Welcome to Infinity - The Quest for Earth

Extracted from Infinity Universe official web site

http://www.infinity-universe.com


Overview



Welcome to Infinity.

Infinity is a massively multiplayer online game set in a persistent futuristic universe, currently in development.

Infinity features an advanced procedural engine allowing for a seemingly infinite galaxy of unique star systems and planets to discover and explore, including seamless planetary landing. Infinity offers new and existing players an extensive storyline following the complex and often intricate political and social interactions of hundreds of corporations, organizations, and reputation groups through the games three primary factions: the Centauran, the Deltan Federation, and the Star Fold Confederacy.



Infinity employs an open-ended world design, in which a player can control everything from a small shuttle to massive military dreadnaught, a single mining operation to an entire vast corporate empire, all without having to change characters. A completely player-skill based game design, Infinity sheds the need for character classes and skills by embracing self-balance over arbitrary limitation, allowing players to choose their own path to make their name across the galaxy.

Although all players are expected to act in concordance with their personal motivations, Infinity is not a traditional role playing game. The actions of a single player greatly affect the evolution of their character. Your character might grow from their humble beginnings as a young military officer to become the master of a vast corporate empire, or even a wanted mercenary and pirate.

The game mechanics do not emphasize any particular game play style - combat, trade, exploration, social relationships, you are free to choose your own path and goals. Players can choose from a number of interesting character backgrounds that serve as your characters personal history, circumstances, and setting in the Infinity universe to help ground new players in their new boundless horizon of stars. The only limit is your own imagination!




Combat in Infinity functions in real-time, utilizing Newtonian physics to control the fluid realistic movements of player ships and objects. Where the outcome of combat is determined by your own intelligence and reflexes. Not the level and class of another player!

Like all massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, you will connect to an online server shared by thousands of other players at any time. But, unlike other MMOs, the Infinity universe is an entirely persistent. The actions of your characters do not stop when you log off - as the actions of your characters continue to progress and evolve, even while you are offline.

By utilizing the advanced procedural techniques of the I-Novae Engine, Infinity has unshackled itself from the limitations of its forbearers, allowing for the dynamic generation of countless star systems and planets, each unique and awaiting to be discovered by a player. Drawing upon plausible astronomic scales and distances of stellar objects, the precise orbital path of every celestial body is modeled, as each planet and star moves continuously within the galaxy. Allowing players to glimpse the double sunrise of a binary star system on some distant rocky world, to the total eclipse of a tiny moon orbiting a massive gas giant thousands of light years from your home planet - every vista, every horizon is wholly unique in Infinity.

Gameplay



Open ended gameplay: Unlike many other games, Infinity does not force you to play in any specific way. Infinity lacks both races and classes, and does not utilize skills in the traditional sense. You can play as a merchant, trade, mine ore from asteroids or minerals on planets, explore the galaxy, do scientific research, create your own industrial corporation, or, if you are more into action, play as a pirate … at your own risk.



Real-time fighting ( twitch based ): Most MMOs today use a semi-turn based, timed "cooldown" approach to combat. In Infinity, you are directly controlling your ships movements and weaponry in a twitch-based way, targeting your every movement. Your own skills and dexterity as a player make the difference, not a list of stats or skills on your character sheet!



Persistent universe: Infinity is a massively, multiplayer online game. The universe is completely persistent. When you are not playing online, the game does not stop. Other players continue to play, your characters actions within the universe continue to evolve, and new things are always happening 24h/24.



Exploration: Players are not restricted as to where they can explore. Land upon and explore every square centimeter of any solid stellar object you encounter, discovering the oceans, ridges, craters, and mountains dynamically generated by the Infinity engine, even active flora and fauna on biologically active planets. In addition to the more natural scenery, players can establish player-developed cities and interact within the numerous existing NPC cities, in and among the hundreds of other unique details that can exist on every planet.



Storyline and missions: Infinity offers a wide range of missions available in space stations or cities through the engines intricate contact and reputation system. But sometimes you might want to try something more challenging, by engaging in the core missions and objectives of the Infinity storyline. Unlike normal missions, the core missions and objectives of the Infinity storyline are unique, and can only be accomplished by a single player (or a group of players). Once a core mission or objective is completed, it disappears forever from the game and is no longer available to other players. Be the first to complete a core missions or objective to earn fame, credits, rewards ... and much more.

Features



Procedural universe: Procedural programming is a technique that allows the game engine generate objects within game space on-the-fly, in real-time and on request, rather than manually building everything beforehand. Because of this, the generated universe can be absolutely huge, unhindered by the bulky information structures of previous games. In Infinity, the engine allows for the creation of billions of worlds and millions of star systems - the majority of which will never explored by any player, but that await each adventurous soul.



Newtonian physics: The Infinity engine employs a rigid-body physics system used to simulate the realistic movements of all in-game objects. However, to reduce the stress and boredom of long-distance travel, such journeys will be controlled by each player's individual ship navigation computer, simplifying the redundancy and tediousness of long-range travel. But, even when players engage in combat or manual control, players can choose to have their system automatically adjust amount their ships thruster and inertia to increase the fluidity of movement. Even under manual control mode with navigational assistance deactivated, it will be very easy to travel in space, land on a planet, or dock at any station.



Seamless planetary engine: The Infinity engine features a completely seamless experience. You can fly in space and land on planets, traveling directly from deepest ranges of space to the rolling hills and sharp mountainous peaks of a distant planet fluidly, without any loading screens, timer bars, or unnatural transitions. If you can see it, you can fly to it !



Astrophysics: Unlike most other games, Infinity respects the relative scales and distances one could find in space. Realistic orbits are used with each individual planet and celestial object moving in real-time. Many systems have multiple stars with a complete hierarchy of planets, moons, and asteroids orbiting around each other - moons and asteroids in orbit of planets, which in turn orbit stars or other large celestial objects like stars, which in turn may orbit even more massive objects, like black holes and supergiant stars.

Gameplay

How does interstellar travel work ? Are there jumpgates ?

Some jumpgates will be available between the main trading routes. However, all the ships can be equiped with an hyper-propulsion system. You can choose your destination on the galaxy map and jump there (providing you have the resources). Jumping will not be instantaneous. It will be very fast to jump to a local system, but jumping to the other side of the galaxy will take from minutes to hours (in real time).


Can I own multiple ships ? A space station ? A city ? A planet... ?

Yes. You will actually be able to acquire any object in the game world. You will be able to hire non-player characters to control your ships and follow your orders. You will be able to move space stations and set the tax rates, acquire some buildings in a city, or if you're getting very rich, a whole planet.


What type of missions will be available ?

The list will be very long; most of the missions will be generated dynamically depending on the system you're in and what you've been doing. Trade, hunt, mine, escort, scientific research, rescue, political, tourism, spy missions, and a lot more. In addition, an in-game interface will be available to propose your own services to the other players, or to non-player characters.


What happens when your ship is destroyed ? Is there perma-death ?

When your ship is destroyed, your physical character will escape in a capsule pod. Perma-death does not exist; however, you will be unable to do anything until you are rescued, either by paying a non-playing character (against a fee), either by waiting for a player to pick your capsule up.


Is the game focused on combat ?

The game is open-ended and is not focused on combat at all, although combat and action is certainly a possible (and viable) way to play. It may not be easy to play as a pirate, though, and players will be free to explore other domains (trading, mining, doing business, exploring unknown worlds, etc.. ).


Is there a storyline ? How important will it be in the game ?

Yes, there will be a storyline, and it will be pretty advanced for an online game. Players will be able to influence the plot or attend "unique" events. One of our developers is dedicated to the story development. To avoid spoiling the story, nothing more can be said, except that the central plot will revolve around a mysterious planet, Earth.


Is it possible to walk around your ship or in cities/stations/planets ?

No, this is not planned at the moment. It could add some depth to the gameplay, but would need a lot more resources and in-game content than a small independant team can realistically produce.

We prefer to focus on space and planet surfaces and ship-to-ship fights/gameplay. Some vehicles (flying cars, hovercrafts, shuttles, etc..) might be added later, too.


What will the combat look like ? Twitch ? Point and click ?

Combats will be real-time, twitch (action) based, much like in a flight simulator or a first-person shooter. You will be in full control of your ship.


How many races, classes, skills and levels will there be ?

None. The game will be very much role-playing oriented in philosophy and soul, but there will be no hard defined classes, skills or levels to limit you. Your own skills as a human will make the difference, not those of your avatar.


Will it be possible to have multiple players board on a same ship?

As a passenger, surely. In an active position, like one player controlling movements and other players on turrets, that's a possibility that we are seriously considering.

Universe FAQ

How many solar systems are present in Infinity ?

A lot. Since they are generated procedurally on-the-fly, they cannot easily be counted. But we tried to respect realistic numbers. Expect a galaxy with up to hundreds of billions of worlds. You will not be able to visit them all in your whole lifetime, even if you were to spend only one second per world!


How realistic is the universe ?

We do not like the word "realistic"; We prefer the word "believable", or coherent. We are primarily doing a game, so we're not interested in making a realistic game for the sole purpose of being realistic. However, when something realistic is fun, we will use it. In particular, the game universe recreates a wide range of celestial bodies, including many types of suns (sometimes binary or trinary systems), planet types, moons, asteroids, nebulaes, black holes, etc.. with believable orbits (moons orbit their planet, themselves orbiting a sun). Scales are also realistic: you will not find a planet of a few kilometers radius in Infinity. Our approach is pretty close to a planetarium software, like Celestia.

Will it be possible to land on planets ?

Yes, this is actually one of the main interests of the game. Expect a lot of missions on planets. However, the game will not feature non-vehicle gameplay like walking with an avatar on planets or inside buildings.

How is the transition between space and ground level done ?

It is completely seamless, with no loading times - actually, what you see from space is really what you see when you land. This is one of the key technologies behind the game engine.

What kind of details can you find at ground level ?

We are trying to make planet landing and exploration as interesting and as detailed as possible. For an Earth-like planet, you should be able to find oceans, clouds, mountains, hills, vegetation.. and much more!

Will the space backgrounds have flashy colors?

This will depend on your location in the galaxy. Near the outer spiral arms, the space backgrounds will be pretty dark and will not contain flashy colored backgrounds.

Inside nebulae or closer to the center of the galaxy, the backgrounds will be brigther and feature more fancy / colorful effects.


Will there be alien civilizations or lifeforms ?

No. You may find traces of ancient civilizations on some planets, ruins and other artefacts, but there will be no intelligent alien civilization that you can meet or interact with. We think that evil aliens are cliché and have been overdone in games, and that focusing on the political aspects of an expanding human civilization would lead to a richer game.

Also, keep in mind that as indy developers, we can produce a limited amount of content due to our limited resources.

It may be possible to find non-intelligent alien lifeforms, such as vegetation or animal life, though. We are not sure yet if those aspects of the game will be included in the first release, or later as an expansion.

Technology FAQ

How can you fit so much data on a CD ?

The trick is: we are not storing any star-system or planetary data at all! What we are storing are algorithms and code to generate this data in real-time, as requested by the game server. This is similar to what 64k demo coders do, and this technique is called procedural programming.


If data is procedurally generated, won't each player see a different result? what happens if I come back to the same location weeks later?

There is a lot of confusion on the Internet about what procedural generation really is about.

Procedural generation is not at all the same than random generation. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite: it's all about recreating the same data providing the same inputs. "Seeds" numbers are given to objects, so as long as an object has the same seed than before, it will be recreated exactly like before, with the exact same details, down to the millimeter level.

Synchronization between multiple players is ensured by making the server transfer the same object's seed to all players who are able to see or interact with this object. So all players will see the same procedurally generated object, like a planet, with the same details.


Won't planets all look the same ?

With billions of planets to explore in the galaxy, it is true that a lot of those planets will share a similar aspect. However, each planet will also be unique and have its own characteristics.

We will try to add as much variety as we can to our procedural algorithms to ensure that exploration is fun and rewarding.


Does the engine make use of multi-core machines ? 64 bits ?

Some parts of the engine, especially the procedural generation, are heavily multi-threaded. A dual core machine is highly recommended although not strictly required.

The engine will also take advantage of more than 2 cores, although at this point, the benefits will be smaller.

A native 64-bits version isn't planned for the moment, but we will consider it if there are enough requests. In any case, there will be no problem to run the game on 64-bits systems.


What about vegetation on planets ? Will it exist ? Will it be procedural ? What about cities ?
There will be procedural vegetation on planets, but the textures (with some exceptions) will probably be hand painted. Cities will play an important role on the game (much like space stations) but buildings will be created by artists, and only assembled into cities procedurally.

Will I need a powerful system to play ?

A medium-end system ( at the time the game is released ) should be enough to run it in medium settings at more than 30 fps.

A high-end system is recommended for a better experience, and pushing the graphical settings to the maximum. For more informations, have a look at the system requirements in the DOWNLOAD menu.

Older systems might not be able to run the game at all, though. Especially if they are more than 3 or 4 years old. You might have to think about upgrading your computer in that case.

Development FAQ

How many developers are working on the game ?

At the moment the core team is formed of 8 members plus I (Flavien Brebion) as the project leader/programmer. Infinity also works on a community contributions model where anybody with 3D modeling, texturing or musical skills can help out. We have received more than a hundred contributions so far. For more informations, please see our contributions forum.

Where can I download this game ?

Infinity is still in development. You cannot download the game at that time. We have however released a combat prototype (pretty much an independent game using the same engine) as a test.

How long will the development last ? When are you planning to release it ?

The official release date is "when it's done". It is hard to give a release date, or even simply an estimation, as everybody is working on the game during their spare time. We are hoping to launch alpha testing during 2009, but nothing is set in stone.


Is this game vaporware ?

Infinity is not vaporware: it is in development. We have already released a combat prototype to test and show some of our core concepts, and you can follow our regular progress on the development journal. We are trying to release updates as frequently as possible.

Since when has the game been in development?

Development of the planetary prototype started in 2004, but at this time, the engine or the game were not started yet. Those started in end 2004 and 2005. It was a one-man project at this time.

The website officially opened for the first time in september 2005. Developers and contributors joined in the development process during 2006.


MMO ? Are you crazy ? Nobody ever completes these games..

This is generally true, although there are a few exceptions. It is very, very hard for an independant MMO project to succeed. But we feel we have one advantage compared to the competition; most projects fail because of the enormous amount of resources needed to make in-game content. Think about it: your typical fantasy RPG requires hundreds of buildings/props, thousands of items, dozens of characters and monsters with their animations.. and for all of these, you need meshes and textures..

But, in Infinity, we generate most of the content procedurally. Yes, there will still be many 3D models and textures created by artists, but the amount of work is one or two orders of magnitude lower. This also allows us to rely less on other people to complete some work. Finally, the in-place contributions system is working pretty well so far and we'll probably have almost a hundred ships playable at release time.


Will there be a Linux port ? A Macintosh port ?

A Linux port might come later after release, if there are enough requests. A Macintosh port is unlikely. It might be possible to run the game at decreased performance through virtual machines / emulators.

Will I be able to play off-line, or is this game only online ?

Although we are currently developing Infinity as an MMO, we plan to release a special version to play and train off-line. Most of the features will be fully available in that version, but it'll play more as a sand-box game without the story.

Will the game be free ? Or if not, how much will it cost ? Will it have a monthly fee ?

This is currently unknown at that time. Running an MMO is expensive. It might be possible to play for free for a while or without some advanced features, reserved to paying customers ( premium memberships ), or to support the game through sponsors/advertisement, but nothing is set in stone.

I'm a developer. Can I help you ?

If you are a talented 2D/3D artist or musician with a lot of free time, and ready to work as a volunteer (or contract-based if you're a professional), please contact me or look at the contributions forum. We are not looking for additional programmers though.

I'm a player. Can I submit some ideas ? Will you listen ?

Sure. Ideas are always welcome. However, this does not mean we will implement them, but simply consider it. We have a vision for the game, which might not fit exactly yours. And that's fine! Everybody has a different vision of what their perfect game should be. But we are not going to include some ideas that we consider too different from what we're trying to achieve, or simply that would require too much work for little benefits. The best way to express your ideas is to post on the forums.

I'm not a developer, but I'm willing to contribute..

We are always looking for new talents. If you are willing to contribute, please read the sticky posts in the contributions forum.

I have no development skills. Is there anything else I can do to help ?
Spread the word! Infinity isn't a very well known project at the moment. Word-of-mouth is an excellent way to make the project known to the masses.