How we Take Screen Shots

Today's blog post will actually be a guest post from one of our artists, Dan Hutchings (@HutchingsINovae), about the process he goes through when creating our screen shots. Dan has taken some stunningly beautiful screen shots with the I-Novae Engine and without further ado I'll pass the podium to him:

"This week I’ve decided to share a bit about the screenshot taking process and provide some behind the scenes insight on the state of the engine. The I-Novae engine is becoming quite user friendly, the tools allow one to control the visual mood and tone of a scene without having to make calculations or adjust code, which is great for a free flowing artistic process.

A screenshot can look quite different just by adjusting the star’s temperature (which translates to colour) from red dwarfs to blue giants. Once a nice view has been selected for capture I can begin tweaking the scene settings to find something that looks appealing. Lower temperatures give reds and oranges whereas higher temperatures produce lovely blues and whites. Personally I prefer the purple sunsets and blue hues.

I control the visual depth of the image by adjusting atmospheric scattering such as density, thickness, and refraction to produce a thick haze or thin veil of an atmosphere. The ambiance of the shot is further modified by toggling the oceans; I can capture a barren dry landscape with a glowing red giant or a frozen, water-less, irradiated world quietly orbiting a white dwarf star. A lot of character and back-story can creep into a shot as it develops.

Now that the general mood has been established it’s time to hone in on the details. Too many stars in the sky? That can be resolved by changing the location of the system within its galaxy. Moving out of the galaxy will reduce the number of visible stars in the shot whereas moving it near the galactic center will fill the sky with points of light. Each star you see represents another solar system in the galaxy, I could fly there if I had the time, however I’ll wait for FTL drives to be integrated before attempting that stunt.

Currently our clouds are low resolution, two dimensional, static, and lack variation. They’re only experimental and the final solution is still under development as a low priority feature. Despite these limitations I manage to pull off some spectacular shots from ground level where they don’t look as bad.

We have received many questions surrounding the future of clouds and whether or not they’ll be a feature in Battlescape. We do want to see volumetric clouds in the engine as well as lush vegetation covering our planets - and more! The current issue is time. Core features come first and beauty treatments are lower priority for now.

There are still many engine features that our current set of (public) screenshots haven’t shown along with an array of game content yet to be published. As the remaining features are integrated and polished, and once they’re ready for showcase, you can be sure to see them featured in future postings.

Taking these weekly screenshots has become a “spare time” task of mine. I enjoy searching for great shots that demonstrate what the I-Novae planetary engine can produce. I love creating the images and I get to enjoy reading the comments once they've been published ;) Let me know what you like or even what you’d like to see more of in the future!

Cheers,
Dan"

Musings of an Independent Game Developer

Being an independent game developer is easily one of the greatest challenges I, and I think probably most everyone on the I-Novae team, have ever undertaken. Many members of the dev team have been working for close to 10 years on this company and to our great astonishment some community members have stuck around with us for about that long as well. Independent game development is, in many regards, a beautiful and rewarding thing. We have ultimate creative freedom and everything we've been doing over the last decade has been in pursuit of our collective dream game. That being said there are many times where it has felt like a 10 year death march. While people are generally supportive of our endeavor we occasionally get comments like this one:

@INovaeStudios Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, No Man Sky even Limit Theory came way after you but will release b4 you. What's wrong w/ you?
— iGeennn (@igeennn) January 25, 2015

When I see comments like the one by @IGeennn I'm always slightly amused. As it turns out I was wondering the exact same thing but in the reverse - what has taken you so long to build your own planetary tech and release a game? Please hurry up because, frankly, I'm tired and would prefer it if you could just do it for me. As of the time of this writing the I-Novae team consists of 11 people working in various capacities. In the last 10 years we have collectively invested, through both money spent as well as lost wages due to working full-time unpaid, over a million dollars. During that period of time we have also received exactly 0 return on that investment. Ten years, over a million dollars, and 0 return - ouch.

We've nearly closed investment more times than I can count. We've signed licensing partnerships with companies only to watch them go out of business when their publisher went belly up and stopped paying them royalties on the games they'd already shipped. We've also nearly sold the company on multiple occasions. The high's have been high and the low's have been low. Most everybody on the team has struggled with depression in some form at some point - yet we keep chugging along.

The team is working as hard as they can to finish the Kickstarter campaign as soon as possible. Our campaign video is really coming together nicely, the excitement surrounding it amongst members of the dev team is palpable, however none of us have any idea if our Kickstarter campaign will succeed. Half a million dollars is an ambitious goal and we really haven't even discussed what we'll do if it fails. It's equal parts terrifying and thrilling to know that, after so long, we will soon release our tech to the public and we have no idea how it will be received. It's possible we may never have a return on the investment we've made in this company. It's possible that the best we can ever hope for is to move the medium forward in some small way. None of us started this journey to get rich. We started it to pursue a dream, to build the game that captured our imagination as kids, to conquer the cosmos.

We're approaching, in some form, a culmination of that effort. Hopefully there will be many more culminations to come. We'll keep chugging along, doing the best that we can, and let the cards fall as they may. Every day I'm humbled and amazed we've been able to assemble a team of such dedicated and talented people who've stuck together for so long. However this journey turns out it has been an honor to work with each and every one of them.

So there it is, that's independent game development. You're probably better off just inventing snapchat or some app that lets people pretend to drink beer. You'll finish it in a fraction of the time and sell it for a billion dollars.

Merry Christmas!

Hey everyone, merry Christmas, it's time for another update! For starters a lot has happened since GDC last spring and you may recall us saying something about a “planetary rings” video. This video was originally meant to be the last video we release before launching our Kickstarter (KS). Previously we were hoping to release that video and launch our Kickstarter before the end of the summer and, well, things didn’t quite work out that way. That’s primarily due to the usual culprit: most of us are working in our spare time which makes it difficult to estimate timelines because things come up with health, jobs, and other general life type things.

Recently we’ve had a lot of internal discussion about publicly providing timelines. We frequently miss them and people get angry and call us vaporware. Thus we’ve decided we will no longer provide exact timelines for the release of new content. From now on you will just hear “it’s done when it’s done”. To that end we are obviously not going to be launching our Kickstarter this year. While I’m not going to provide a new timeline I can tell you we will continue to work diligently to release it as soon as possible and as of this exact moment in time everything is really starting to come together.
What does “coming together” mean? For starters we have all of the animations and shots for our Kickstarter video mocked up in-engine. Accomplishing this was dependent on numerous art assets, engine features, and of course the creation of the actual animation curves. Most of our materials are finished and half of our art team has moved on to fun things like lighting and particles/effects. We still have a tremendous amount of polishing left to do however all of this stuff we’ve been talking about for months is finally starting to come alive.

On the engine side we’re wrapping up the last of the major features we wanted to get done for the KS campaign. Early in the year we had another programmer, Kimmo Kotajarvi, join the team and we’ve spent a significant amount of time working on tools, art pipeline, particles, cross platform support, optimization, and HDR. You may be surprised to see HDR on that list as I wrote a blog post about our HDR solution a couple of years ago. Previously we were doing what most games do with regard to lighting by using realistic “ratios” of light instead of realistic “quantities”. Late last spring we decided to finally switch our lighting pipeline over to realistic quantities of light so we could really show the impact that stars of various intensities have on objects in space.

So, without providing a timeline, where does that leave us? The team is beginning to move over to the polish phase. There will be a lot of tweaking things such as animation, lighting, and post-processing. We still need to record the audio, write the script for the live-action portion of our Kickstarter campaign video, nail down all of our stretch goals, launch the Battlescape website, and put together our marketing materials for the month that our KS will be running. In other words there’s still a lot to do but the good news is that most of it has to do with running a good KS campaign.

While we’re still committed to our plan of keeping most of our new content under wraps until we launch our KS campaign we will be releasing new content mostly in the form of art and/or screenshots. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, G+, or Facebook, you should have already seen some of this content coming out already. Overall we’re very excited as we move into 2015, while launching this KS has taken a bit longer than we originally hoped we’re confident most of you will be pleased with the results!

Here are some fresh screen shots including a few teasers of the new content you will see in our final Kickstarter campaign video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update as I Head to GDC 2014

Stars at sunset

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:

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. We have to finalize music and sound fx.
5. The scripts for our Kickstarter videos still need to be written.
6. 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.
7. We have to finalize all of our pledge tiers
8. Lastly we have to write press releases and get all of our marketing materials ready.

A view of Infinity

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!

That's a big sun

2013 Retrospective and What's Next

It's that time of the year again - time for our annual retrospective! Last year was a very productive one for us. It kicked off with Flavien quitting his job to work on I-Novae full-time. Unfortunately this was counterbalanced by the fact that I ran out of savings and had to go get a job. The year was quite a roller coaster ride which started on a high note with the announcement of our desire to launch a Kickstarter. This initial enthusiasm was tempered a bit by the realization that we weren't going to be able to launch by the end of summer with the level of quality we wanted - followed by the discovery that our web server had been compromised and turned into a spam bot. Fortunately, while there was a period where we had little to no updates, we were hard at work rebuilding our web presence, re-branding the company, and of course polishing up our tech as we push toward launching our Kickstarter.

State of the Kickstarter

As I have mentioned before our Kickstarter will be for a game titled Infinity: Battlescape (I:B). This is not going to be the same game as Infinity: The Quest for Earth (I:TQFE). Most notably it won't be an MMO. After taking stock of the situation early last year it became apparent to us that we needed to reduce the scope of our ambitions in the near term so that we could release a product. Our ambitions for Infinity the MMO are huge and the capital requirement to build I:TQFE at the most basic level is on the order of millions of dollars that we don't currently have. Thus we've decided to build a game with a heavier focus on space combat.

To summarize, our core 30 seconds of fun will be massive space battles like you see in Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc. If we raise enough with our Kickstarter there will also be plenty of support roles combined with deeper strategy and tactics for those of you who aren't so keen on combat. I:B will be multiplayer only and take place in the Infinity universe within a single solar system (others may be released as DLC). Instead of having individual maps, combat will take place in different "battlescape's" throughout this solar system. Exactly how this concept of a battlescape is implemented will, like many things, depend on how much money we raise. Either way the game will contain an offline sandbox mode where players will be able to explore in peace without any restrictions.

You may be wondering why haven't we released the Kickstarter yet. As it turns out launching a good Kickstarter is a lot like dying from a thousand paper cuts - the devil's in all the little details. When we initially announced our plan for a Kickstarter the overall message we received from the community was "don't launch it before it's ready". This was best summarized I think by an article in Rock Paper Shotgun. We've taken that advice to heart and we realized last summer that we simply couldn't release the Kickstarter in 2013 with the level of quality that we want and you expect. The good news is that we're pretty confident we'll be able to get it out in the first half of 2014. I know we've said this before but hear me out.

State of the Engine

Some people have lamented our focus on our technology. The fact of the matter is that we have a specific vision for the games we want to make, a vision we don't want to compromise, and no other technology stack on the market today will let us achieve that vision. Thus we decided to create our own game engine - a massive undertaking that's hard to overstate. The single largest hurdle for us releasing pretty much anything has been our engine. The I-Novae Engine is a really cool piece of technology however it's also extremely complicated. Being on the bleeding edge is great but sometimes you get cut. What we did a great job of hiding in the 2010 video was that there were still a couple of problems with our planetary terrain engine. To summarize there were enough problems that we didn't feel comfortable shipping a product with our technology in its current state given our limited resources at that time. I spent a lot of effort trying to get the investment we needed to polish up the tech so that we could ship a product however that never came to pass. Thus the task fell to Flavien and I to continue pushing onward with our limited time/resources to resolve those problems.

In the intervening 2 years the quality of our planetary tech has improved dramatically. All of the major issues that plagued us before have been resolved, we've significantly improved performance, and we threw in physically based rendering while we were at it to make everything look even better. As I write this we are working on finishing up the last couple of engine features we want for our Kickstarter campaign. Work on the I-Novae Engine will never stop however it's finally at a point where we can get back to focusing on making games and that's a great place to be.

Kickstarter Timeline

So what's left to do for the Kickstarter? For starters we've been mocking up our Kickstarter video but it isn't quite ready for production yet. The campaign video will start off with a gameplay teaser followed by the usual talking head stuff. Needless to say we're super excited about what we have to show you, our art team has done a great job, and it's going to be awesome! In the meantime our artists are still putting the finishing touches on the video's assets and, like I previously mentioned, we're wrapping up a couple of engine features which we hope to have done by mid-February. There's still a lot of work to be done on our website. Specifically we're going to put up a bunch of information on the background story for I:B and the ships that will be involved. We're also going to provide fan site media packs and wallpapers.

The current plan is to release 1, maybe 2 video(s) between now and the launch of our Kickstarter campaign. These will include more pretty planet stuff, similar to the video we released last November, with the goal of giving you all something new to look at while you wait without revealing the goodies we're saving for the Kickstarter video. We will formally announce the launch date for our Kickstarter campaign with the release of a demo. For the first time since the Infinity Combat Prototype (ICP) you will be able to download a copy of the I-Novae Engine and run it on your computer at home! This demo will require a pretty beefy system, the exact specs to be determined, as we will have all of the shiny stuff turned on. It also will not be fully interactive but will instead contain scripted camera motion across 1 or 2 planets/moons. This is intentional, we want to release the demo as a teaser for the Kickstarter campaign. Those of you who pledge enough for early access to the game will get an interactive sandbox immediately upon successful completion of our Kickstarter as a way of saying thanks.

Lastly we're finishing up the design of the game, nailing down our pledge tiers, and trying to arrange for an art gallery to show off the I:B artwork during our Kickstarter campaign. The gallery will be located in Phoenix, AZ and I'll be there so you can drop by to say hi and get any questions you may have answered in person. Tentatively I'd like to say we'll be at or near completion in time for GDC in mid-March however there's a lot of moving pieces so we'll keep everybody posted if that changes.

In Closing

Last year was a super productive year for us and so far everything indicates 2014 will be even better. We've increased our team size from 5 to 9 people and we're moving along faster than we ever have before. Our technology and artwork are really coming together to create something truly beautiful and unique. For everybody who has stuck with us over the years we can't thank you enough. Hopefully 2014 will be the year that your patience pays off, we're very excited to show you all what we've been working on, and we can't thank you enough for your support!

Why OpenGL Probably isn't the Graphics API of the Future and I Hope it Dies

Anybody who has followed my Twitter for any length of time is probably aware there is no love lost between myself and OpenGL. Up until this point I haven't really done a good job of explaining why, courtesy of Twitter's 140 character limit, however the land of graphics API's has recently gotten really interesting with AMD's announcement of Mantle and Valve throwing its weight behind Linux/OpenGL with SteamOS so I've decided to wade into the fray.

First some background information: the I-Novae Engine has both OpenGL and D3D11 rendering backends for maximum cross platform portability. Both rendering backends are actively maintained by myself and Flavien. If you don't know what the I-Novae Engine is or why you should care then please watch this video. In my day job I work as a contractor programming OpenGL drivers for an RTOS being used by a large multinational corporation for its safety-critical embedded systems. I bring this up because I think most people in either the D3D camp or the OpenGL camp have little experience with the opposing API so I just wanted to say I've worked quite extensively with both and I hope this gives me the opportunity to be as unbiased as possible. Lastly if you're a programmer you can skip the next 2 sections and go straight to "the only reason why you should use OpenGL".

A condensed history of 3D graphics API's

Back in the glory days of Doom there was no such thing as OpenGL or DirectX. A graphics programmer had to code the entire 3D pipeline himself. The awesome part of this was that you had complete control over every aspect of the rendering pipeline. The downside was that everybody had to reinvent a whole lot of wheels and a general purpose CPU just isn't that great at (quickly) meeting the unique needs of 3D rendering - thus the consumer GPU was born. When GPU's were originally created they came with severe limitations on what a graphics programmer could do. These limitations are commonly referred to as the "fixed function" rendering pipeline because its features were fixed in silicon - a programmer couldn't add any additional functionality. To access these fixed function graphics capabilities there originally were 3 major API's:

1. 3dfx Glide
2. OpenGL
3. DirectX

DirectX and OpenGL are general abstractions that make it easy for a developer to access the capabilities of a GPU from any manufacturer. Glide was proprietary to GPU's produced by 3dfx as it was the heavyweight champion of its day until NVIDIA suddenly gobbled it up, killed Glide in favor of OpenGL, released the Geforce 256, and took over the world of graphics.

Back in those days OpenGL was awesome. In fact I first started teaching myself graphics programming in high school using OpenGL and NeHe's tutorials (still a great resource for beginners). DirectX, while still supported by all of the various GPU manufacturers, was widely considered laughable. This all changed with the revolution that was, and still is, the programmable pipeline.

Viva la revolución!

The root problem with OpenGL, its Achilles heel if you will, is the fact that it's designed by a committee called the Khronos Group. Open standards hippies think this is great and while there are certainly some really good reasons not to have everything controlled by a single, evil corporation there are also some serious problems. For example HTML5 is all the rage these days and all of the web hippies are out basking in the glorious death of Flash and Silverlight. The problem with this line of thinking is that it took an entire decade for HTML5 to come out. While I have no love for Flash if you've ever used Silverlight you know that it's super easy to use, has great tools, and it's fast. If you've ever had to code a website by hand then you know it's a complete and total nightmare for absolutely no good reason. You have to deal with all these different implementations of the HTML standard in all these different browsers and for some completely insane reason Javascript became the lingua franca for client-side scripting. The story of OpenGL and DirectX at this point follow a similar arc - except Microsoft won - with good reason.

A programmable pipeline in the context of a GPU means a programmer can write little programs, called shaders, that get executed directly on a GPU to ultimately control the color that is output for each individual pixel. When programmable GPU's were first released OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 8 came out to let developers access these new features. DirectX 8 was a complete rewrite of the DirectX API however OpenGL 2.0, in order to maintain backwards compatibility, kept all the old cruft and stapled on some new programmable pipeline stuff - similar to how each version of HTML just staples more crap onto the previous version. Needless to say when it came to working with shaders the shiny new DirectX 8 was awesome and the not so shiny and not so new OpenGL 2.0 was... not. At that point the only reason to choose OpenGL over DirectX was the fact that OpenGL was supported on non-Microsoft platforms. Since at that time consoles all used proprietary rendering API's and Windows was by far the most dominant gaming platform this really didn't matter so everybody switched over to DirectX.

The only reason you should use OpenGL... for now... I hope...

Realistically I think if you ask any hardcore graphics programmer if he prefers DirectX or OpenGL he's probably going to tell you he wishes he didn't have to use either one. Ironically, with the maturation of the programmable pipeline due to compute shaders, 3d graphics is coming full circle and you can now write very complicated "shaders" that run entirely on a GPU - they don't even have to have anything to do with graphics. The ultimate goal for graphics programmers is to be able to write C/C++ code, or possibly even some other language someday, that seamlessly executes on both CPU's and GPU's and lets you pass pointers without any hassle. There will only be fixed function hardware for rasterization and maybe a few other things and that'll be it. Both DirectX and OpenGL currently get in the way of this process by forcing you to dance a complicated jig as you move data to/from the CPU and GPU. Addressing this problem is the whole reason AMD recently announced Mantle but I'll get to that in a minute.

The only reason you should use OpenGL today is the exact same reason you would use OpenGL over DirectX 10 years ago: you want to target non-Microsoft platforms. With the emergence of mobile, another thing I'll get to in a minute, this is not an insignificant reason to favor OpenGL however it comes with some rather severe costs which are the primary reasons why I hate working with OpenGL:

1. Now that we're onto OpenGL 4.4 the API has had a whole extra 2.4 versions haphazardly stapled onto it since 2.0. You now have to deal with things like two completely different sets of functions to do the exact same thing, like enumerate uniform buffer objects, because one set of functions supports a single extra feature that the other doesn't for absolutely no good reason.
2. You have swiss army knife functions. An example of this is resolving an MSAA render target. All you want to do is resolve the MSAA render target but you have to use a function that can do 100 different things and you're left trying to figure out what which combination of flags you need.
3. Driver support on Windows, still a dominant gaming platform, isn't that great since everybody has been using DirectX
4. DirectX has an awesome debug layer, OpenGL's debug context pales in comparison
5. DirectX has awesome tools (awesome is a relative word here), OpenGL does not. Granted, OpenGL has recently made some improvements in this area but saying OpenGL now has good tools is like saying that you would rather get kicked in the balls than be shot. Both options really suck though one just happens to be slightly better than the other
6. OpenGL documentation sucks. If there is one thing that Microsoft tends to do better than everybody else it's developer tools and API documentation

Lastly the OpenGL specification has, historically, been updated very slowly relative to DirectX though recently the Khronos group has improved on this front. OpenGL acquired support for compute shaders a year after DirectX and both AMD and Apple still haven't released fully compatible drivers. There is, however, one caveat. Recently Microsoft has made the unfortunate choice of restricting new versions of DirectX to new versions of Windows. This sucks because Windows 8 adoption is much slower than Windows 7 and the newer versions of DirectX 11 have some really nice features. There are also some rumors floating around that Microsoft might kill off DirectX and that is obviously a huge concern when deciding which API to go with.

Mantle & CUDA

Ultimately Mantle, which is an open specification like OpenGL, and CUDA are the reason I think OpenGL is doomed, or at least the reason OpenGL should be doomed unless the Khronos Group does something radical, and they're also the reason the API wars are so interesting right now. For those of you who don't know, at a high level a graphics driver primarily does 3 things: it manages memory and it creates then executes command buffers. The primary purpose of Mantle is to provide developers with a lightweight hardware abstraction layer so they have more control over those 3 things than DirectX and OpenGL currently allow. Basically it gets developers closer to how the hardware actually works while reducing OS and driver overhead. CUDA isn't actually a graphics API per se, it's a proprietary compute shader language/runtime that provides seamless integration with C/C++, however I don't think it would take much for NVIDIA to turn it into a direct competitor with Mantle which is why I mention it here.

The jury is still out on Mantle and I think a lot depends on how Intel and NVIDIA react. If AMD can convince one of them or one of the mobile manufacturers to include it on their platform that'd be a huge vote of confidence for Mantle being useful on something other than AMD hardware. The reason Mantle and CUDA are such a threat to OpenGL is because, as has already been mentioned, the Khronos Group is not very good at responding quickly to changes in the marketplace. Microsoft has established with DirectX 8 and DirectX 10 that it is not afraid to completely rewrite DirectX to better accommodate changes in the architecture of next-gen hardware. There is nothing to prevent Microsoft from creating a Mantle style API with DirectX 12 and porting it to older versions of Windows whereas the Khronos Group demonstrated the exact opposite when they failed to rewrite OpenGL in any meaningful way with version 3.0. If Mantle gains traction, and Microsoft rewrites DirectX with version 12 to meet that threat, what incentive remains to use OpenGL? An even more radical thought is what if Microsoft does in fact discontinue development of DirectX, as AMD has suggested it might, in favor of Mantle? That would certainly explain why AMD made such a bold statement. Either way if Mantle begins gaining serious traction it seems likely OpenGL will no longer be worth supporting.

OpenGL ES and WebGL

There isn't much to say about OpenGL ES that hasn't already been said about the regular desktop version of OpenGL. Basically I think the Khronos Group really screwed up with OpenGL 2.0+ and WebGL. Firstly I think they screwed up with WebGL because they gave it the same feature set as OpenGL ES 2.0 instead of the full desktop OpenGL. Secondly I think they screwed up OpenGL ES 2.0 because they had an opportunity to start with a clean slate and create something really forward looking for mobile, like say Mantle, and instead they just took desktop OpenGL 2.0 and made it slightly more sane. Sure, there are some good reasons for that since plenty of people already have experience working with desktop OpenGL, but if Mantle or perhaps an NVIDIA competitor gets any traction in mobile then I can't think of any good reason as a developer to continue to use OpenGL ES.

In Closing

I've decided to leave out discussing SteamOS because I think that could be a blog of its own and this one is already way too long. Ultimately, regardless of what happens to OpenGL, I think 2014 is going to be an exciting year for computer graphics and high end gaming in general. New consoles, new API's, and ever more powerful PC hardware. The best part, if you're a consumer, is you don't have to worry about any of this API jazz. Us developer types shall wage holy war upon each other and once we get comfortable with these new API's and hardware capabilities consumers are going to have some great games to play!

The Road to Crowd Funding

Needless to say I think we can all agree I'm a terrible blogger haha. It takes a lot of time to produce a quality blog article and I've been spending that time on coding instead of, well, blogging. That being said we've promised to become more active as we approach our crowd funding release date, which I confess we haven't announced yet, and to that end I would like to provide some information about what we're doing that's taking so long.

We've blogged a lot about our technology in the past. Things like HDR and atmospheric scattering and that's because our planetary tech is shiny and we <3 it and it's a big part of what makes us unique. It's the vehicle through which we will build the kind of games we want to build, bringing unique gameplay to you, the consumer. However there's something we really haven't talked about much yet that's just as important - our web/server/backend infrastructure.

The Vision

Believe it or not we are actually guided by a cohesive vision of the games we want to build, the type of company we want to create, and how we're going to interact with our consumers. A core pillar of this vision is a community first approach to everything we do. In the beginning this took the form of allowing the community to help build Infinity by contributing assets to the game. Unfortunately we realized some time later that there were two major problems with our contributions system. The first, and most important, is the complicated issue of intellectual property (IP) rights. We had no way of verifying who had made what and whether it was violating anyone's IP rights or anything like that. Everybody loses if we get sued into oblivion - except the lawyers of course. The second issue is that there really wasn't a good way for a contributor to submit their assets for a formal review for inclusion into the game. Later on in this article I'll address our solutions to these problems but first I want to talk about our plans for the cloud.

Joining the Cloud Kool Aid Party

If you look at what has made Apple so successful in consumer electronics it's the ability to create a seamless, easily accessible experience with their hardware and software. We would like to do that with our games by creating a cohesive, seamlessly integrated I-Novae ecosystem. Everyone who participates in this ecosystem will have an I-Novae ID that can be used across all I-Novae powered games and services. This is important in the near-term because we will need to keep track of everybody's donations during our crowd funding campaign so we can give them their awards upon successful completion of the campaign. We are considering making some of our reward tiers access to beta, alpha, and pre-alpha builds of the game. In order to properly support reward tiers like this we need to have the ability to provide/restrict access to builds of the game to the right people as well as collect their feedback, bug reports, etc. All of this will run through our I-Novae cloud platform and a users I-Novae ID.

Another benefit of the I-Novae ID will be our ability to provide a single sign-on experience. Many of you, if not most, are already using something like Google/GMail/g+, Twitter, Windows Live, or Facebook and instead of having to create yet-another-username/password you will be able to log into both our games and our services using credentials from one of those providers. Optionally you can still use a username/password if you prefer it.

In the long run we would like to support taking screen shots and video from directly within I-Novae Engine powered games and uploading them to your I-Novae profile in the cloud. We want to make it easy for you to share your favorite gaming moments with your friends through your preferred social media platforms. Lastly our I-Novae cloud will also support the usual cloud stuff like maintaining friends lists, digital distribution of I-Novae Engine powered games, and virtual market places.

Virtual Market, wait, WHAT!?

Infinity: Battlescape itself will not be released with assets from the community however, assuming we raise enough money (stretch goals!), the game will have a virtual marketplace where people can create and sell/share their own assets. These assets will be restricted to things that do not affect gameplay. For example you will not be able to create new weapons or ships but you will be able to create new skins - unless of course you create a mod. Mods will also be available through our virtual marketplace and will allow changing most of the game. Contributors will be able to submit their assets and mods to the marketplace for a nominal fee. This fee will serve two purposes. The first is to help cover our administrative overhead for verifying that the contribution does not violate anyone else's IP (solution to problem #1 above) and the second is to make sure the asset meets our minimum quality requirements and if they don't we will provide appropriate feedback (solution to problem #2 above). Lastly we don't want our virtual marketplace to fill up with tons of junk, a huge problem faced by all virtual marketplaces with a prime example being the Android app store, and having a nominal fee for submission is a huge step toward preventing that. Once a submission has been accepted the contributor will be able to set the price of the asset/mod themselves. Our community has a tremendous amount of energy and creativity, we have some really cool tech, and we would like to be able to harness that in a way that benefits everyone. We believe a virtual marketplace would go a long way toward achieving that goal.

In Closing

Laying the groundwork for this cloud infrastructure is also coinciding with rebuilding our website. Our current forums will likely be archived and replaced with a more modern solution that we can integrate with our I-Novae ID system. Since we don't really want to reinvent the wheel with forums software if anyone knows of something that's easy to integrate with a custom authentication/roles system, ideally built in ASP.NET, then please let us know. Redoing the website will be a lot of work but we believe it's necessary and in the long run it'll be worth it =).