Infinity: Battlescape (with seamless planetary transitions) *FUNDED 300k+*

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #102

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

Hey all, it’s time for your weekly update! We’ve had quite a week with the release of 2 patches and our 3rd Alpha backer weekend. The feedback for our new weapons has been overwhelmingly positive and last weekend was the smoothest of our major launches with a relatively small number of support requests. Our core 30 seconds of fun is massive space battles and, even in our rough pre-Alpha state, we believe the latest Alpha weekend has demonstrated we are achieving our goal of building a compelling experience. For those of you who were unable to participate we highly recommend you check out some of our community generated images, videos, and reviews.

A massive space battle

Despite all the warm fuzzies from this last weekend there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done between now and the release of the Alpha within the next few months. The most important of these is the core gameplay loop which includes the resource system, ship configuration, and victory conditions. On top of that we need to finish capital ship weapons, implement radar/sensors, and improving warp remains a perennial thorn in our side.

A group of players forming a fleet

I’m going to take this opportunity to segue a bit from the usual dryness of our weekly updates. When we originally launched the Kickstarter for I:B it was with the knowledge that many people would likely lambast us for (temporarily) abandoning our ultimate goal of building an MMO. While this intuition proved to be correct, particularly within the gaming press, we knew we had to reduce the scope of our ambition to something we were confident we could deliver with the resources at hand. We had no idea if we could convince enough people to back I:B and the exuberance of it being successfully funded was quickly replaced by the terrifying realization that we had no idea if the vision we articulated would actually be fun in practice. This was further compounded by the fact that we had now accepted people’s hard-earned money to deliver on that promise.

The view from a corvette

With great relief I believe I can now say we are confident that not only are we moving in the right direction, but that we will deliver a quality gaming experience that uniquely sets itself apart from its competitors. There’s still a long road to travel between now and shipping I:B to retail, fraught with challenges and frustrations, but the game is coming into focus and we can see a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. We will deliver Infinity: Battlescape as a worthy addition to the library of any space combat enthusiast. Thank you all so much for your patience and for believing in us, we can’t wait to release the Alpha so we can begin introducing more of you to the game!

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[JonnyƦedhed]

Some large space battle screen shots from the latest game update (0.2.6.0).

Kindly shared by SpaceJay on the I-Novae forums - source

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #103

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

 

Hey all, it’s time for your weekly update! We’ve had quite a week with the release of 2 patches and our 3rd Alpha backer weekend. The feedback for our new weapons has been overwhelmingly positive and last weekend was the smoothest of our major launches with a relatively small number of support requests. Our core 30 seconds of fun is massive space battles and, even in our rough pre-Alpha state, we believe the latest Alpha weekend has demonstrated we are achieving our goal of building a compelling experience. For those of you who were unable to participate we highly recommend you check out some of our community generated images, videos, and reviews.

A cruiser in its death throes

 

On the art side there has been work on some additional HUD improvements. Along with that we’re working on improving special effects, texturing improvements, and the carrier final geometry. We want to get to the point where we’re releasing a new patch roughly once a week but there’s a handful of larger systems that need to be completed over the next few weeks before that’s likely to happen. That’s pretty much it for now, there should be more to talk about next week!

 

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Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

New Game Patch 0.2.7.0 ( Saturday, 24 March 2018 )

 

Originally posted by I-Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link

 

This patch introduces many performance tweaks, AI improvements (especially related to planetary battles) and new battle locations. Also includes many tweaks to warp mechanics to make it more reliable / easy to activate.

 

Locations

• Added Gemini floating station in atmosphere of Rethe Prime (the Gas giant) - a nice new place to visit.
• Added Ackor space station orbitting Semnoz (the Icy planet).
• Added 3 new station outposts to the solar system.
• Added 5 new factories to various planet surfaces.
• Revamped team owners for each location, to make teams more balanced in factory/bases/stations types and numbers.

 

Gameplay

• Warp improvements: emergency warp out was severely nerfed, now only happens when getting armor damage.
• Fixed target warp speed that could be under minimum warp speed accidentely set by the player and which cancelled warp as soon as it engaged.
• Warp speed can now be modified while in warm-up phase.
• Default warp speed is always set to 50.0 km/s upon initiating warp.
• Warp is now interrupted upon collision not just in warm-up, but also after warp is engaged.
• Warp is now interrupted upon more than 10% damage or any amounts of damage in warm-up.
• Warp now automatically repairs after 30 seconds of no damage.
• Minimum warp speed increased to 500 m/s.
• Reoved energy requirement to enter warp.
• Warp conditions are only checked upon initiating warm-up, not once the drive is engaged. This change should make the warp drive a lot more reliable and not fail accidentely all the time.
• Side thrust is now disabled in warp warm-up but main target thrust is maintained.
• Warp exit speed no longer equals entry speed; it is now set to a constant of 500 m/s.
• Introduced smoothing and randomization to anti-gravity vector generation, which should make the ship feel more like it’s hovering over the planet.
• Anti-gravity model physics updated: all thrusters can generate an anti-gravity force excepting the top thrusters, which should prevent the ship from flying upside-down in flight-assist mode off.
• Introduced maximum turn speed limit (assuming the flight assist is not damaged) to prevent infinite turn rates.
• Introduced maximum angular velocity upon collisions (note: the value is set pretty high).

 

HUD / input

• Fixed selected target loss when actor transitionned to an indicator.
• Minor fixes to text localization that wasn’t utilizing UTF-8 in the UI.
• Setting target speed now shows a decimal value in the UI message, instead of being rounded to integer (ex.: 2.5 km/s appeared as 2 km/s ).
• Modified HUD graduations on the speed bar and shields to match the number of target speed level.
• Target speed number is now displayed on HUD above the current speed.
• Added next / previous target speed cycling input events.
• Added a cycle / switch team option in the escape menu.

 

Bug fixes

• Fixed collisions for missiles/torpedoes: they will now explode on direct contact with a planet or structure.
• Fixed Eupraxia (ring) station around Rethe Prime) respawn death loop for capital ships.
• Fixed camera orientation / smoothing that wasn’t reset upon dying and respawning.
• Fixed new players very likely to be starting in the blue team. Probabilities are now equal for all teams.

 

AI commander

• Introduced ship quotas per battle. This means that lesser important points of interests will generate smaller battles than highly strategic ones.
• Introduced limits to how many bots can gang up on a single target.
• Destinations under planet surface are now ignored (example: during a warp out to a station that’s on the other side of the planet…).
• Commander can now transfer battle credits into scouting credits and vice versa, if the credits are unbalanced.
• Intoduced atmospheric flight conditions to AI component: max air speed, min flight altitude, keeping orientation towards horizon….
• Inreased probability for AI to launch missiles.
• Introduced warp in/out checks for AI (to avoid spawning/arriving inside a planet).
• Revamped target attack priorities / threat levels for AI. This should change the flow of battles quite a lot.
• Fixed a bug with AI warp out on planets: it was not aiming at the sky.
• Reduced timer on stuck bots check.
• AI commander now uses target / destination position to form battle clusters.
• Fixed major bug when establishing ships quotas per cluster. Previously, quotas were not respected.
• Lowered AI scouting frequencies, to avoid re-igniting finishing battles.

 

Assets, visual effects, performance

• New sound effect for heavy blasters on capital ships.
• Updated two space station modules with improved geometric details and texturing.
• Anti-gravity now properly makes the side thrusters effect fire.
• Tweaked contrails and damage smoke effects for quality and improved performance, especially on planets.
• Revamped wind grid and dust/cloud effects in atmospheres.
• Gas giant now utilizes wind grid and dust effect as a cheap “volumetric” effect.
• Various parameters in the wind grid are now read from config files insteaed of being hardcoded.
• Planets now make better use of the dust effect: “sand” storms on Aresthia, “ash” storms on Cinder, etc… Note that the field density is pseudo-randomized, so there might be locations without dust and locations with a highly dense storm.
• Also please note that wind currently does not affect the flight model - this will get reintroduced in a future patch.
• Dying explosions effect is now attached to the parent actor (previously it simply spawned with the same velocity, but the actor could change orientation or velocity and it wouldn’t properly follow it).
• Reviewed parameters and massive performance improvement for station module lights.
• Reviewed and made coherent energy emissions and sensor power for various actors.
• Lights / emissive intensities tweaks for ship thrusters.
• Performance / quality tweaks for lights on ship hulls.

 

 

 

 

 

Server

• Added a public/test command called “/ghost” (to type in chat) so that AI is not agressive towards you.
• Added a command to show the position coordinates of the player: “/position”.
• Lowered network range threshold: it was set too high by default and caused too many entitie to be sent through the network.

 

Misc

• Introduced priority system to audio module. Musics now have a higher priority (at equal volume) than 3D sounds. This should avoid hearing the music being “cut” during explosion/damage-heavy scenes.
• Added more debug code for a certain OpenAL crash.
• Reduced Destroyer’s max energy pool.

 

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Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

Infinity: Battlescape - Battle at Gemini station ( inside gas giant )

Kindly shared by I-Novae Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source

 

 

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

Some of the many beautiful locations from game patch (0.2.7.0)

 

 

Kindly shared by SpaceJay on the I-Novae forums - source

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What to see more ?  then go >> here <<

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Quick Look Infinity Battlescape Patch Patch 0.2.7.0

 

Kindly shared by Playbenni on the Inovae forum - source

 

 

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #104

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. During our Alpha backer weekend two weeks ago we discovered that the resolution of our planets wasn’t properly scaling up on 4k monitors. Upon further investigation we learned that not only were our planets not properly increasing quality based on graphics settings – but that all of our planets were actually being duplicated twice in memory. What that means is that even though each planet was only being drawn on screen once, like it should be, we were generating and caching the data for every single terrain patch twice. Fixing this problem had the obvious impact of doubling the performance of our planetary terrain generation and reducing our GPU VRAM consumption by hundreds of megabytes.

Orbiting a gas giant at sunrise

Now that our planets can be generated twice as fast as before, we decided to slightly increase their average quality. Unfortunately, increasing the quality of our terrain generation reduces the quality of our planets in another area – aliasing (flickering pixels). We have some ideas for reducing aliasing however we may not be able to schedule any graphics work until after we ship the Beta.

Fighting over a station in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant

We released another patch this week along with tweaking our HUD icons, adding dual controller support, researching HOTAS support, making some small improvements to warping, and ongoing texture improvements for stations. Last but certainly not least we’re happy to announce that we will be releasing the Alpha on Friday, June 15th. We appreciate your patience and we’re looking forward to bringing our Alpha backers into the development process. That’s all for this week, until next time.

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Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

[JonnyƦedhed]

Some screen shots from the latest game stream.

Kindly shared by I-Novae Hutchings - Developer/Artist on the I-Novae forums - source

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Some stunning screen shots from game patch (0.2.7.0)

Kindly shared by SpaceJay on the I-Novae forums - source

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #105

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! This week our primary focus has been on getting another patch ready for the weekend. The big ticket items will be planet fixes and improved peripheral/HOTAS support. We’ve discovered a bug in one of our build scripts that causes one of the game’s 3rd party dependencies, specifically Microsoft’s 2017 C-Runtime (CRT), to be skipped during installation/upgrade. This bug will cause the game to crash when the Play button is pressed in the launcher unless you happen to already have the 2017 CRT installed (most people already have it). It will be fixed in the next patch.

Flying over the volcanic moon of Cinder.

On the art side a lot of effort is being spent on the carrier. This is both the largest and the most complicated ship in Infinity: Battlescape. Great care must be taken with how we design the hangar as it will not only serve as a spawn point but also a place to get repaired and re-armed. The carrier is the last ship for us to get the final geometry pass completed and our goal is to get it mocked up in the game by the time we release the Alpha.

Flying towards sunrise over a gas giant.

That’s all for this week, until next time!

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Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

[JonnyƦedhed]

New Game Patch 0.2.7.1 ( Saturday, 7 April 2018 )

 

Originally posted by I-Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link

 

This new patch includes a couple of quality fixes for planets and projectile effects, as well as massive improvements to the input system, including better support for controllers and HOTAS.

 

 

Gameplay

• Tweaked angular accelerations on the smaller ships. The main change is a reduction of angular acceleration on the interceptor to give some momentum to turning. The bomber and corvette are also affected in a smaller way.
• Increased survivability of all ships: small shields boost on bomber, medium boost on corvette and huge armor/shields increase for capital ships (up to +50% for cruiser/carrier).
• Emergency warp out condition tweaks: slightly above air speed, armor <= 75% and shields <= 5% (these conditions were too harsh previously, you had to fly to twice air speed for emergency warp to activate).
• Reduced minimum warp speed to 495 m/s instead of 500 m/s (to better match target speed 3).
• Relaxed max turn speed in direct flight mode.

 

HUD / input

• Fix for players not showing up in exploration mode: the “player” indicator was accidentaly switched between exploration versus combat modes.
• Added support for dual controller inputs in the launcher settings dialog (note: these are mapped to Joystick0 and Joystick1 respectively).
• Added support for OEM key 102.
• Introduced new game events supported by the input mapper: specific formation events (Ex.: SwitchFormationMatchVelocity), overcharge (SwitchOverchargeShields), toggling weapon groups (WeaponGroup3).
• Added an input mapper profile editor to the launcher settings dialog.
• Added SetTargetSpeed event.
• Added support for throttles (events declared as throttles return values in 0…1 instead of -1…1).
• Added support for controller vibrations in XInput - currently this means the XBox controller will vibrate on impacts, collisions, damage etc.
• Added/moved deadzones/curve power settings for both controllers to the input mapper editor. Same for mouse sensitivity. Revamped default settings to be more coherent.
• Added relative versus absolute navigation cursor modes. The absolute mode (SetCursorX and SetCursorY) allows usage of an axis to directly set the target velocity (you don’t need to move the actual cursor on screen for that).
• Also added SetViewYaw/Pitch events to set the absolute camera-view angle. This should be helpful for TrackIR users.
• Also, to improve TrackIR usage, the View (previously called “Head”) event no longer needs to be assigned. When unassigned, it returns true all the time. This allows TrackIR users to simulate a head-look without having to hold the view key.
• Fixed View event affecting direct-mode flight model.
• The roll axis event is now usable with the navigation cursor flight model (previously, only the roll left/right keys were used).
• Swapped some axis names between XInput and DirectInput. This change made all previous input mapper config files using Joystick0AxisN events incorrect. Please discard/rebuild them using the new input mapper editor.
• Added experimental support for DirectInput force feedback. If somebody has a FF-enabled joystick, please test this build and let me know if you can feel a rumble/vibrations on the stick. Also, please send me the log file in PM, thank you.
• Renamed “joystick sensitivity” to “power”. Note that the curve power is simply applying a pow(input, value) in the 0…1 range.
• Introduced the notion of “idle” value for joysticks calibration. This part of the code is still not robust, due to the way DirectInput works.
• Improved the key detection mecahnism. Added a 5 seconds timer to hitting a key.
• Updated support for arrows/POV/hats on controllers. 8-directional POVs should now be fully functional.
• Introduced event types: AxisX and AxisY to replace Axis. These are used as hints for arrows/POV/hats when used as an axis input (the angle gets projected on the given axis type). Example: using an arrow with a value of 45° on AxisX will return 0.707.
• Added filtering by event types/keys to the detection mechanism. You can’t input an axis into a ToggleButton for example.
• Fixed a rare bug where keyboard input could be lost upon loss of focus of the game (during an alt-tab for example).
• Moved controller settings to the input mapper config file; so they are now profile-specific
• Joystick axis values are automatically reset to their idle values when the game loses window focus.
• Added event groups and support for groups exclusion to avoid certain false conflicts between some events.
• Cleaned up and change names of some events to be more coherent.
• Sensitivity settings should now make input more coherent between mouse and joysticks.
• Introduced navigation sensitivity in relative cursor mode. Note that if the mouse sensitivity is different than 1.0, these two settings will get multiplied for incremental mouse movement. It is recommended to keep mouse sensitivity in the input profile to 1.0.
• and change the navigation cursor sensitivity instead.
• Fixed navigation cursor being incorrectly shown or hidden in direct flight mode.
• Reverse axis state for an event can be toggled by double-clicking on the reverse column in the input profile editor.
• The input profile editor shows conflicts/issues to the user before saving and exiting the dialog.
• Added ability to clear a row, clear all rows, or reset/reload the parameters in the input profile editor.
• Fixed cycling formation events which stopped on Fixed.
• Navigation cursor settings are now only applied in relative mode. Absolute mode (basically, using SetCursorX and SetCursorY) bypasses those settings, as it is assumed that deadzone/power have already been applied from the input controller already.
• Radial menus are now functional with gamepads/joysticks.

 

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that duplicated planets in video ram and forces cpu overhead by tesselating them, even if they were not rendered.
• Note: to be clear, planets were NOT rendered twice. They were generated twice (which has a performance cost, but not in terms of average framerate).
• This saved around 600 MB of video ram usage.
• Fixed a camera smoothing glitch in third-perso view mode.

 

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Introduced an experimental tweak to projectiles particles to provide some cheap anti-aliasing. Particles in the distance should also preserve their brightness longer now.
• Implemented planetary terrain quality settings. Planets tesselation should be higher around ground level in high or extreme quality mode. The planet should also retain a higher tesselation from space.
• Optimized planet material shader compilation; this should save up to a total of ~30 seconds of loading time when you start the game.
• Fixed emissive on static actors, which stayed to zero (black) if the static actor didn’t have a power generator.
• Fix for cockpit shadows; due to a wrong setting, cockpit shadow maps used a range that was too far away. The closest shadow map should now better cover the cockpit, which should dramatically improve shadows quality in cockpits.

 

Locations

• Moved factory 8 into a crater on Sarake.
• Added space whale easter egg around Semnoz (warning: might be hard to detect).

Input Profile Editor

 

 

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Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

[JonnyƦedhed]

The team are looking at releasing the Alpha on Friday, June 15th

 

 

Some stunning screen shots from game patch (0.2.7.1)

 

Kindly shared by Sab1e on the I-Novae forums - source

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

New Weapons And Effects! Infinity Battlescape Patch 0.2.7.1

 

Kindly shared by Playbenni on the I-Novae forum - source

 

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

Switching to another team - POLL

 

Originally posted by I-NovaeFlavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link

 

At the moment there are no restrictions on switching to another team - which is fine for the current state of the game. However, in the future, a player could gain a strategic advantage by temporarily switching to “spy” an enemy team to gain information about their fleets, locations of bases ( those will have to be scouted at the beginning of a match ) and other various strategical information.

 

So I believe we need to add some restrictions to team switching. Let’s have a look at some possibilities via a poll:

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/t/switching-to-another-team/6964

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #106

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

 

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! To kick things off let’s talk about patches. Previously we’ve stated that our goal is to have at least one patch a week and I’m happy to report that, for the last few weeks, we’ve successfully hit that goal. Not only did we release a patch last Saturday, but we’ll be releasing another one within the next few days. There are still a couple of large game systems on the to-do list so it’s possible there may be some gaps down the road however we have demonstrated we’re able to hit our desired release cadence.

Cinder with the high resolution terrain fix

 

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into releasing an update. We implement the engineering changes, collect the art changes, rebuild the game, “cook” assets into their optimized format, build a new installation package, and then upload the installation package. At this point our backend encrypts the installation package, calculates various hashes to ensure integrity, and uploads the package to our Content Delivery Network (CDN) for distribution. Lastly, our installation runtime running on a user’s machine downloads the package, verifies its integrity, and performs the installation operations. That’s a lot of moving pieces and getting them working together reliably represents an important milestone. Being able to quickly iterate on gameplay or bugs and then seamlessly deliver a new build to our users is critical for our long-term success. There are still some improvements to be made, for example we need to add support for incremental patching and optimize post-installation package caching, however the system is holding up well and we look forward to additional stress testing during the Alpha.

A desert moon with the high resolution terrain fix

 

Speaking of a new patch we’ve fixed some networking issues including stuttering, made additional improvements to how we interface with peripheral inputs such as joysticks, and started work on spectator mode and kill cams. Over the last few weeks we’ve noticed Infinity: Battlescape has started to acquire greater visibility within the larger space gaming community. To that end the team has been discussing things we can do to help our players continue getting the word out. At the moment this primarily revolves around finding easier ways to share screen shots and videos but we’ve also talked about the possibility of adding elements of social networks to our website. That’s all for this week, until next time!

 

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Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

Pledge Upgrade: https://inovaestudios.com/Account#products

[JonnyƦedhed]

New Game Patch 0.2.7.2 ( Saturday, 14th April 2018 )

 

 

Originally posted by I-Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link

 

An important patch that addresses a long-time issue with networking interpolation and error-correction smoothing and which was made more noticeable in the form of rubberbanding since patch 0.2.6.0. This patch also includes some new gameplay experimental changes.

 

Gameplay

• Reduced angular momentum in direct flight mode, to make settings coherent with navigation target cursor mode.
•  
• Tweaked angular accelerations and maximum return speeds for capital ships (mostly carrier).
•  
• Implemented an automatic throttle option. It is disabled by default. It can be enabled in the launcher settings dialog. In this mode, manual forward/backward thrust (W/S) sets the target speed to the current speed.
•  
• Added two new input events: “ResetTargetSpeed” and “MaxTargetSpeed” which respectively set the target speed to zero and max. The profile xml files version was not increased in this patch, therefore if you want to make use of these experiment events and
• the automatic throttle, we recommend that you copy/paste them with double-tap=true from the official xml file into your user/documents file. You can assign them to forward/backward thrust (W/S) as double-tap.
•  
• Implemented experimental damage model. In this new model, kinetic damage gets absorbed by the shields ratio. Ex: if a ship has 80% shields remaining, 20% of the damage will be applied to the hull armor while the remaining 80% will reduce the shield points.
•  
• Energetic damage gets 100% absorbed by the shields and does not deal damage to the hull armor. However energetic damage on a naked hull (when shields are down) now depletes energy points at a 1:1 ratio and causes a chance of critical damage to internal ship systems.

HUD / input

• Doubled camera view max sensitivity.
• Fixed a bug in the input profile xml version check, which caused a crash if a user manually edited the xml file and introduced a syntax error. This will now cause a warning, but execution can continue.
• HUD icons like the crosshair now take into account error correction smoothing.
• Added a camera view roll strafing effect toggle in the launcher settings dialog.
• Fixed invert pitch toggle bug which wasn’t working with the navigation target cursor.
• The input profile editor now retains the selection and scroll position upon acting on the events or detecting a key.
• Reduced vertical size of the input profile editor dialogue.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed camera smoothing glitches for internal cameras (capships) (Note: the camera glitch fix from the previous patch was only applied to the external view).

 

Networking / server

• Fixed a bug that caused client/server input mismatch around planets, which in turn caused error corrections to happen all the time when they should theoretically be exceptionnal.
• Fixed a bug with error correction smoothing that conflicted with physics keyframe interpolation, which in turn resulted in “rubberbanding”/jittering of the player actor.
• Increased precision of player snapshots for client-side error correction checks, which also reduces the amount of error corrections happening.
• Added a higher priority system for checking for client-side error corrections upon collisions.

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Updated carrier geometry placeholder (Note: will no longer spawn on docking ports at stations, as the carrier is now bigger. Will be spawned in a random location around a space station).
• Minor performance improvements on the server.

 

Misc

• Added code signing certification which should stop Windows from showing a warning for executing from an “unknown publisher”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[JonnyƦedhed]

Screen shots from New Game Patch 0.2.7.2

 

Kindly shared by I-Novae Hutchings Developer/Artist - on the I-Novae forums - source

The carrier really feels like a carrier now.
Length ~2.2km from tip to tip

 

 

 

 

The Carrier is a beast to control when in atmosphere!

 

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Screen shots from New Game Patch 0.2.7.2

 

Kindly shared by I-Novae Hutchings Developer/Artist - on the I-Novae forums - source

Some love for the planet Gallia, it looks pretty nice close up now that it’s surface resolution has been improved. There are still some issues with the planet in places though, and the shadow distance doesn’t work well. But I got a couple nice ones.

 

And some Full shots of the current moons.

 

 

 

 

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

 

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #107

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

 

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. To kick things off we’ve released, as promised last week, another patch. The major changes are improvements to networking error correction, new placeholder geometry for the carrier, and changes to the damage model. You may recall we mentioned last week that we were thinking about different ways to incorporate social networking into our game/website. After some discussion we’ve decided the best way to do this is by making it easier for players to capture “sharable moments”.

The new placeholder geometry for the carrier

 

A “sharable moment” is defined as anything that has recently happened that you thought was cool/fun enough to want to share with your friends. The first step in this process is something we laid the groundwork for months ago – spectator mode. Over the last week we've made significant progress on adding a spectator mode to the game which allows you to have a free range camera monitoring everything from ships (in/out of cockpit), to individual missiles, to entire planets and moons. We have a number of Developer Access backers who've already been quite successful at producing awesome videos while playing Infinity: Battlescape but spectator mode should give you all more creative freedom.

Carriers in combat over Cinder

 

In the future we want to extend spectator mode into things like kill cams, recording short snippets of video, and even playing back an entire recording of your participation in a match. For Alpha our only plan is to support spectator mode and possibly kill cams as we still have a lot of work left to do on the core gameplay loop before mid-June. Once we get to Beta and we have more time to work on polish there’ll be a lot more we can do to help players capture “sharable moments”. That’s all for now, until next time!

[VIDEO]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp6AdBckhtE[/VIDEO]

 

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[JonnyƦedhed]

Some stunning screen shots from latest game patch (0.2.7.2)

 

Kindly shared by SpaceJay on the I-Novae forums - source

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infinity: Battlescape website: https://inovaestudios.com/Battlescape           

Infinity: Battlescape forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com

[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #108

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. You may or may not have already noticed but we’ve rolled out a new update to our company website. It includes some cosmetic tweaks but the primary goal was to improve the user experience for managing emails. Previously, you could only add a new email to your account by visiting a direct link as there was no way to do it from the main site. On top of that you couldn’t change your primary email, remove an email address from your account, or resend a verification email. This was obviously a problem and fixing it had been deferred simply because hardly anyone was complaining about it and we have a long list of things to do. Lately, with Infinity: Battlescape gaining visibility, some people started running into problems so we re-prioritized it. Lastly, there is a known problem with the new website that will cause it to look all crazy messed up if you have recently visited the old version. To fix this just clear your browser cache or force reload the page (shift + reload in Chrome on Windows).

Looking out the corvette cockpit

On the game side we spent most of this week continuing work on our replay/spectator system. New target indicators have been added along with new weapon and shield impact effects. A patch with all of the spectator code will be released soon and then we’ll shift toward focusing on the rest of our core gameplay systems. As we’ve mentioned before this includes radar/sensors, re-arm/repair, the resource system, and building actual battlescape’s to name a few. That’s all for this week, until next time!

A destroyer near a station over Cinder

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[8uhbbhu8]

I have to say this is turning out to be one beautiful game.

[JonnyƦedhed]

New Game Patch 0.2.8.0 ( Tuesday, 1st May 2018 )

 

Originally posted by I-Flavien CTO/President & Cofounder - source link

 

This new patch is an important step towards releasing the alpha, as it introduced the spectator game mode and various game states which currently act as placeholder (such as the main menu). There are also tweaks for the HUD and various systems.

 

 

Game States

• Introduced the main menu. Currently is is empty, just click on any key to initiate the connection to the server
• Introduced the spawn menu. Currently is is showing your team bases at which you can respawn at. If a base does not have a spawn point, it will not be shown. Bases can be cycled (default bindings are left/right mouse buttons). You’ll respawn at the currently selected base.
• Note that this spawn menu can make the camera jump from a planet to another very quickly and there’s no collisions on the camera. Ultimately, the spawn menu will not show a 3D view of each base, but the solar system’s strategic map with menus to select your ship/loadout. So the
• current implementation is a placeholder until after the alpha is released.
• Introduced a kill-cam feature. The view switches to the ship that killed you a few seconds before you explode. After 10 seconds, it automatically switches to one of your ally’s viewpoint. Just like in the spawn menu, you can cycle through ship allies.
• This mode only cycles through ships that are in the current battle zone (it will not cycle to a ship that is thousands of Kms away for example).
• Introduced a spectator mode. There are currently no restrictions on what can be observed, but restrictions will be added later on. You can enter the spectator mode at any time by selecting a target on your HUD and pressing F8 (default key). Note that your ship is still alive
• during that time and will continue to fly through its current course. If you get killed while observing another actor, the spectator mode will be interrupted and you’ll be back to the spawn menu.
• Introduced experimental record/replay system. Since this is a heavy WIP, there is currently no way to launch a replay. This will come in a future patch.

 

 

Gameplay

• Doubled pitch/yaw angular accelerations for the interceptor, to reduce rotationnal momentum.
• Increased probabilites of some critical hits.
• Reduced random aiming spread for bots AI.

HUD / input

• Fonts now dynamically adapt to the screen/window resolution
• Note: fonts were set up for 1440p, which caused players that are in 1080p (or below) to have text that is too big.
• Information window has been moved from top-center to the bottom-right corner of the screen.
• Revamped indicator types for actor classes; now using small / medium / large size indicators (respectively: triangular, diamond and hexagonal icons). Structures/bases ues a square icon. Planets still use a circular icon.
• New icons have been added in various spots of the HUD (ex.: when exceeding air-speed, an icon is shown instead of the old “AS” flashing text).
• Ship systems status icons are now displayed on the left side of the HUD. When a system is broken, it will be shown as a flashing orange alert until the system gets repaired.
• Non-ship actors such as missiles no longer cause a bleep sound when popping in/out on the HUD.
• Experimental changes for HUD target indicators transparency and sizes; should now be more clear and improve tactical awareness.
• Fixed an old bug with HUD indicator target directions radar/ring which was incorrect when camera view was rotated compared to the ship’s front direction.
• Automatic version upgrade of input profile config file (plus, catching exceptions due to invalid config files).
• Added rotation animation to missile/torpedo HUD indicators.
• Revamped indicators management, now server driven, which should fix many indicator-related bugs such as “?”.
• Detection status of a newly spawned actor is instantly updated (there’s no longer a second of latency).
• Same for HUD indicators creation: the latency has been removed.
• HUD no longer shows crosshair and velocity indicators when the viewed actor isn’t a ship.
• Tweaks to cursor icons for HUD.
• Added arrow to link center of screen to cursor on HUD.

Bug fixes

• Fixed atmospheric particle effects no longer affected by scattering color.
• Fixed sudden change of music volume after a loading screen.
• Fixed a crash when launching the game when an input profile in the data folder had an obsolete version.
• Fixed a bug with velocity indicators always showing up in third-person camera mode.
• Fixed a bug with normal calculation for a dynamic actor’s bounding box hit which could cause impacts to be displayed at the correct orientation.
• Fixed wind grid leak when a planet gets deleted.
• Fixed a bug with atmosphere objects pooling that sometimes gave the wrong (or no) atmosphere to a planet.
• Fixed planet-engine related resource leaks.
• Fixed bugs related to power critical hit ( loss of power ) which didn’t use the repair timer.
• Fixed potential crash on client related to planet raycasts for projectiles.

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Shadow uprate rate has been set to zero in extreme quality mode. This should help to prevent z-fighting flickering on shadows on dynamic entities, however the downside is a performance hit of 10 to 20%. Other quality settings are unaffected by the tweak.
• Added a shield impact particle effect, and introduced “surface types” to actors. Weapons configuration files can now specify a different effect for each impact surface type.
• Revamped a bit the normal and offset calculations for projectile hits.
• Added a max texture resolution setting affecting loaded assets. Currently set to 1024 for at low quality, 2048 at medium quality, 4096 at high quality and 8192 at extreme quality. Note that these are maximums. If an asset texture has a resolution of 2048x2048, then only
• in low quality will this texture change to 1024x1024.
• Added different hit feedback sounds for shields versus hull.

 

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[JonnyƦedhed]

Weekly Update #109

Originally posted by I-NovaeKeith CEO & Cofounder - source link

Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! With a little less than a month and a half left to go until we release the Alpha it’s been another busy week. Most notably we released a new patch including our new spectator mode, kill cams, improved HUD icons, and laid some groundwork for our menu system. There’s also lots of tweaks and bug fixes which you can read about in the patch notes. Next up, as we’ve mentioned before, is core gameplay.

The new WIP carrier in high orbit

The remaining big-ticket items for the Alpha, and there are still a few, are radar, the resource system, capital ship weapons, countermeasures, win/loss conditions, carrier spawning, and getting our first battlescape up and running. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory except this idea of a “battlescape”. Originally, we were hoping to have a continuous battle take place across the entire solar system which would involve some amount of base building on the part of players. That game would have been a sort of semi-persistent mini-MMO. Unfortunately, this was a lofty stretch goal and we came nowhere near raising enough money to achieve it. Instead, bases will be pseudo randomly generated from a predetermined set of possible locations centered around a single planet and nearby moons. When a battlescape has been conquered the war will move on to another battlescape on some other planet. To win the war, thereby causing the server to reset, one of the 3 teams will have to conquer all of the battlescapes.

Under the watchful gaze of a gas giant

At least this is an outline of the current plan. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we will make significant changes to that as we go along but insofar as the Alpha is concerned we want to get a single battlescape up and running. This will involve a balanced set of factories, small space stations, large space stations (for capital ships), and land bases strategically placed around a planet and its nearby moons. The core gameplay loop starts with each team spawning at their pre-designated collection of bases. Due to being initially resource constrained the beginning of the game will involve scouting and light skirmishes as each team saves up resources to purchase more powerful ships and weapons. As the resource system kicks into high gear each team will be able to progressively acquire greater firepower until one team finally emerges victorious. The rate at which this occurs will be tweakable from one server to the next as it will have a significant impact on the length of a match.

Flying in the upper atmosphere over a large mountain range

This is just a rough, high level overview. We’ll be having a lot of core gameplay discussion over the coming weeks and as this stuff starts to get implemented for the Alpha we’ll be discussing it in greater detail. That’s all for this week, until next time!

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