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).

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.

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.

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.

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 will 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.. ).

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.

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, shuttles, etc..) might be added, too.

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

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 will make the difference, not those of your avatar.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Indeed; rest assured that most of the game will not be like that. It will actually depend on your position in the galaxy: the starfield will be bright and full of nebulaes near the core; less bright at medium distances (but still colorful), like in most of the screenshots. In the outer systems, space will be very dark, and generally more realistic.

At the risk of disapointing some people... no. We think the universe will be rich enough with humans only. Some traces of ancient civilizations might be found on some planets though.. who knows ?

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

This is a danger. But reality is sometimes boring too. We will try our best to recreate variety in the game, so that visiting a new planet is always a new experience. However, with a hundred billion worlds to explore, you can bet some of them will be pretty uninteresting.

No, it won't. Do not confuse procedurally generated data with random data. The planet and all its details will be the same than when you left.

Definitely yes. Although the engine is designed to be scalable, it is likely that we will not have the time to optimize for older systems until late into the development. So a powerful configuration is highly recommended at the moment.

Some parts of the engine, especially the procedural generation, are multi-threaded. This means improved performance for hyperthreaded (not much) and dual or multi-core CPUs (much better). There are little benefits for using 64 bits at the moment so this is not used.

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.

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.

Infinity is still in early 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.

The official release date is "when it's done". The beta might start in 2008, but it's just a rough estimation due to the fact we are working on it in our spare time.

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 weekly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It has been in "passive" development/research for many years until the ideas and technology matured. Real development started at slow speed in early 2004 with the creation of the engine and the planetary terrain algorithms. The website opened to the public in September 2005 and regular development started.

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

Spread the word! Infinity isn't a very well known project at the moment. Word-of-mouth could be an excellent way to make the project known to the masses.