Infinity: Battlescape - out in Early Access

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Posting dev journals here in case anyone's interested.

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In today's developer journal, I will be talking of what I've been working this past month: an improved algorithm for the planetary terrain engine. Why yet-another terrain engine update ? Which results did we obtain ? Find more in this journal, as well as a bunch of new pretty pics !





Why another planetary engine update ?


It's no secret that we've updated the planet engine a couple of times in the past years. Each iteration has seen various improvements, but many problems were left to be addressed at a future time. We decided to address those problems now, since the Kickstarter is coming in a few months and we're planning to release a tech demo to hype it. The interactive tech demo will mostly focus on the planet engine, which I'm sure a lot of people are eagier to test after waiting that many years.. therefore, our tech must be as pretty as possible in order to keep expectations high.

But what are those "problems" I'm talking about ? Well, they can be placed into two categories: performance and quality.

Performance

The new terrain algorithm that we're using is both much more simple, code-wise ( making it easier to configure and maintain / debug ), and runs a lot faster than before. There is less dependance on the CPU, meaning that we're now able to reach the theoretical throughput of geometry processed by a video card ( when it's not fill-rate limited of course, ie. when it's not limited by the amount of shader work.. ). That makes it much more future-proof, and able to use the all potential of the most powerful video cards out here.
Last time I benchmarked our terrain engine, it was topping at 350-400 millions triangles per second, on my Radeon HD 6870. And it isn't even using patch instancing, which we cannot use due to the spherical nature of our surfaces.

Overall, our new implementation is in average x2.5 times faster than our old terrain engine (the one we showed in the tech demo 2010 video).

Quality

Another motivation for changing our algorithm, but not the least, was to fix popping artifacts. The tech demo 2010 was litterally full of those. These happen when a terrain patch gets sub-divided (as the camera zooms in closer to the terrain), therefore suddenly more geometry appears, and the texture gets replaced by another. We now use geomorphing, which means that we morph the geometry between the various level-of-detail levels, and we also blend textures together so that terrain features smoohtly appear, instead of popping "in your face".

In addition to geomorphing, we've also added support for normal mapping for the texture layers (grass, rock, etc..), which improves the lighting a lot in some cases.

Finally, some fractal noise has been added to displace the texture layers. It makes a lot of transitions look more natural.

The art is placeholder. Normal maps were generated from derivating grayscales, so they're not very good. We also have plans in the future to address the tiling patterns you see when a single texture is repeated a lot, but that will have to wait a bit.

None of the pictures in this article have shadows. This is another thing I'm going to reimplement and add back soon. More on that in a future dev journal..

Screenshots

You can click on those pictures to see them in HD. I guess they'd make for some nice wallpapers if you want :smile:












Flavien
 
I wonder what ever happened to that other game that wanted to create an earth and then have people living in it from like 1000BC or something and somehow develop the world.
 
Kevlar said:
I wonder what ever happened to that other game that wanted to create an earth and then have people living in it from like 1000BC or something and somehow develop the world.
It's still just a Youtube video going "We gun maek gem of ervuting!" without any kind of concept of how they were planning on doing it.
 
Ljas said:
Kevlar said:
I wonder what ever happened to that other game that wanted to create an earth and then have people living in it from like 1000BC or something and somehow develop the world.
It's still just a Youtube video going "We gun maek gem of ervuting!" without any kind of concept of how they were planning on doing it.

These guys have been talking pretty for over half a decade now but it seems that they've finally decided to actually bother doing something without waiting for the next century to pass.

I still use these guys as a prime example of how to do things the wrong way as an indie developer....or developer at all.

 
So apparently the website was hacked and turned into a spambot. They're saying the hacker might've had access to the source code, but chances are it wasn't a targeted attack.

While we're waiting for the server to go back online, here's the new I-Novae Studios website and - ****ing finally - here is an update. Especially the street shot looks wonderful.
 
Yeah, me too. It's stupendously ambitious. I mean, even the 'small scale' thing is incredibly ambitious. A seamless solar system with that level of detail is their idea of small scale? How many other games with budgets in the hundreds of millions have that? And the studio is composed of what, two guys and some volunteers that chip in once in a while? I would love to see this succeed but to be honest I'm incredibly skeptical.
 
So the website was down for so long that I completely forgot to check it every now and then. Here's the november 20th blog, and also spoilered below.
tl;dr Stuff has been done, kickstarter postponed to early 2014, pictures still pretty.

Flavien here, reporting. It's been a while since I've posted a new development update, as a lot has been going on behind the scenes. But today, I have a small present for you, which will hopefully satisfy your hunger.. at least for a little while. A new video ! We have been planning to post a new one for a couple months now, but between the website redesign, the forums, the Kickstarter preparations and the daily coding, everything has been crazy. Fortunately, it is now done and I'm proud to present you with our latest video demonstrating tech and features that we've integrated into the I-Novae engine in the past months.



It's still a work-in-progress and some things need adjustments and polishing ( and yeah, we know: vegetation on ground, volumetric clouds and all the good stuff - will come at some point in the future ).

Shadowing

In the past 6 months, I have reimplemented our real time shadowing ( and added support for point lights and spot lights ) and integrated it into the planetary engine. Sunsets in mountaneous areas really look gorgeous now. I've also done a lot of work related to performance and smoothing the shadows, using up to 25 smoothed samples per pixel. This requires a pretty beefy video card ( the scenes in the video were recorded on a Radeon 7870 and usually run at 100-150 fps ) but later on we will offer various quality levels so that older GPUs do not suffer as much.







Gas giants

Gas giants are finally back ! You may remember how I had experimented with them a few years ago, but it was a standalone test. They're now fully integrated into the engine. Unfortunately they're still not volumetric so you cannot fly too deep into the atmosphere, but after the Kickstarter we might revisit them and make them fully volumetric. Each gas giant is composed to multiple layers of clouds, all colorized and animated with different parameters, so they don't just appear as a static background but as a fully living, almost "breathing" entity in the game universe.



Texturing


The procedural texturing algorithms have been revisited and much improved thanks to Kristian. The quality of the texturing at ground level is now as good, or even better, than what you can find in a typical first-person shooter or RPG ! We still have to do some work on the aspect of planets as seen from space, though.

Shorelines and Ocean rendering

If you follow me on twitter, you probably already saw the ocean pictures. Last month I also added foam to the shorelines. There are still some repetition patterns to fix, but I'm pretty happy with the result so far; the waves are entirely animated and properly reflect the sky color. No transparency or refraction yet, but it's on our TODO list.









Rocky Formations and Crater structures

In this article I wanted to show how our procedural algorithms can generate different Earth-like planets that look at the same time both similar and different ( more "alien" ) than our own Earth. They're slightly unrealistic, but who can say what an actual Earth-like planet might look like in reality ? There are these new rock formations, as well as craters of various shapes / sizes. Sometimes they result in "crazy" mountain formations, with large canyons and rifts. It's pretty fun to fly between those cliffs at high speed..













You may even see some natural lakes formed inside some craters if you're a bit lucky:



Kickstarter

As you may already be aware, we've decided to delay our Kickstarter until early 2014. We are aware that this will disappoint some of our fans that were anxiously waiting for it, but ultimately we decided that we were not ready to launch it earlier this year and that we were better off polishing what we have and trying to make a campaign that looks as good and as professional as possible, all while avoiding the critical timing of Christmas - a really bad period for people's savings..

- Flavien
 
That is ridiculously pretty. I just can't wait for someone to actually make a game with it. Or something. Turn it into something more than just a pretty picture generator.
 
New blog post by Keith.
tl;dr version: Kickstarter scheduled end of May/start of June, engine still very pretty.

http://inovaekeith.blogspot.fi/2014/03/update-as-i-head-to-gdc-2014.html said:
Update as I Head to GDC 2014
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Wow I can't believe it's already time for GDC. I fly out to San Francisco tomorrow morning so if you're going to be at GDC and you want to meet up please let me know via twitter! It's been a whole month since I quit my day job to work on I-Novae full-time (again) and it's been a whirlwind of activity. Flavien has been working on putting the finishing touches on our new particle engine and I've been working on tools for our art team to improve their workflow. Originally we were hoping to have launched our Kickstarter by now and unfortunately that isn't going to happen. While our campaign video is really starting to come together, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, it isn't quite ready yet. Specifically:

[list type=decimal]
[*]The art team is putting the finishing touches on the assets for the video. One in particular is taking a significant amount of time but I don't want to divulge too many details because we're keeping it a surprise for the Kickstarter video. In fact we're keeping almost all of the art assets a secret right now which is hard to do because they look great and we can't wait to show everyone!
[*]Our Kickstarter video has been mocked up but we're still tweaking the camera shots and the pacing. It's amazing how much time this takes.
[*]There are still a couple of engine level things we're finishing up. The biggest item on the engine todo list is re-integration of planetary rings. We hope to have that done by the end of next week which will allow us to then focus on polish/shipping.
[*]We have to finalize music and sound fx.
[*]The scripts for our Kickstarter videos still need to be written.
[*]The Battlescape website still needs to be built which will include information on the factions, ships, and an overview of the weapons that will be in the game.
[*]We have to finalize all of our pledge tiers
[*]Lastly we have to write press releases and get all of our marketing materials ready.
[/list]
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Like I've stated before we're planning on releasing one more video before we launch our Kickstarter. If we can finish that by the end of this month, which we've been crunching really hard to do, then we're going to be aiming at launching our Kickstarter towards the end of May or early June. If it looks like we're going to slip again then I'm likely going to start cutting scenes from the Kickstarter video until we arrive at something we can ship. Sometimes I think we're a little too obsessed with perfection.

In the meantime I've attached some new screen shots to this blog post. Please head to our forums and let us know what you think - they're honestly the best way to stay up to date with our progress and the various members of the team check them daily. As always we greatly appreciate your support and we can't wait to get this Kickstarter out the door!
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It's a cold day in hell right now. :razz:

A pity they couldn't get this out before Star Citizen became a thing, better of the two game concepts but didn't have the celebrity big name to excuse them selling vaporware like Star Citizen did.

Probably the first Kickstarter I'll actually back though. Hopefully once the game comes out it'll show enough promise to continue development with post release success, doubt they'll get much past their $300,000 goal.
 
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