to battle reinforcements (server-side), localization and a new custom graphical setting mode for debugging. Performance improvements For more details please see Weekly Update #136.5: from 15 to 45 Emissive values on the hull of a ship are no longer changed every frame when the emissive hasn't changed Lights are only collected on the hull when the lights layout has changed, and not every frame any more Statistics are no longer gathered every frame even if the graph stats page isn't currently opened Thrusters are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance Lights are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance Weapons/turrets are dynamically attached/detached based on view cone visibility and distance This last batch of changes lightens the load on the scene-graph, which previously caused a lot of cpu calculations to update transformation matrices or perform frustum culling on hundreds of objects per ship. In this patch, thrusters, lights of weapons that aren't in view ( or that are too far away to be rendered ) are simply detached from the scene-graph. From the player’s point of view, there should be no visual difference, even if turning the camera around very quickly. If you notice any bug introduced by this new behavior, please let us know. Fixes experimental change for loading fonts from localization files. added a custom/debug graphical setting mode, which loads graphics settings from ClientConfig.xml. fixed popup dialog arguments not supporting localization (utf-8). fixed battle reinforcement system which under-reinforced due to a ship-budget recalculation issue. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

Weekly Update #136: New battle system Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link The past two weeks have been intense. And very tiring. But with beta patch 0.4.3.0 out, and its follow up patch 0.4.4.0 a few days ago, I am happy to report that the new battles system is in and has vastly improved the game ! Prior to 0.4.3, the pacing of the game was off. Battles would randomly start in a few places, but would last forever, and you’d often see 20 interceptors versus a lonely enemy. If you logged in at a random time of the week when no other players were around, the game would be quite boring, with nothing to do and probably no large battle to participate in. You’d just fly around randomly, do some small skirmishes, explore a planet and log off. But since 0.4.3, the pacing of the game has clearly stepped up. At any one time ( maybe excepting the first 15 minutes of a match, when enemy locations haven’t been scouted yet ), there are multiple battles going on. Some small ones, some medium ones, and every once in a while, a massive one ( 100+ ships ). Battles at Glimmerfall or Hebellos ( the huge asteroid bases ) are a sight to be seen. And more importantly, you can have fun with the game, even playing alone. It’s still a bit on the repetitive side after a few hours but it’s definitely going in the right direction and will improve even more once we add more content, more ship upgrades and more weapons. Another important change with the new battle system are consequences. Battles can be clearly won or lost, now. We introduced the “critical” battle system, which spawns critical battles once it detects an imbalance in credits assigned by the AI commander at the given location. The consequence of losing a “normal” battle is simply team credits, however the consequence of losing a critical battle is the loss of the objective. This means that the AI can now finish a match on its own. The player’s goal is to turn the odds into the team’s favor, and now they no longer have to micro-manage the destruction of every single building or module in a base. As expected, this has made the game much more battle / action-focused, which increased the pacing a lot and brings it a step closer to the original vision presented during the Kickstarter in 2015. Another thing which helped a lot is that we revamped the death effects, particularly for capital ships, torpedoes and proximity mines. These huge shockwaves are beautiful and cause a lot of violent shaking ( we even added a knockback and damage effect if you get too close ). The thrill of “being there”, in the middle of the battle, has increased tenfolds, and you’ll often see multiple explosions in the background, giving you a sense of how the battle is progressing. Using torpedoes from the bomber also feels much more satisfying now ( even though technically the amount of damage is the same ) and you won’t be under-estimating proximity mines any more when they’re literrally exploding in your face. That being said, there is still a lot of work to be done in the battle system. The revamped notification system is a step up, but is still sometimes a bit confusing when multiple battles are going on. The bots AI still needs major improvements ( a bunch of these were already made in January, but haven’t been integrated yet ). Battles are too chaotic, and the bots need to fly in formation, regroup and cooperate better, instead of just chasing random enemies ad nauseam. In the coming 1-2 weeks, we will be focusing our efforts on the following: The UI / menu system, which has been pretty neglected so far. There is still a lot of work to be done here Capital ships missiles, torpedoes, laser countermeasures and flak canons Performance improvements, both on the client and server side. Eventually we would like to double the battle sizes, and reach 1000+ ships per server ( last week we reached 650, so we’re not that far from that goal ) Some more experimental changes: adding back the asteroid belts, improving the atmospheric shaders / fixing visual glitches Kristian is focusing is efforts on texturing the Destroyer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready for the next patch, in 2 weeks. Jan is still working on new visual effects and Dan’s doing Dan things ( mostly: streaming, social media and modeling collision meshes ). Finally, Keith has just gotten married and will resume his company activities shortly ( administrative tasks,support requests, web development, business/marketing work etc… ). Community A short video of Aresthia’s atmospheric tweaks: Sab1e’s “A cruiser’s last stand”: Mattk50’s “Defense of Glimmerfall and Thalys” -Flavien Brebion ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

Beta 0.4.4.0 Feedback Thread