Yesterday's news was obviously an April Fool's.. But like last year, a lot of people thought it was true. I must say, posting it in the 31th didn't help, but in the GMT timezone it was near midnight and I didn't want to wait another 12h to post it, which would have been in the middle of the 1st April day for me.

The werewolves comment was a funny reference to this thread, but you had to follow it to understand it.

Rest assured that I have more backup copies than just 4.

Most of the events that I described had a part of truth ( yes, including the cops chasing the thiefs in the woods at 3 am. This really happened ). The timing was not though. The probability that all of that happened the same day, on April 1, is ridiculously low. I'd rather win at lottery.

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..

I would like to wish a happy new year to everybody. Hopefully 2008 will be "the" year of Infinity, and we are hoping to have a small part of the game done and playable for alpha testing by 2009. Stay tuned!

In other news, Steve Breslin has joined the dev team as the new story/background writer. He works as a teacher at the university of Buffalo. We hope that he will be able to bring the storyline to a whole new level, and give it the life and the quality that a game such as Infinity deserves.

We are also still looking for a volunteer to texture all the spaceships in the medium/large size category. Using simple mapping methods and existing texture packs, it's mostly an easy ( but relatively boring ) "modeler" job, not requiring any particular knowledge/skills in actual 2D texturing/painting. 3ds max 7 or above is mandatory and you need to be proficient at it, due to the way we "post-process" the models in our art pipeline. If you are interested, please contact me or leave a message in the contributions forum. Thank you.

"It was decided in turn that those individuals whose body and mind most exemplified the fundaments of Harmony would be elated to a special status among the Centaurus. The Atriachs they where called, chosen rulers six times six in number, and charged with the duty of leading the Centaurus civilization by virtue of their wisdom and courage. Thirty six men and women stood aligned beneath the heavens, each six appointed to a star. Together they formed The Circle of the Empyreal [COE]."

This is an extract of the latest version of the timeline and exegesis written by Dyoto. The exegesis is a collection of short stories describing particular events of the timeline. Betelgeuze has produced an illustrated PDF that you can download here:

http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/Media/Docs/Timeline&Exegesis.pdf

Note that this is not a final version of the timeline, and is still subject to potential changes and fixes.

We are happy to welcome Kristian ´spAce´ Ågrén to the development team. If you follow the work submitted to the contributions forum, you've probably already seen some of his very high quality work, including a generic textures pack, many turrets models, the Kasparov ship, and even some musics.. we all feel he will be an invaluable addition to the team. He will also be helping out on the mapping and texturing of some of the bigger ships.

Warning: the following was our April Fool's joke - apparently a few people have fallen for it, so I must add this disclaimer. It should not be taken seriously!

Dear community,

This is with great sadness that I must announce a bad news ( sort of ).

We have decided to review the promised features list and to cut some of them to be able to complete the project in a realistic time frame, and to differenciate us even more from the competition. The following list is not exhaustive, but here are some of the most important changes:

- the game will no longer be a MMO, but exclusively solo.
- planetary landing is removed, it was all pre-rendered in Terragen and would look crap in real-time anyway.
- in order to keep performance up, it will no longer be twitch based, but play as point & click. Newtonian physics is overrated and playing the view upside-down is dangerous for your mental health anyway..
- the game will now be wholy jumpgate-based. We thought that the freedom of the previously-planed hyperdrive would confuse newbies too much.
- we'll remove collision detection.. nobody likes to bump into objects.
- there will only be around 5000 star systems, and not a full galaxy. They will only feature one sun and a couple of random planets, and they won't be moving on their orbits anymore. It was causing too many designs problems (what if you were taken in sandwich between two colliding planets?).
- you will no longer be able to acquire a station, a city or a planet. You will never have enough credits to afford those, so it was wasted time to implement them.
- we'll introduce a system of races and skills to make the game more interesting, because we all know that a game without those will be boring. 5 races will be available: the Rrama (directly inspired from A.C.Clarke of course!), the Iradlac, the Etnellag, the Evoj and the Ratamnim.

To reflect those changes, we also decided to rename the game. We have settled on a new name.. let's all wish a warm welcome to "Adam Offline" !

I would like to wish a warm welcome to Richard Woods ( aka Crayfish ) as our new community manager. Rich will answer basic e-mails, players questions/support, contact websites for promotional purposes and generally, handle PR ( public relationships ). His e-mail address is support@fl-tw.com, but if you send your e-mails to infinity@fl-tw.com as before, I will forward them to him if he can answer them directly.

Note: You should continue to use infinity@fl-tw.com as the main contact address for anything that is development, business or technical/engine related.

As you might have noticed, we are currently experiencing server issues. The website is getting more and more popular, and is consuming too much resources for the current server. We will be moving to a new server soon, so expect some downtime ( maybe up to a few hours ) tomorrow. Thank you for your understanding.

Edit: the move has been delayed to next Monday.

We spent a few days to generate new renders of all the ships that have been modeled for Infinity so far ( official developers or normal contributors ). So far, a total of around 65 ships (small, medium or large) and vehicles. The renders show the relative scales of those ships, and come in three versions at different zooms ( notice how the small ships appear as dots in the bottom area of the larger renders ):

Large ships
Medium ships
Small ships

A few of those ships are still a work in progress and are lacking details, and they're of course not textured yet. Also note that those ships won't necessarily all make it into the final game, our final decision will depend on the quality of the models and their coherency / style.

The second Corp Wars event will start in a few days, on the 12/13 January, and will take place in the latest version of the Infinity Combat Prototype. If you are interested in participating, please check the following thread on the forums:

http://fl-tw.com/InfinityForums/viewtopic.php?t=2934

A patch ( 2.2 ) will be available with minor fixes ( crash bug on Nvidia 8800s fixed, a dedicated server, additional server commands as well as the possibility to select the team you want to join ).

A new video trailer made by Kaboom22 has been released, showing off the Infinity Combat Prototype 2.1. You can view it here:

on Youtube
on Google videos

JoeB has left the development team to concentrate on his university studies. Wish him luck ! But don't be afraid, he'll stay around and continue to work on Infinity, just at a less steady rate. Kaboom22 has joined the dev team to replace him and will continue his work as a modeler. See his recent work on the Galactos-class carrier for example. Two other people ( names undecided yet ) will get added to the dev team in the upcoming weeks too.

Many people reported problems to run the combat prototype version 1.0. Most of the time, this is coming from a lack of OpenAL 1.1 drivers; some people also seem to get a network bug called "Invalid RTT". Both of those should be fixed in the combat prototype 1.1 patch, to be installed in the same directory than the full 1.0 install.

If you do not have one of the two above-mentionned problems, 1.1 is optional and will not change anything for you.

The space combat prototype has been released last sunday, and has been a half-success, half-failure. Despite the delays, the frequent crashes and the server disconnections, a few people were able to play and have fun with the game. If you are curious to see how it looked/played, head over the Screens and videos thread on the Testing forum.

A new major version ( with more in-game content ), along with a few surprises, are going to be released next sunday ( 14th May 2006 ) in the evening around 7 PM GMT. This next version should be a lot more stable than the previous ones, so if you didn't get to play yet, this is your chance.

The space combat prototype is scheduled for release today, at 3 PM GMT. Instructions to download the client and more informations will be posted on the newly-opened Testing and Feedback forum. Keep in mind that the combat prototype is not the game; its goal is to test a few sub-systems, stress the physics and networking, and see if the twitch-based gameplay works well. Expect the worse ( bugs, crashes, etc.. ).

I have added the ability to comment the news. A link to the forum topic and comments is now displayed on the news page in the top-right corner of each news. Please let me know if there is any problem.

I would like to welcome "officially" two new people to the development team: JoeB, who's successfully completed his first 3D model ( a light frigate ) and who will be working on more models; and Russell Morahan ( Dyoto Orion ) who will work as a storywriter. His goal will be to develop the storyline, the game universe, its history and write descriptions and quests to be used later in-game. Welcome guys!

Today, the limit of 100,000 page views has been hit. I would like to thank everybody for their support. I am planning to release a new video to show off the space station in the coming 1 or 2 weeks, so stay tuned! And do not forget that you can follow the development from day-to-day ( often with exclusive pictures ) in the development journal on the forums.

Thanks to Starbrow, i have updated the web site with a new header image, and modified the layout of the menu a bit. Some details and content has been modified here and there, too.

A few days ago i promised to post a video showing seamless planetary transitions. It's not ready yet, but to make you patient until i fix all the bugs and implement detail textures, i've uploaded a small "teaser" video: a panoramic view of a valley, surrounded by mountains.

Get it here ( 3.7 Mb DIVX4 )

The official forums are now opened. You do not have to register to post, so feel free to leave comments or questions.

Official forums

So, it's been approximately a week since the website has been opened. Thanks to gamedev.net, i've been featured as the first image of the day, and have reached close to 10 000 page views.

I'd like to comment about three points often returning:

1. The DS9 space station: is only a temporary test model i've found on the net. It will shortly be replaced.

2. The starfield: a lot of people like it, but it seems like many others would prefer a more realistic, black space. Rest assured that not all the game will be like that. Depending on the distance to the core of the galaxy, space will be more or less dark. At large distances like our solar system, it will look pretty realistic. Maybe i can also add an option to disable the "artistic" starfield.

3. The scepticism: i completely understand (and expected) this. It's a big, ambitious project, and honnestly it might never see the light of the day. But i'm no beginner in programming, so hopefully it won't stay vaporware for too long.

Also note that on the media page, the screenshots are showing flat planets; this is because the terrain prototype has not been integrated yet. That's what i'm currently working on.

This news page had a small problem when viewed with Firefox; the image and text of the first news appeared in a scrolling area. Hopefully this is now fixed.

A forum should be opening soon.