[Commander Zane]

Glad to hear that, the Sabus made my eyes bleed just looking at it.

[jr2]

Gotta have FS2 era ships for ze pirates!

[Rampage]

First off we as Inferno would like to thank you as our loyal fanbase.  It is impossible to have made it this far w/o your patronage.  So thus I wish to answer the two most pressing questions that many of you may have:

Q1: When will Inferno be released?
A1: We originally planned the release for the end of 2011, but as we draw closer to that date, it is becoming a more and more unrealistic goal for us to reach.  However, if you decide to help us, then we may be able to reach this goal.

Q2: What still needs to be done?
A1: FREDding and mission polishing.  This is where the work is at.  Most of the models should be done by the end of this year.

Q3: I want to contribute; how can I help?
A3: We need mission designers to polish pre-designed missions made by our staff.  We also need good texture artists who can work on previously UVed ships.

Please let us know if you can help.  As one of the grandfather projects and certainly one of the more well-known ones, it is very exciting to work on Inferno.  Plus we have very nice teammembers who will provide guidance and help you along the way.

INFTeam

[Mobius]

We need mission designers to polish pre-designed missions made by our staff.

Sure I wouldn't dislike a FREDder available to create new missions from scratch.

[Woomeister]

Hey all the team has asked me to deliver a bit of a progress report to you on how things are going with the model upgrades and the missions

models

Model Progress Terran
There are a total of 48 models
22 are in the final stages
11 other HTL models are in production
15 Have yet to be started

Model Progress Earth Alliance
There are a total of 37 models
28 are in the final stages
8 other HTL models are in production
1 Have yet to be started

Model Progress Vasudan
There are a total of 34 models
14 are in the final stages
2 other HTL models are in production
18 Have yet to be started

Model Progress Shivan
There are a total of 55 models
37 are in the final stages
5 other HTL models are in production
13 Have yet to be started

So a grand total of 174 models. If you want to break it down to a total percentage
58% of models have been completed
15% of models are in production
27% of models haven't been upgraded

Not all of these are required for the first release however as only a few last key models are now missing for a first release candidate, the only two I can mention without major spoilers would be the Gigas and Icanus


Missions

I can't really do percentages for the missions but I'll give a bit of a breakdown.
The original plan was a 30 mission script. 'R1' was 20 missions and 'R2' was 10 as was stated in our original FAQ. This is being expanded now slightly.

Of the 20 original R1 missions only 3 haven't been started
Of the 10 original R2 missions 2 have been started
There's 1 'R1' mission not part of the original script done and one for 'R2' in the planning phase, and probably more to come, but I don't want to go into too much detail there



The Future

As we mentioned in our FAQ back on the announcement day there are plans to support the Inferno Upgrade and to continue adding content after the first release. This includes the Ancients campaign Gateways and a upgraded version of Sol: A History which will be released as separate downloads. There's at least one other in production/planning as well but we don't want to spoil everything so I'll only mention the two commonly known ones:

Gateways
I can't really say much about Gateways at this stage as it's still in the concept phase, but it's set a large distance away from known GTVA space were the surviving Ancients fled from the Shivan invasion of their empire 8000 years before.
More on this in the future.


Sol: A History-U
The Sol: A History upgrade will be fully compatible with INF-U and run from it's own mod folder. The campaign remains mostly untouched but with addition of new ship classes and only 1 slight mission change
- FS1 era ships including the Apollo and Angel
- INFASA ships introduced in the later chapters to supplement the older Fenris and Hercules, this includes ships like the Latona, Callisto, Antaeus and Ethon

The campaign storyline remains unchanged and the only thing edited are ship types and the weapons available due to the R1 versions of weapons not being included. It's being produced as S:AH was probably the most popular none INF Team made campaign produced for INFR1 and we didn't want it to be obsolete.
And no this doesn't mean INFA is cancelled as this isn't designed to replace it in the continuity.

I can share some early screens:

[QuakeIV]

Command, requesting mission update!

[BrotherBryon]

Moving along nicely, don't have the time to compile a list of things done since September because that time is better off spent modeling. I can say with some degree of certainty that a few more models have worked their way into game, more have been started, and others have moved to further stages of development. Missions have seen a lot of work in last few months but how much I can't say, not my area of expertise.

[Jellyfish]

More models we haven't seen or heard? Weren't you guys nearing the limit of model entries supported?

[BrotherBryon]

Most models replace older existing models so there really hasn't been much change in the total number of ships we have. Also we aren't any where near the ship limit (Dropping the Ancient and SOC fleets for the first release probably helped there) but we are however fast approaching the limit for shield icons if I'm not mistaken.

[Rampage]

Most assets involving what is formerly known as R1 have been completed (includes missions) and are playable to various degrees.  R2 is still in development stage, where most missions and some models are pending completion.

Currently we are working on (1) debugging R1 missions (~30) and (2) making models and textures for R2.  Missions for R2 depends on these models and will be started once these models have been completed.

How you can help: We need texture artists more than we need FREDders right now.  Also we've had a bad experience with some FREDders who did absolutely NOTHING, so we're more hesitant w/ hiring new FREDders.

R

[Woomeister]

Weren't you guys nearing the limit of model entries supported?

No, the the limit for shield icons.

[Rampage]

I want to give an update to the Community regarding what's going on w/ the project these days.  As you can see, we haven't released new updates in some time; this is because many of our core members after working on Inferno non-stop for the past two years are taking a short leave of absence to refresh ourselves (amongst other things, in particular RL matters).

However, work is still being done; some of our members are finalizing the FREDding work needed on several missions, while others are working on meshes.  We will resume work sometime in March or April; stay tuned!

R

[Beskargam]

so how goes it?

[Woomeister]

[General Battuta]

All I've done for the team is get them SVN, I've been pretty worthless and don't really deserve my badge

But Rampage, Woo and Trivial Psychic are all fantastic

[Mongoose]

Lots of mission numbers = awesome

[Woomeister]

Most of the R1 missions are in finetuning now. Adding hotkeys were we need them, balance tweaking, messages being updated and fixing up a few objectives.

[Goober5000]

Lots of mission numbers = awesome

Lots of completed mission numbers, hopefully.

[Rampage]

But Rampage, Woo and Trivial Psychic are all fantastic

And don't forget our modeler extraordinaire - - - BrotherByron!

R

[General Battuta]

Yes! I'm so sorry, he is great.

I am not great. You should remove my badge, I'm an insult to it.