Infinity : The Quest For Earth - 3D model contributions

[spAce]

Infinity is a space-based, Elite-inspired massively multiplayer online game being developed by a small group of indy developers, and has been in development since 2005. Some of its unique features include a seamless planetary engine, an advanced 3D engine able to render high-polycount models with all modern next-gen effects, newtonian physics, etc..

Development is based on a small team of developers working on the core features, and a community-based contributions model, where anybody is free to submit models, textures or musics depending on their skills level and available time. Only the work above our minimum quality and coherency standards gets validated and integrated into the game.

The community is pretty large and friendly ( more than 5000 registered forum members and a million website visits ); we have already released a working combat prototype to give a taste of the full game, that can be freely downloaded and played; Infinity has been featured on major websites and media / magazines such as PC Gamer, PC Format or PC Zone in various countries, and received awards for the best visuals and most anticipated standalone game on moddb.com's 2006 competition.

Official website - Infinity: The Quest for Earth
Development journal - http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/ :: View Forum - Development Journal

We are looking for people who would be interested in contributing a few models / textures, or if really interested, in doing more dedicated work. So far we've got more than a hundred ships modeled, but a lot still have to be textured, and we're still looking for more models in those areas:
– non-combat ships ( industrial, civilian, transports, liners, haulers )
– space stations
– city buildings, spaceports or factories

The largest models ( over 200m ) don't have to be unwrapped and skinned; simple UV-mapping based on planar / box projections can be used, and we have tiling generic texture packs available to ease the process.

The engine allows relatively high polycounts ( ranging from 5K triangles for a fighter, 20K for a frigate and up to 100K for stations or Km-long ships ), generates level-of-details automatically, and has a tool named “ASEToBin” that allows to import and visualize your models in real-time with shaders. It also supports diffuse, bump/normal, specular, self-illumination maps, dual custom colors ( stripes / paintings ) and dirt maps.

To get started, have a look at all the sticky posts in our contributions forum:
http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/ :: View Forum - Contributions

Don't forget to read the ships design doc ( a more complete version is currently on its way ) and the copyrights and the organization / FTP server sections.

A lot of great concept art, made by Dr. Chee Ming 'Koshime' Wong ( our official concept artist ) is available for modeling if you lack inspiration to come up with your own designs. If you want to work on your own designs, make sure to follow the guidelines / style for coherency, post sketches and/or regular work-in-progress so that it gets validated as soon as possible.

Here are some of our concept drawings that are not reserved:

































For more informations, please visit our website and contributions forum or leave questions here. Thank you.

- Kristian ´spAce´ Ågrén, texture artist / 3D modeler from Infinity: The Quest For Earth development team.

[al3d]

and naturally you want this done all for free right?

Did some post a sticker on SFM"s front page saying " Plenty of idiots that will waste countless hours working for free." !??

[spAce]

Originally Posted by al3d

and naturally you want this done all for free right?

Did some post a sticker on SFM"s front page saying " Plenty of idiots that will waste countless hours working for free." !??

Here's an old quote from Flavien Brebion (project leader):

Profits and payments:

As you know, Infinity will go commercial ( or at least, semi-commercial ) one day. I don't want people to be disapointed by their work not being paid, or paid lower than what they were expecting, so here's the plan:

1. Money income will first be used to pay the monthly expenses ( includes, but not restricted to: servers hardware / rent / bandwidth, advertisements costs, maintenance / support costs, sub-contracting work, etc.. ).

2. Remaining money will be used to pay the investments / expenses made ( mostly by me on my personal money ) during the development ( same list that #1 ), which probably means that you should not expect any payment during the first months after release.

3. Once all of that is paid, the "profit" will be split depending on the contribution ( in amount of hours of work ) of everybody. Of course, since i have already spent ~5000 hours ( around 2.5 years almost as a secondary full-time job ) of work on this project, if you work a grand total of 10 hours on something, your "part" will equal peanuts, like 0.1%. So, do not expect to get "rich", even if the game becomes midly popular.

4. You have no right whatsoever on the sales or commercial plans for the I-Novae engine ( on which i'm building Infinity ), since these are well separated projects, and that your work will not be used at all in I-Novae ( which is a pure programming thing ).

Please let me know if you have questions.

http://www.fl-tw.com/Infinity/ :: View topic - Copyright and legal issues

[Zoxesyr]

...so the business model does not consider "Talent" to be an "expense". More than a few game companies have failed making that mistake.

Reading the rest of the thread referenced here, this company expects the players to submit the content and receive "payment in kind" by being allowed to play...

Note this is in the copyright text:

Any work that you do, as soon as it's "submitted" ( e. files sent to me or another developper for use in the game ).. remains your own copyright. You will, of course, get credits for your work. However, and that's my point, you are granting us the right to use it in the game. This right is not exclusive ( you can still use your own work in any way you see fit ). You can use this work in another project. You can even sell your work. It remains yours. But, once it's submitted and integrated, you cannot ask us to remove your work from the game - and that, independently of the way this project is heading ( commercial or not ).

...and this:

There is no guarantee that your work will be included in the game, especially if it's not up to our quality standards.

This implies that you keep your copyright, but you lose control over it in the game whether it is used or not. However retaining copyright (at least in the USA) means being able to deny access or to remove protected work on demand.

[RazorsKiss]

This is one of the most-anticipated space sim projects I've ever heard of, and I'm a space sim junkie on a truly massive scale.

Ask him how many hits his website gets per week - that alone will get your modeling skills exposure you couldn't buy.

I'm not affiliated with Infinity in any way - but he wasn't promising anything but a potential for very small profit on the work.

I'm surprised this has received such a series of negative replies, considering the massive buzz around this project. It's an indie game project. How much do you think he can pay?

Of course it's a freebie thing - unless you get lucky. If your job is to model, you'll get paid for it. If you're doing it for an indie game project, it's _always_ a gamble - and a long shot one. Working on an indie game is usually for something other than profit potential, I've found.

[Zoxesyr]

One of these requests appears on SFM every week or two, so a request like this isn't all that big a deal. The way the post was written sounded like a newbie looking for free stuff, not a pro soliciting portfolios.

Recently SFM has had a couple of bad experiences with other boards stealing art and meshes without credit, and the "copyright" text quoted is a real red flag, especially when other people's art is posted without credit in the same post.

I did some browsing, and there is interesting stuff on the BBS. It's a bit chaotic, but there is an awful lot of stuff.

Also, the BBS seems to have been running for over 2 years, and the MMORG still hasn't started up. That's a really long development cycle in this business world.

The best post would have been to invite people to this link, which would have been interesting to almost anyone on this BBS.
Infinity: The Quest for Earth
I invite the members of SFM to read it. It has some nice stuff in it.

[RazorsKiss]

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

Also, the BBS seems to have been running for over 2 years, and the MMORG still hasn't started up. That's a really long development cycle in this business world.

No offense - but the average large-scale MMORPG's dev time is at least double that - and it grows more and more the smaller the team is. Anarchy Online's dev time was 6 years - but it was a very different sort of MMO, too.

He's been working on the engine itself solo for a good long time, if I remember correctly. The bottleneck in their development is going to be models, from everything I've read.

Singleplayer games do average about 2 years, for a major studio, but not for indie devs. Jumpgate took something like 5-6 years, with a lot bigger team, and a smaller game than the one he's planning. So, I don't think that's unreasonable

[spAce]

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

One of these requests appears on SFM every week or two, so a request like this isn't all that big a deal. The way the post was written sounded like a newbie looking for free stuff, not a pro soliciting portfolios.

Recently SFM has had a couple of bad experiences with other boards stealing art and meshes without credit, and the "copyright" text quoted is a real red flag, especially when other people's art is posted without credit in the same post.

I did some browsing, and there is interesting stuff on the BBS. It's a bit chaotic, but there is an awful lot of stuff.

Also, the BBS seems to have been running for over 2 years, and the MMORG still hasn't started up. That's a really long development cycle in this business world.

The best post would have been to invite people to this link, which would have been interesting to almost anyone on this BBS.
Infinity: The Quest for Earth
I invite the members of SFM to read it. It has some nice stuff in it.

You are right, I should have given this topic more official form. I should have gone through the Guidelines for advertising a project/request sticky before posting here. I apolige.

I posted this topic here to offer something delightful to do. I contribute to Infinity myself and find it very valuable doing in artist's eyes. Infinity is the biggest virtual reality ever made and I'm very proud to get my creations into it. I dont see it as money.

The official website is filled with old visual media that dosent really represent the game. The engine has gone through massive changes and the changes have affected the look of the game thoroughly. Infinity dev team is going to release a big media update soon.

[Andrew March]

I'd like fries and a large soda with that please.

[Nyast]

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

...so the business model does not consider "Talent" to be an "expense". More than a few game companies have failed making that mistake.

There is no business model, it's an indy project. Of course, there's always the risk of failing and I'm certainly not going to blame people thinking it's vaporware, but you could at least do a bit of reading to see why/how it's different than the tons of amateur projects out here, particularly the procedural generation approach as well as the contributions development model.

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

This implies that you keep your copyright, but you lose control over it in the game whether it is used or not. However retaining copyright (at least in the USA) means being able to deny access or to remove protected work on demand.

I would word it a bit differently. Copyright is yours, of course. But by submitting the ship/work you are allowing us to use it in the game. We won't be modifying your work without your agreement first.

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

One of these requests appears on SFM every week or two, so a request like this isn't all that big a deal. The way the post was written sounded like a newbie looking for free stuff, not a pro soliciting portfolios.

We are not pros looking for portfolios. We are indy developers with no money ( old story ) looking for people with the same passion to create games and who'd like to be involved in this project. If you are not interested, fine, just ignore the request, but I don't see why there's such hostility.

Originally Posted by Zoxesyr

Recently SFM has had a couple of bad experiences with other boards stealing art and meshes without credit, and the "copyright" text quoted is a real red flag, especially when other people's art is posted without credit in the same post.

I understand people being cautious, but there's a fine line between being cautious and assuming that everybody posting requests here is trying to steal your work.

By the way, the concept art posted in this thread was done by the development team and/or by SpAce himself, so there's certainly no problem to show it off here.

Infinity has been in development since 2005, and will continue to be in development for at least an additional 1-2 years. I've spent more than 10,000 hours of work on programming, and paid all the costs so far with my personal money. We have a pretty large community, we have already released a working combat prototype that you can download and play, hopefully proving that we have the skills to complete a game; Infinity has been featured on major websites and media / magazines such as PCGamer, PCFormat or PCZone in various countries, and it received awards for the best visuals and most anticipated standalone game on moddb.com's 2006 competition.

F. Brebion