Reduced min boost ratio energy requirement from 25% to 10% for all ships
Boost had a requirement that energy was at least at 25% of its max. There is no feedback when failing to engage boost, which could result in frustration from players not understanding why their ship didn't boost when they pressed the key. We need to work on better feedback, but by reducing the requirement to only 10%, ships have "a bit more juice" and can still engage boost for a last thrust.
Reduced credits rewards for destroying turrets / weapons
Reduced credits rewards for destroying ships
Last patch nerfed credits rewards related to bounties. This time we nerfed credits rewards for destroying ships or turrets. The rewards are largely unchanged for destroying small ships, but mid/cap ships kills will no longer generate as many credits as before.
Interceptor
Increased energy points from 150 to 175
Increased energy recharge rate from 7.5 to 12 points per second
Increased max heat points from 125 to 150
Increased turbo boost thrust rate from x2.0 to x2.5
Increased max chaffs from 10 to 16
Another interation towards better maneuverability for the Interceptor. It received a small boost update combined with more energy, to allow for boosting more often/efficiently and using blasters at the same time.
Bomber
Increased energy recharge rate from 6 to 10 points per second
Increased max chaffs from 16 to 20
Corvette
Increased max chaffs from 20 to 24
Destroyer
Increased hitpoints from 15000 to 20000
Cruiser
Increased hitpoints from 30000 to 40000
Carrier
Increased hitpoints from 40000 to 60000
Capital ship hitpoints were increased; they tend to die quickly to concentrated fire, especially from bombers, and with the reward nerfs they might not be as easy to reach as before.
Weapons
Tweaks to locking times for missile / torpedo launchers: slightly lowered on small ships, slightly increased on capships
Chaffs
Doubled duration (6s to 12s)
Increased launch speed (40 m/s to 100 m/s)
Increased range (1 km to 1.5 km)
Tweaked launch angle (behind and up)
Missiles required too much attention from the player on the receiving end. Chaffs will be more efficient and launch further away from the ship, resulting in less splash damage. The doubled duration and increased amounts of chaffs on all small ships ensure that chaffs will not run out as quickly as before.
Collision Damage
Reduced collision damage by half and reduced warp ramming damage by another 50%
The ship doing the ramming should cause less damage, but will still receive full damage. Collision damage in general was halved due to many players hitting docks when starting with their capital ships
New features
New chat box and team chat
Added a new UI for the chat box with 4 default channels: All, Global, Team and Local
All agglomerates all messages received from other channels
Global channel messages are sent to all players on the server
Team channel messages are sent to all team members on the server
Local channel messages are sent to all allies in the local zone of the player (roughly 1000 Km)
You can enter/exit chat mode via Enter/Return/Escape like before
You can press Tab to cycle through the channels; the current one is where the messages will be sent to
Each channel has its own color to identify the channel more easily (especially useful for messages in the All channel)
Messages are now scrollable when you enter chat mode. Default is 30 messages
A Channel's tab background color flashes when a new unread message is received in that channel
Added chat auto-close mode mode in Options -> Gameplay (this will close chat mode after every single message typed). Default is off
Voice commands will go in the Local channel
Text content is verified for errors before being validated and sent to the server (to avoid errors like empty strings, accidental key presses, too long messages etc.. )
Training
Added youtube links with 8 video tutorials in the main menu (note: only a placeholder in Early access until the gameplay is finalized and we can produce in-game tutorials)
Assets
Updated some station modules materials and textures
Fixed holes in station Hub B
Bug fixes and misc
Final fix for "name is invalid" error on the server when players have a name shorter than 3 characters
Improvements to key detection, especially related to throttles (throttles where often blocking input detection due to always sending non-zero values)
Added input profile for Logitech Extreme 3D Pro
Patch 0.6.2.0 notes
Game balance
Turbo boost cooldown parameter is now set per ship. Interceptor boost cooldown was reduced to 0.5s (from 1.0s) and bomber to 0.75s (from 1.0s)
Increased initial boost intensity for interceptor ( +20% ) and forward / backward boost ( +12% )
Reduced boost intensity on lateral thrusters for interceptor ( -25% ) (note: since initial boost was increased by +20% the end result is similar for lateral thrusters and higher for main/back engine )
Some people have been complaining that the Interceptor felt "slow". We tried increasing accelerations in the past but it proved troublesome due to the engagement distances, making hitting enemies even more difficult. Instead, we're looking at rebalancing the game in small steps to see how we can improve the ships "feeling". Our first step here is a buff of turbo boosting.
Increased proximity mine launch speed to 100 m/s (from 50 m/s)
AI destroyers and some players got caught into their proximity mine exploding (due to accidental contact or splash damage from another mine) right after they launched a mine. Increasing the launch speed should help with that.
Improved bounty rewards to be less agressive and generate less credits ( the reward starts lower, but scales by +50% for each bounty rank )
Limited bounty max rank to 3, to avoid insane bounties
Player will now receive a notification when the enemy commander placed a bounty on him
It's still very easy to generate credits in the game right now, but keep in mind we don't have the credits sinks yet (besides dying). Instead of adjusting the ship prices we'll try to adjust the rewards prices iteratively each patch. In this patch we're starting with bounties, which were probably the more imbalanced. A bomber killing a capital ship with a bounty could easily earn double or triple the price of that capital ship in a single kill. Bounty rewards now start lower, but can still generate a decent reward if the bounty reaches rank 3. In addition, players will now get informed when a bounty has been placed by the enemy commander on their head
Tweaked warp ramming damage formula
Ramming damage seems to be in a decent spot.. when not in warp. The problem is that damage increases far too quickly at higher velocities such as in warp. Aiming at an enemy ship in warp is also easy, so the risk vs reward ratio is too good at the moment. Instead of completely removing warp ramming damage we reduced the amount of damage caused by warp ramming at velocities higher than 1 km/s. The reduction factor isn't linear but based on a logarithmic scale, so doubling the impact speed does less than doubling collision damage.
It is now possible to recharge shields at hangar / docking bays
The rate at which shields recharge might still need some tweaks, and we're aware of some issues with the repair/resupply rate of people "camping" at the spawns and firing non-stop missiles/torpdoes. We'll revisit these mechanics in a future patch
Weapons tweaks: slightly faster turn rates for auto-turrets
Increased max range for mk4 / mk5 auto-turrets and defense platforms
Increased hit points for mk5, mk6 and mk7 guns
Increased damage from static defenses
MK4 auto-turrets range was increased to make the Destroyer fit his protection role again small crafts better. The range was almost doubled. The static defense towards / guns also needed a serious buf to detract surprise attacks and earn time for defenders to spawn or come back. In a future patch we'll add base attack notifications to the starmap.
Hitpoints were increased, starting on the MK5 (just a little), MK6 (quite a bit) and MK7 (a lot more). It will be harder to destroy the large guns on capital ships now. It was frustrating for capital ship players to have their main guns destroyed so quickly.
Bug fixes
Fixed a rare issue where game executable does not launch due to symbols such as $ appearing in the user Documents path
Fixes for "invalid login length" message upon connecting to a game server
Fixed destroyed weapons still absorbing damage despite being down and preventing the ship from being damaged
UI / HUD
Options menu will now enumerate controllers from Direct Input asynchronously
Some users had massive slowdowns / 10-to-30 seconds freezes when entering / exiting the options menu. After our investigations our conclusion is that some input drivers are not improperly detected and cause Direct Input to not answer until a time-out is reached. We can't do much about that, however the controllers enumeration will not proceed in the background instead of blocking / exiting the options menu. Note that if you modify keybindings, applying the changes might still take a long time. However if you modify other game settings without changing keybindings, there should be no slowdown anymore.
Added more information messages when using various ship systems / weapons fail
A generic failure sound has been added. Locking sound volume has been increased. More warnings show up when for some reason you cannot fire or launch missiles / torpedoes / mines
Fixed "warp engage" alert which was lingering too long compared to other alerts
Fixed an issue with carrier spawning around Glimmerfall and instantly dying
Improvements
Added ships engine / thruster sound fade ins/outs (it'll now take half a second for most sounds to smoothly start and stop)
Improved loading times of background images in the GUI
Added voice volume slider in options menu
Voice command spam was real. One bug was fixed with global volume not affecting voice commands. The range of voice commands has been decreased to 10 Km (full volume) and 100 Km (65% volume). Voice commands over 100 Km aren't audible anymore
Added a priority icon to battle missions screen, to make it more clear what battles are recommended to join
We found that far too many people were joining battles that were lost, and by the time they arrived, the battle had ended. The coloring rules have also been simplifies: green for battles being won and red for battles that are either critical or high priority. High priority battles are battles with contested odds (40-60% range) and that are about to start, or have started recently.
Increased warmup / countdown until battle missions start, to give players more time to prepare / transition out of other battles
The countdown to battle start was often too short, 2-3 minutes. If the player was busy with another battle or doing something else, by the time he took off, travelled in warp and reached the battle, that battle was already in the middle phase. Increasing the countdown duration to battle start should give players more time to coordinate and prepare.
Assets
New engine sound on Interceptor
Many people have been complaining about the high pitch engine sound on the Interceptor so while we're working on an improved version we've replaced it by a new placeholder
New Odyssey station lights pass
Added ambient occlusion and colors to station Hub B module
Carrier final texturing, improved materials and updated skins (green stripes were out of place). Added ambient occlusion
Misc
Added more debug info for DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED into the logs when presenting the back buffer
This error is typically caused by a video card that doesn't have enough video memory, or has an obsolete driver. We recommend upgrading your video card drivers if this happens. There has been a few cases of users that have modern / powerful video cards AND updated drivers and still have these issues. For these people this video might help (caution: follow advice at your own risks: link)
Improved server disconnection messages
First-time run of the game will now bring up a window to select the starting quality / screen mode / resolution
First-time run of the game will attempt to auto-detect the quality level based on the computer's cpu performance ( note: we need to take into account the gpu too, but ran out of time to implement it yet )
Server
Fixed performance issues related to refreshing the players list UI, causing too many events. This in turn generated random stutters for all players on the server, every second
We're still monitoring server performance. It is possible that there are other sources of stutter / slowdowns, but keep in mind a number of issues could also be coming from your connection to the server
Early Access Launch and Roadmap
State of the Early Access launch
Hey everyone, it's been a pretty crazy launch into Early access so far for us with a lot of work, but that was obviously expected. We appreciate your patience as we are resolving the most urgent issues as soon as we humanly can ( keep in mind we're just a handful of developers ).
We've had a number of issues, some related to servers stability ( not all that bad overall, the first server crashed after 30 hours ), and as you might have noticed if you followed us, a number of issues related to HOTAS and keybindings.
Most of those issues are now fixed, which isn't to say that everything is perfect; we've identified a larger number of urgent bugs ( some balance-breaking, such as abusing ramming ; some just causing pain and frustration, such as the never-ending missiles ).
We'll be patching the servers in an hour or two ( in a staggered way, to avoid disrupting online players ) with a lot of fixes. Another client patch will follow next week, probably on thursday, and from now on we'll try to keep a regular update pacing by patching the game every thursday ( with possible hotfixes for urgent issues ).
Roadmap
A lot of people have been asking for our Roadmap in the short and long term. While we can't make exact promises on the date at which these things will be delivered, here's what we have been internally discussing and what we'll be working on in the coming weeks and months.
Our immediate focus will be on technical support, and helping players that have technical issues playing the game. Some people have had connection issues due to routers or firewalls; others have their game crash, due to gpu drivers, non-standard paths and a variety of issues that are pretty common to Early access launches.
Once this is done, we'll be shifting our focus back on the game itself. This is what we are looking at:
Short term ( 1-3 weeks ):
HUD cleaning / decluttering / making things more clear
Team chat and improving communications
Helper screens and more alerts and contextual info tips in game
Ship upgrades ( first iteration; we won't necessarily have much new content there. Maybe a new weapon and EMP missiles )
Battle reports / statistics / player stats / team stats
Making the star map more useful and interactive
Game balance: another pass on weapons / locking, corvette repairs / rewards
Credits redistribution and team scoring ( / ladder rankings )
Input event and control scheme unification ( a lot of players are confused by the way the current system works, and think their controllers do not detect pitch / yaw )
Allowing the carrier to repair / resupply ships like the corvette
Anti-missile / torpedoes laser counter-measures for capital ships
Auto-repairing turrets / modules on stations and other installations
Revamping / increasing static defenses
Sub-systems targetting
Mid term ( End of year goal )
Second pass over ship upgrades: adding more weapons, more upgrades and more variety to the content
Electronic warfare
Revamping capital ships control schemes, cameras and weapons management
Assets streaming and performance improvements to eliminate the high video-ram needs, causing micro-stutter and freezes
New battlescapes and new planets, including the first Ocean planet
Localized damage ( disabling thrusters, armor pieces ) and visual effects ( damage decals, more effects )
Revamping shields and adding localized shield systems ( front+back, 4-directional shileds etc.. )
Networking improvements, especially related to client side prediction for projectiles )
Squads system
In-game communication system ( this one is tricky, so we'll be looking into it, but it might easily slide to next year )
First iteration on the persistent progression system with unlockable content based on your military ranking ( weapons, bobbleheads, skins, decals )
Extra joysticks / HOTAS / hardware testing and official TrackIR support
Long term ( Next year, but before the full release )
Orbital bombardment with nukes
New visual effects and improvements ( better HDR / tonemapping, better anti-aliasing, new shader effects, glass / refraction etc.. )
More planets and environments, maybe props on planets
General AI improvements, having AI ships travel between planets in warp
Kickstarter rewards
More work on HUD improvements and customization screens
Finalized in-game tutorials
Solo / sandbox mode
More work on the persistent progression system
Side missions content
Note that one important feature is missing from this roadmap: side missions. It's a tricky one, because it's important to retain the player's attention, but it requires a lot of work and will not delivered as a single feature in a single patch, but more progressively as we improve the system over a long series of patches, over the entire next year.
We haven't fully decided how far we want to go with side missions. At the very least we want to offer escort / attack missions, assassinations / bounty hunting, or things such as scavenging. Some of these missions could have conflicting objectives with players on the opposite team, which would in fact turn these side missions into "mini-game modes" naturally integrated into the game. We'll see exactly how far we can go with this, but keep in mind Battlescape is warfare focused, so you should not expect things such as trading or mining.
That's it for now - if you have more feedback, just let us know on the Steam forums or on the I-Novae forums. We still have a long road (map) ahead of us, but your support is appreciated. Thank you !
-Flavien Brebion I-Novae Studios
New Early Access video trailer
We are happy to announce that our new Steam Early access video trailer has been released.
You can view it on the store page gallery or directly on Youtube:
https://youtu.be/uZpWUzJ3USA
In other news: T - 7 days ! As a reminder, the game goes Early access on the 26th ( evening time US, early morning on the 27th for EU ).
We are getting ready for the launch, performing the final stress tests, testing the Steam build, implementing the last high priority features and doing another "polish" pass. It feels unreal to think that after all these years of work, we will finally be launching on Steam in exactly a week from now.
Needless to say, this next week is gonna be.. interesting, to say the least.
We will be ramping up on our marketing in the coming week(s), but keep in mind we have a very low budget, so we'll be relying on word-of-mouth for the most part. If you are interested in helping, the best way would be to talk to your friends or people who like space games and let them know about our project.
As usual if you have questions or comments do not hesitate to post on the Steam forums or on our website, thank you.
-Flavien Brebion
Early Access Release Date: Friday, September 27th
We are happy to announce that Infinity: Battlescape will enter Steam Early Access on Friday, September 27th, at 04:00 UTC.
Keep in mind that we are a small indy company ( 5 developers ! ) launching our first title. We will be monitoring the servers closely, provision extra servers if the current ones reach max capacity and of course work on hotfixes to address other issues ( client crashes, emergency bugs etc.. ).
It's only the beginning though, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We are expecting to stay in Early access for about 12 months. After the dust following the Early access launch has settled we will continue working on the game diligently, adding more features, more content, polishing and optimizing everything.
If you are unfamiliar with our development process we usually patch the game every 1-2 weeks ( emergency stability issues get hotfixed as soon as possible of course ). If you have any feedback or questions, just let us know in the Steam hub forums.
We are very excited about this launch, although there is also a lot of pressure on our shoulders. We have spent countless days and nights working on this game for the past 5 years ( more if you count all the work on our custom engine and tech ) and although it still needs a lot of polish and content, as any Early access game does, we think the result is pretty close to our original vision and that you will have a lot of fun with it.
Forming a squadron or fleet is the best way to experience Infinity: Battlescape as it has been designed. Invite your friends and begin building your battlegroup. The fight for space conquest begins.. on September the 27th !
-The I-Novae Studios team
Weekly Update #141: Towards Early Access and new backer week-end 30 Aug - 2 Sept
Well, it's been a while since the last update. Not exactly surprising, but since we are gearing up for our Early Access launch on Steam in a month, things are been pretty busy.. and that's an understatement. It's going to get even busier in september, so updates are going to be very irregular from now on, just be warned..
A new beta backer week-end will be organized next week, from Friday august the 30th to Mondy the 2nd of september. We had a couple of technical issues in the last event, but this one should be much more fluid. Note that this might be the last one before the launch.
There will be two community events on Saturday 31 and Sunday the 1st, at 19:00 UTC, as usual. More information in this thread: I-Novae community events
Steam
We are wrapping up production on our Steam trailer and will announce the official Early access launch date in a week or two.
Steam integration is also progressing well. Our build system is now compatible with Steam and authentication / integration with I-Novae accounts is almost finished. We still need to implement a server browser in the game client ( basically what our custom launcher was doing ) so that Steam clients know to which server to connect to, but this should go relatively fast to implement.
We've also more or less figured out our plan regarding giving a Steam copy of the game to backers. If you pledged on Kickstarter, IndieGoGo or our website, a Steam section will appear in your account settings on the I-Novae website, which will allow you to login to Steam. After you successfully login, the game will be granted to you and appear in your Steam library like any other game. ETA on this feature is around the launch, end of September, however we might do some earlier internal tests with a few select member of the community, if needed.
Extra game copies ( backer tiers above $100 if I remember well ) will be given as extra Steam keys. There is no ETA on that just yet, but it'll definitely be after the EA launch. In general, crowd-funding rewards will come after the EA launch. A certain number of them aren't even on our radar just yet, so might slip well into 2020.
Development news
In other development news, in the short term ( next week ) we are focusing on the patch for the next backer week-end. This is what we're planning on doing for next week's patch:
The first version of the Star map
More balance tweaks related to weapons on the Interceptor and the Corvette
Another round on stability ( we've had a few issues introduced by last patch ), also fixing full-screen and lower-resolution issues
A basic implementation for system menus ( options, in-game keys rebinding, etc.. )
Improvements to the menus / UI in general, with more information displayed in the various menu tabs
Revamp of input / controls, unifying events, and using more logical default keys ( goodbye to right-ctrl for launching missiles ! )
The following are on our wishlist, but will likely slip away to early September:
Laser counter-measures for capital ships
Battle statistics / performance ratings / rebalancing the scoring system and maybe introducing the ladder rankings
HUD improvements and MFDs
In the "longer" term ( second week of September, probably ):
Ship upgrades system
More iterations on the menus / UI
Improving the new player experience, giving hints, mini tutorials, and reducing the learning curve, making things more clear
More work on capital ships, control scheme and weapons management
Finally, in whatever time is left:
The missions system ; we want to at least add support for scouting, bounty hunting and hauler escort/attack missions ; those already exist in game but are a "natural" part of the game flow. We want to make some of these more formal, including clear objectives and rewards.
Introducing a few new Battlescapes and planet environments
The longer-term goal (2020+ ) we have in mind for the mission system is to implement a semi-procedural missions generator, based on various templates. Assassination missions, investigation missions, helping kill a pirate base in an asteroid field, hack an enemy base, plant a bomb, protect a ship while it's being repaired, etc.. not super original, but would definitely bring variety to the game. Some of those missions would have conflicting objectives with players of the enemy team, which would make them mini "game modes" within the game. We'll see exactly how far we can go with this next year.
As you see, while we're getting there, the amount of work left for September is still scary. There's a good chance various systems will stay in a "first-stage implementation" and be iterated / improved on after the launch. It's important to keep in mind this is Early access, and we'll still have a year of development ahead into 2020 before we can call the "full 1.0 version" ready to be released.
New teaser video from Asteroid backer week-end
The closed-beta week-end for Kickstarter and IndieGoGo backers has started !
We've been focusing on visual polish, added new effects, and improved many areas of the gameplay this time around.
There's still a lot more to do in the next two months until we're ready to release on Steam, but we're slowly getting there !
Here's a short teaser video of what the game looks like now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1EiYqKgJ8o
In the next days we'll record footage to produce a new trailer on Steam.
-Flavien Brebion
Weekly Update #140: Visual polish and asteroid backer week-end
Remember to wishlist Infinity: Battlescape if you haven't done so yet, thank you.
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 the closed beta 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 during that week-end.
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 curently 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 ( admitedly 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 ugprading 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
Weekly Update #139: Bomber, UI, next patch
Remember to wishlist Infinity: Battlescape if you haven't done so yet, thank you.
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.
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.
Bomber
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:
UI and Beta backer patch
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 !
