Infinity: Battlescape News

General

• Reduced min boost ratio energy requirement from 25% to 10% for all ships
  

Boost had a requirement that energy was at least at 25% of its max. There is no feedback when failing to engage boost, which could result in frustration from players not understanding why their ship didn't boost when they pressed the key. We need to work on better feedback, but by reducing the requirement to only 10%, ships have "a bit more juice" and can still engage boost for a last thrust.

• Reduced credits rewards for destroying turrets / weapons
  
• Reduced credits rewards for destroying ships
  

Last patch nerfed credits rewards related to bounties. This time we nerfed credits rewards for destroying ships or turrets. The rewards are largely unchanged for destroying small ships, but mid/cap ships kills will no longer
generate as many credits as before.

Interceptor

• Increased energy points from 150 to 175
  
• Increased energy recharge rate from 7.5 to 12 points per second
  
• Increased max heat points from 125 to 150
  
• Increased turbo boost thrust rate from x2.0 to x2.5
  
• Increased max chaffs from 10 to 16
  

Another interation towards better maneuverability for the Interceptor. It received a small boost update combined with more energy, to allow for boosting more often/efficiently and using blasters at the same time.

Bomber

• Increased energy recharge rate from 6 to 10 points per second
  
• Increased max chaffs from 16 to 20
  

Corvette

• Increased max chaffs from 20 to 24
  

Destroyer

• Increased hitpoints from 15000 to 20000
  

Cruiser

• Increased hitpoints from 30000 to 40000
  

Carrier

• Increased hitpoints from 40000 to 60000
  

Capital ship hitpoints were increased; they tend to die quickly to concentrated fire, especially from bombers, and with the reward nerfs they might not be as easy to reach as before.

Weapons

• Tweaks to locking times for missile / torpedo launchers: slightly lowered on small ships, slightly increased on capships
  

Chaffs

• Doubled duration (6s to 12s)
  
• Increased launch speed (40 m/s to 100 m/s)
  
• Increased range (1 km to 1.5 km)
  
• Tweaked launch angle (behind and up)
  

Missiles required too much attention from the player on the receiving end. Chaffs will be more efficient and launch further away from the ship, resulting in less splash damage. The doubled duration and increased amounts of chaffs on all small ships ensure that chaffs will not run out as quickly as before.

Collision Damage

• Reduced collision damage by half and reduced warp ramming damage by another 50%
  

The ship doing the ramming should cause less damage, but will still receive full damage. Collision damage in general was halved due to many players hitting docks when starting with their capital ships



New chat box and team chat

• Added a new UI for the chat box with 4 default channels: All, Global, Team and Local
  
• All agglomerates all messages received from other channels
  
• Global channel messages are sent to all players on the server
  
• Team channel messages are sent to all team members on the server
  
• Local channel messages are sent to all allies in the local zone of the player (roughly 1000 Km)
  
• You can enter/exit chat mode via Enter/Return/Escape like before
  
• You can press Tab to cycle through the channels; the current one is where the messages will be sent to
  
• Each channel has its own color to identify the channel more easily (especially useful for messages in the All channel)
  
• Messages are now scrollable when you enter chat mode. Default is 30 messages
  
• A Channel's tab background color flashes when a new unread message is received in that channel
  
• Added chat auto-close mode mode in Options -> Gameplay (this will close chat mode after every single message typed). Default is off
  
• Voice commands will go in the Local channel
  
• Text content is verified for errors before being validated and sent to the server (to avoid errors like empty strings, accidental key presses, too long messages etc.. )
  

Training

• Added youtube links with 8 video tutorials in the main menu (note: only a placeholder in Early access until the gameplay is finalized and we can produce in-game tutorials)
  

• Updated some station modules materials and textures
  
• Fixed holes in station Hub B
  

• Final fix for "name is invalid" error on the server when players have a name shorter than 3 characters
  
• Improvements to key detection, especially related to throttles (throttles where often blocking input detection due to always sending non-zero values)
  
• Added input profile for Logitech Extreme 3D Pro
  

• Turbo boost cooldown parameter is now set per ship. Interceptor boost cooldown was reduced to 0.5s (from 1.0s) and bomber to 0.75s (from 1.0s)
  
• Increased initial boost intensity for interceptor ( +20% ) and forward / backward boost ( +12% )
  
• Reduced boost intensity on lateral thrusters for interceptor ( -25% ) (note: since initial boost was increased by +20% the end result is similar for lateral thrusters and higher for main/back engine )
  

Some people have been complaining that the Interceptor felt "slow". We tried increasing accelerations in the past but it proved troublesome due to the engagement distances, making hitting enemies even more difficult. Instead, we're looking at rebalancing the game in small steps to see how we can improve the ships "feeling". Our first step here is a buff of turbo boosting.

• Increased proximity mine launch speed to 100 m/s (from 50 m/s)
  

AI destroyers and some players got caught into their proximity mine exploding (due to accidental contact or splash damage from another mine) right after they launched a mine. Increasing the launch speed should help with that.

• Improved bounty rewards to be less agressive and generate less credits ( the reward starts lower, but scales by +50% for each bounty rank )
  
• Limited bounty max rank to 3, to avoid insane bounties
  
• Player will now receive a notification when the enemy commander placed a bounty on him
  

It's still very easy to generate credits in the game right now, but keep in mind we don't have the credits sinks yet (besides dying). Instead of adjusting the ship prices we'll try to adjust the rewards prices iteratively each patch.
In this patch we're starting with bounties, which were probably the more imbalanced. A bomber killing a capital ship with a bounty could easily earn double or triple the price of that capital ship in a single kill. Bounty rewards now start lower, but can still generate a decent reward if the bounty reaches rank 3. In addition, players will now get informed when a bounty has been placed by the enemy commander on their head

• Tweaked warp ramming damage formula
  

Ramming damage seems to be in a decent spot.. when not in warp. The problem is that damage increases far too quickly at higher velocities such as in warp. Aiming at an enemy ship in warp is also easy, so the risk vs reward ratio is too good at the moment. Instead of completely removing warp ramming damage we reduced the amount of damage caused by warp ramming at velocities higher than 1 km/s. The reduction factor isn't linear but based on a logarithmic scale, so doubling the impact speed does less than doubling collision damage.

• It is now possible to recharge shields at hangar / docking bays
  

The rate at which shields recharge might still need some tweaks, and we're aware of some issues with the repair/resupply rate of people "camping" at the spawns and firing non-stop missiles/torpdoes. We'll revisit these mechanics in a future patch

• Weapons tweaks: slightly faster turn rates for auto-turrets
  
• Increased max range for mk4 / mk5 auto-turrets and defense platforms
  
• Increased hit points for mk5, mk6 and mk7 guns
  
• Increased damage from static defenses
  

MK4 auto-turrets range was increased to make the Destroyer fit his protection role again small crafts better. The range was almost doubled. The static defense towards / guns also needed a serious buf to detract surprise attacks and earn time for defenders to spawn or come back. In a future patch we'll add base attack notifications to the starmap.

Hitpoints were increased, starting on the MK5 (just a little), MK6 (quite a bit) and MK7 (a lot more). It will be harder to destroy the large guns on capital ships now. It was frustrating for capital ship players to have their main guns destroyed so quickly.

• Fixed a rare issue where game executable does not launch due to symbols such as $ appearing in the user Documents path
  
• Fixes for "invalid login length" message upon connecting to a game server
  
• Fixed destroyed weapons still absorbing damage despite being down and preventing the ship from being damaged
  

• Options menu will now enumerate controllers from Direct Input asynchronously
  

Some users had massive slowdowns / 10-to-30 seconds freezes when entering / exiting the options menu. After our investigations our conclusion is that some input drivers are not improperly detected and cause Direct Input to not answer until a time-out is reached. We can't do much about that, however the controllers enumeration will not proceed in the background instead of blocking / exiting the options menu. Note that if you modify keybindings, applying the changes might still take a long time. However if you modify other game settings without changing keybindings, there should be no slowdown anymore.

• Added more information messages when using various ship systems / weapons fail
  

A generic failure sound has been added. Locking sound volume has been increased. More warnings show up when for some reason you cannot fire or launch missiles / torpedoes / mines

• Fixed "warp engage" alert which was lingering too long compared to other alerts
  
• Fixed an issue with carrier spawning around Glimmerfall and instantly dying
  

• Added ships engine / thruster sound fade ins/outs (it'll now take half a second for most sounds to smoothly start and stop)
  
• Improved loading times of background images in the GUI
  
• Added voice volume slider in options menu
  

Voice command spam was real. One bug was fixed with global volume not affecting voice commands. The range of voice commands has been decreased to 10 Km (full volume) and 100 Km (65% volume). Voice commands over 100 Km aren't audible anymore

• Added a priority icon to battle missions screen, to make it more clear what battles are recommended to join
  

We found that far too many people were joining battles that were lost, and by the time they arrived, the battle had ended. The coloring rules have also been simplifies: green for battles being won and red for battles that are either critical or high priority. High priority battles are battles with contested odds (40-60% range) and that are about to start, or have started recently.

• Increased warmup / countdown until battle missions start, to give players more time to prepare / transition out of other battles
  

The countdown to battle start was often too short, 2-3 minutes. If the player was busy with another battle or doing something else, by the time he took off, travelled in warp and reached the battle, that battle was already in the middle phase. Increasing the countdown duration to battle start should give players more time to coordinate and prepare.

• New engine sound on Interceptor
  

Many people have been complaining about the high pitch engine sound on the Interceptor so while we're working on an improved version we've replaced it by a new placeholder

• New Odyssey station lights pass
  
• Added ambient occlusion and colors to station Hub B module
  
• Carrier final texturing, improved materials and updated skins (green stripes were out of place). Added ambient occlusion
  

• Added more debug info for DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED into the logs when presenting the back buffer
  

This error is typically caused by a video card that doesn't have enough video memory, or has an obsolete driver. We recommend upgrading your video card drivers if this happens. There has been a few cases of users that have modern / powerful video cards AND updated drivers and still have these issues. For these people this video might help (caution: follow advice at your own risks: link)

• Improved server disconnection messages
  
• First-time run of the game will now bring up a window to select the starting quality / screen mode / resolution
  
• First-time run of the game will attempt to auto-detect the quality level based on the computer's cpu performance ( note: we need to take into account the gpu too, but ran out of time to implement it yet )
  

• Fixed performance issues related to refreshing the players list UI, causing too many events. This in turn generated random stutters for all players on the server, every second
  

We're still monitoring server performance. It is possible that there are other sources of stutter / slowdowns, but keep in mind a number of issues could also be coming from your connection to the server

Hey everyone, it's been a pretty crazy launch into Early access so far for us with a lot of work, but that was obviously expected. We appreciate your patience as we are resolving the most urgent issues as soon as we humanly can ( keep in mind we're just a handful of developers ).

We've had a number of issues, some related to servers stability ( not all that bad overall, the first server crashed after 30 hours ), and as you might have noticed if you followed us, a number of issues related to HOTAS and keybindings.

Most of those issues are now fixed, which isn't to say that everything is perfect; we've identified a larger number of urgent bugs ( some balance-breaking, such as abusing ramming ; some just causing pain and frustration, such as the never-ending missiles ).

We'll be patching the servers in an hour or two ( in a staggered way, to avoid disrupting online players ) with a lot of fixes. Another client patch will follow next week, probably on thursday, and from now on we'll try to keep a regular update pacing by patching the game every thursday ( with possible hotfixes for urgent issues ).


A lot of people have been asking for our Roadmap in the short and long term. While we can't make exact promises on the date at which these things will be delivered, here's what we have been internally discussing and what we'll be working on in the coming weeks and months.

Our immediate focus will be on technical support, and helping players that have technical issues playing the game. Some people have had connection issues due to routers or firewalls; others have their game crash, due to gpu drivers, non-standard paths and a variety of issues that are pretty common to Early access launches.

Once this is done, we'll be shifting our focus back on the game itself. This is what we are looking at:

Short term ( 1-3 weeks ):

• HUD cleaning / decluttering / making things more clear
  
• Team chat and improving communications
  
• Helper screens and more alerts and contextual info tips in game
  
• Ship upgrades ( first iteration; we won't necessarily have much new content there. Maybe a new weapon and EMP missiles )
  
• Battle reports / statistics / player stats / team stats
  
• Making the star map more useful and interactive
  
• Game balance: another pass on weapons / locking, corvette repairs / rewards
  
• Credits redistribution and team scoring ( / ladder rankings )
  
• Input event and control scheme unification ( a lot of players are confused by the way the current system works, and think their controllers do not detect pitch / yaw )
  
• Allowing the carrier to repair / resupply ships like the corvette
  
• Anti-missile / torpedoes laser counter-measures for capital ships
  
• Auto-repairing turrets / modules on stations and other installations
  
• Revamping / increasing static defenses
  
• Sub-systems targetting
  

Mid term ( End of year goal )

• Second pass over ship upgrades: adding more weapons, more upgrades and more variety to the content
  
• Electronic warfare
  
• Revamping capital ships control schemes, cameras and weapons management
  
• Assets streaming and performance improvements to eliminate the high video-ram needs, causing micro-stutter and freezes
  
• New battlescapes and new planets, including the first Ocean planet
  
• Localized damage ( disabling thrusters, armor pieces ) and visual effects ( damage decals, more effects )
  
• Revamping shields and adding localized shield systems ( front+back, 4-directional shileds etc.. )
  
• Networking improvements, especially related to client side prediction for projectiles )
  
• Squads system
  
• In-game communication system ( this one is tricky, so we'll be looking into it, but it might easily slide to next year )
  
• First iteration on the persistent progression system with unlockable content based on your military ranking ( weapons, bobbleheads, skins, decals )
  
• Extra joysticks / HOTAS / hardware testing and official TrackIR support
  

Long term ( Next year, but before the full release )

• Orbital bombardment with nukes
  
• New visual effects and improvements ( better HDR / tonemapping, better anti-aliasing, new shader effects, glass / refraction etc.. )
  
• More planets and environments, maybe props on planets
  
• General AI improvements, having AI ships travel between planets in warp
  
• Kickstarter rewards
  
• More work on HUD improvements and customization screens
  
• Finalized in-game tutorials
  
• Solo / sandbox mode
  
• More work on the persistent progression system
  

Note that one important feature is missing from this roadmap: side missions. It's a tricky one, because it's important to retain the player's attention, but it requires a lot of work and will not delivered as a single feature in a single patch, but more progressively as we improve the system over a long series of patches, over the entire next year.

We haven't fully decided how far we want to go with side missions. At the very least we want to offer escort / attack missions, assassinations / bounty hunting, or things such as scavenging. Some of these missions could have conflicting objectives with players on the opposite team, which would in fact turn these side missions into "mini-game modes" naturally integrated into the game. We'll see exactly how far we can go with this, but keep in mind Battlescape is warfare focused, so you should not expect things such as trading or mining.

That's it for now - if you have more feedback, just let us know on the Steam forums or on the I-Novae forums. We still have a long road (map) ahead of us, but your support is appreciated. Thank you !

-Flavien Brebion
I-Novae Studios

We are happy to announce that our new Steam Early access video trailer has been released.

You can view it on the store page gallery or directly on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/uZpWUzJ3USA

In other news: T - 7 days ! As a reminder, the game goes Early access on the 26th ( evening time US, early morning on the 27th for EU ).

We are getting ready for the launch, performing the final stress tests, testing the Steam build, implementing the last high priority features and doing another "polish" pass. It feels unreal to think that after all these years of work, we will finally be launching on Steam in exactly a week from now.

Needless to say, this next week is gonna be.. interesting, to say the least.

We will be ramping up on our marketing in the coming week(s), but keep in mind we have a very low budget, so we'll be relying on word-of-mouth for the most part. If you are interested in helping, the best way would be to talk to your friends or people who like space games and let them know about our project.

As usual if you have questions or comments do not hesitate to post on the Steam forums or on our website, thank you.

-Flavien Brebion

We are happy to announce that Infinity: Battlescape will enter Steam Early Access on Friday, September 27th, at 04:00 UTC.

Keep in mind that we are a small indy company ( 5 developers ! ) launching our first title. We will be monitoring the servers closely, provision extra servers if the current ones reach max capacity and of course work on hotfixes to address other issues ( client crashes, emergency bugs etc.. ).

It's only the beginning though, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We are expecting to stay in Early access for about 12 months. After the dust following the Early access launch has settled we will continue working on the game diligently, adding more features, more content, polishing and optimizing everything.

If you are unfamiliar with our development process we usually patch the game every 1-2 weeks ( emergency stability issues get hotfixed as soon as possible of course ). If you have any feedback or questions, just let us know in the Steam hub forums.

We are very excited about this launch, although there is also a lot of pressure on our shoulders. We have spent countless days and nights working on this game for the past 5 years ( more if you count all the work on our custom engine and tech ) and although it still needs a lot of polish and content, as any Early access game does, we think the result is pretty close to our original vision and that you will have a lot of fun with it.

Forming a squadron or fleet is the best way to experience Infinity: Battlescape as it has been designed. Invite your friends and begin building your battlegroup. The fight for space conquest begins.. on September the 27th !

-The I-Novae Studios team