Infinity

[Rockymods]

As some may have noticed I have a link to Infinity in my signature. Some may have checked it out, some not. I'll go into more detail about it here though.

It's a MMORPG space game. You may hear about this all the time, they look cool but you'll never play it for this and that reason no matter how fascinating it is to see those movies of them, however when you paly them they are quite boring (in my oppinion) *cough* eve *cough*

All other space games that I know of have that free roam camera where you select something and push this button and this and that then you start shooting. It's not like you are flying a F22 at all. With infinity this is a whole new case, you are the ship that uses twitch based combat using your mouse to aim and thrusters to move about in either first person or 3rd. The camera is always fixed but you can move it around your ship however it only gives you a disadvantage when you do this, it's mainly for looks.
Not everyone wants to read text so let me explain some pictures.

These pictures below are from a recent dev update how IA (infinity admin, lead developer) has finally come up with anti-aliasing on multiple render targets. He talks about lighting and frequencies and much mumbo jumbo to make your head spin, but in the end it always creates a remarkable result.


All pictures, High res
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_1.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_2.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_3.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_4.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_5.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_6.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_7.jpg
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... pace_8.jpg


An older dev update shows a comparison from an actual NASA shot and his low orbit view, (missing clouds)



Enough of how it looks though, what else is to it than twitch based combat? The main answer to that is the sheer scale of the game. The engine generates stars upon stars with many huge planets, planets that can actually be built upon with buildings where AI takes up and creates cities. Maybe instead of being industrial you can be a pirate and raid those cargo ships for plunder. There is so much more to this game that I have not said, go to the gameplay section of their forums to learn much more about what people want and what will happen if you are wondering. Even the IA will post to some things, unlike other game developers.

I should also this is like a homebrew game, meaning that it's not being made by some huge team like Bungie. IA has to go to work then come home and work on it still, he has other developers though across countries. They have a contributions thread where most of the action of the content happens, I'm sure Argon could create a ship for them

Tell me what you think! and if anyone is up to it we'll play the prototype of course you'll never last!

[DoorM4n]

This sounds incredible...
I'm a bit confused in a few of your explanations.
Is this an online game that is similar to the World of Warcraft experience?
A huge online server with people doing and building their own protagonist into some sort of ranking system. (I haven't actually played World of Warcraft, as a matter of fact) :p

The pictures are unbelievable and make the game seem jaw-dropping.

[Kirk]

That looks frickin' incredible. Best part is indeed the fact that it's not selecting and moving.. #1 reason I can't play space MMORPGS. Graphics look amazing too. I might have to check it out come 2009 or so...

[Remnant Samurai]

is it free or do u have to pay? cause it looks freaking awsum im looking for a free good - looking online game for free (im a cheap ass lol)

[XZodia]

That is what a MMORPG space game should be. I wantz 2 playz >_>

[Rockymods]

I haven't qutie got a chance to reread my post but you can download the combat prototype for free (released quite a while ago though so things are not up to date) When the game is completed it will have a monthly fee much like that of WoW
Edit: Let me describe what you can do in the prototype.

Sorry for the wall of text...

You have about 6-9 ships at your disposal to choose from. All cost "credits" 3 of them are 50/100 and you cannot go below 100 credits. As you kill ships you can gain these credits, or you could take out a mining ship and go to some astroids, harvest some stuff, return to the battleship and deposit. This is the best way, however it can be frustrating as ships are always on the look out for you as you are easy targets. No worries though it's not hard to mine. Even better is that when you target a ship and they go behind something like a asteroid, you cannot find them as their position becomes invisible. If you are really in a bind and are on a big rock there are even holes you can fly into and many different path ways to go around in to easily lose your pursuer After obtaining some credits, you can choose bigger and badder ships to blow your enemies up. The bigger the ship the harder to control, but the more guns. They have auto targeting for these behemoths however you are still in full control of the ship, you still control throttle and steer by using the mouse (strafing is done on keyboard). What I love about big ships is the ability to piss them off in smaller ones by taking out their shields then destroying one or two of their engines. It's near impossible to steer that way. Big ships such as the battleship are controlled by AI, but players will be able to use these ships in the actual game. Some things seem a little generic or misfitting like the lasers appear to be very far away from the ship when firing. Just be sure to remember that the final product won't like this in combat, this is only a prototype and not even an alpha. 100% guaranteed to keep this form of gameplay style though

and here is a show of his on a rocky planet physics, along with actual asteroids in an asteroid belt lol

[Rockymods]

No interest?

Anyway here are some new screenies of the terrain engine IA has been working on. You saw the orbit views, but here are the views when you actually decend to the planet

This is without Anti-Aliasing.

Nitpicking


Terrain texturing, sun shafts / god rays, vegetation ( not procedural, modeled and textured by SpAce ), etc...

I may spend more time on land than in space!

[Aumaan Anubis]

This game is obviously an April Fool's Joke.

Rendering all that, for thousands of players, no way.


Must be a divine act.

Praise be to God!

[Rockymods]

IA plays nasty april fools... Here's this years lol

IBL: Incredibly Bad Luck (tm) (Mon Mar 31, 2008 3:28 pm) by InfinityAdmin - 76 comments

Unfortunately, I have a bad news to announce.

Sometimes, things that you thought would never happen, do happen. Today, I learned it the hard way.

I'm a pretty paranoid developer. I always keep 4 copies of my work, as backups, in case something happens. In the worst case, only a few days or weeks of work can be lost. Unless.. fate decides otherwise.

When I waked up this morning, I had a bad surprise. My home computer's external USB drive, which I had for 3 years now, had died. I was storing all the Infinity source code and data files on it. Fortunately, I had a backup. Every few days I transfer that backup to my work computer, which is in a different physical location ( in case my appartment burns, or a horde of werewolfs invade it, or something.. ). My workplace is in Brussels too, but unless a nuclear bomb explodes on Brussels, that should be safe, isn't it ? So since I had many backups, I wasn't too worried. Except...

When I arrived at work this morning, I found that everybody was already here, and in a great panic. Apparently, during the night some thiefs broke in our offices, and since they weren't too tech-savy, they didn't steal the most expensive hardware, but they went directly for our work computers. The bastards! But the most funny thing is, during the night, the office concierge saw some suspicious movements and called the cops. They arrived soon after, and chased the thiefs in the woods. Those last ones probably couldn't escape with all the stolen material, so they threw it away over a fence, to run faster. I don't know if they were finally captured or not, but what I do know is that my computer, on which there was the backup, is badly broken. But fear not! I still have backups. So I still wasn't too worried ( although a bit confident than the first time. It really smelled fishy ). Except...

I also have a backup on my pocket USB drive. It's only 1 GB, so I don't backup as often as on my other computers. A few weeks of lost work, too bad, but not catastrophic either. So I looked in my appartment for the USB key, I was pretty sure I had it in hand a few days ago, but couldn't find it.. until I realized it stayed in my trousers. And I had just washed it yesterday. Guess what ? It didn't survive either.

By now, I was really in panic. But I still had one more chance. One last backup, a .zip archive of the whole project. The one I upload every once in a while on my US server.. in case of a problem ( asteroid fall ? ) in Brussels. So I was saved. The chance that the US server had died during the night was just.. zero.

And I found my file back ! Ouf. Saved. So I quickly copied it to one of my hard drives ( one that didn't burn ), and started to decompress it. A dialog popped in. Please enter the password. Ah, true, it was password protected, of course. But what was the damn password ? No way to remember it, I always choose passwords that are a random mix of weird symbols. But I had noted this password somewhere.. in a file. Where was that file again ?

Then I started to cry when I realized. You see it coming. The file was on my USB drive.

...Tomorrow will be another day, I'm sure it was a nightmare, and I'll wake up..

[Remnant Samurai]

Bumpish

Demo(ish) Download:
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infini ... %202.2.exe

[neodos]

That game is gonna be sick their engine is looking pretty good, i may make some artwork and models for them.

[Gary]

This game is obviously an April Fool's Joke.

Rendering all that, for thousands of players, no way.

If it's clilent side, then only the player's computer has to render the scene, the game server just tells the other players where they and any game objects.(Something like that...)

~XZ~Indeed, this is what MMORPG's do

[Rocky]

The prototype is very old now. Still fun though

[Dragonfire]

That landscape model looks......amazing

[Remnant Samurai]

I still can't get the prototype to work still

[Rocky]

What does it do?

[Remnant Samurai]

Nevermind it works now