Welcome!

[kathief 2]

Hi! Welcome to our first-ever forum for Infinite Scuba, our new reality-based scuba-diving game! I'm Kathie Flood, the Managing Director of Cascade Game Foundry (CGF), and the other moderator is Russ Glaeser, CGF's Development Director. We look forward to meeting you and finding out what you think of our new game, which will release very shortly. Scuba may seem like an odd fit for AVSIM, but most of the people at CGF worked on Flight Sim and Train Sim, as well as on racing and sports games in the Microsoft Games Studios, and we are thrilled to be here.

 

Thank you for visiting!

   Kathie Flood

 

ps: We are new to forum moderation, so please be patient while we learn the ropes. Thanks again!

[Chuck_Jodry-VJPL 663]

Welcome Kathie and to you and the whole crew  , Best of Luck with the launch !, i look forward to seeing the results of Cascade Game Foundry's hard work over the last few years.

 

C.J

 

PS , Perhaps some links and a few images could introduce Infine Scuba  to the forum readership who hasnt followed its evolution ?

[alpha117 73]

Look forward to release.

 

Welcome aboard

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

I'm so excited for the release! Aces has done a great job on Flight Simulator all these years, and I'm sure they'll do a great job once again.

 

Is it coming out this month?

[CavalierDuck 106]

Welcome Kathie and CGF!

 

As a keen flight simmer and scuba diver, I was intrigued when I first saw an announcement about Infinite Scuba a few months ago.  I had often wondered if diving might be a suitable subject for simulation software - I guess we're about to find out.

 

Good luck with the release, I'm eagerly waiting to see what you've made of it!

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

I'm so excited for the release! Aces has done a great job on Flight Simulator all these years, and I'm sure they'll do a great job once again.

 

Is it coming out this month?

 

This is not ACES, but some former ACES members, and it is expected to be released tomorrow, March 13th. We'll announce when the release takes place.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

This is not ACES, but some former ACES members, and it is expected to be released tomorrow, March 13th. We'll announce when the release takes place.

 

I know, I meant all the former members from Aces.

 

Tomorrow? Wow, is that a surprise. I'll be waiting!

[flyer32a 3]

Hello Kathie and the team, I am intrigued by the new sub-aqua sim. I was a scuba diver in the late 1960's with the British Subaqua Club and I have many happy memories from that time. One question,

is the science of diving, i.e.the effects of pressure,nitrogen narcosis,etc simulated? Can we see

some screen shots from the sim? I am so looking forward to reliving my experiences from the deep.

Best wishes for a successful launch. RegT (flyer32a)

[kevinh 409]

According to the website the minimum spec for the PC is Windows 7.  Any chance it might run under XP?  I like the idea of the game (I dive occasionally) but I don't want the upheaval of an OS change just to play it, even in a limited fashion.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

I just realised that it's in here! Infinite Scuba, welcome to life!

[kathief 2]

Many thanks for the warm welcome! I've always heard that your job doesn't really begin until the day you launch a downloadable game, and so far, that's proven true! We have received lots of great comments on the game so far, so we're excited about what's to come re: building an audience for a new, non-standard game.

 

Today's adventures: we have discovered some kinks in the online purchase process, especially re: purchases originating outside the US, so we are working with Vindicia (our backend financial transaction provider) to resolve them. We are also puzzled by our very solid Mac build which seems to be suffering from a known Mountain Lion bug re: code-signing and keys after download. We're heads down solving these issues today. You never really know how the test environment will transfer to the live environment until you throw the switch.

 

Enough about the less-fun bits of the real world. Let's move on to answer some of your questions!

• We are a reality-based scuba diving game. Real dive sites, real dive gear, real dive physics and body chemistry. Real diving activities like wildlife identification, artifact finding, underwater photography, compass navigation, and so on. But, we are also a game. It's always a balancing act to decide which aspects of reality translate well into a game, vs. those that reflect the too-complex or too-annoying parts of the real world. Where to draw that line is definitely different for different audiences. We fully expect to create add-ons that cover a wide range of complexities and topics, some that reflect the work of real divers and real marine scientists, some that provide a completely relaxed take on reality for people who just want to chill out and look at the fish and coral.
• We use a realistic air consumption model, so divers burn more air the deeper they go and the more they move. For initial release, we only support regular compressed air, but we are architected to support nitrox, tri-mix, and other gas mixtures in the future. We have one diver in the game so far, but will be adding others as we go along, so their air consumption will reflect their physiology. We do not yet expose issues like repetitive dives and surface intervals... staying out of the water for an hour between dives is one of the less fun things about real diving.
• The goal of the initial release is to provide a beautiful, fun, accurate representation of scuba diving in the real world, so players will have a great time and want to come back for more adventures with us later, as well as be inspired to dive in the real world. Scuba is nicely suited for incremental releases, such as cave diving, night diving, ice diving, wreck diving, videography, scientific research, underwater scooter obstacle courses, and the enormous variety of sea life in dive sites all around the world. We aspire to be the modern, interactive equivalent of the National Geographic Jacques Cousteau television specials that inspired us as children to learn about the underwater world and science.
• We do model nitrogen narcosis, which makes divers woozy when they go below 90 feet. The symptoms diminish somewhat as the diver accumulates experience. We do not model things like clearing your ears under pressure, clearing your mask, or forgetting your dive light. Those are some of the un-fun bits better suited to real-world dive training. The term we use internally is "optimistic realism", which is the real world on an especially good, or especially dramatic, day.
• Please check out our website (www.infinitescuba.com) to see screenshots and more info on the game. We are working on more screenshots and videos that should be available very soon.

[kathief 2]

Re: whether it will run on Windows XP... I honestly don't know, since we did not test it on XP. We are a tiny completely independent startup, so we do not have a formal config lab, but have relied on our team, friends, and beta testers to spot-check common configs. For Windows, we are aiming to run on 3-year-old or newer machines with discrete video cards. For Mac, we run quite well on machines back to 2007. It's certainly a new experience for me to know more about Mac configs (code-signing excepted) than those for Windows.

 

Our Minimum System Requirements skew higher than we will likely end up, but we are still waiting for config test results from Nvidia and ATI. I'm hoping we will be able to gather more config data from the forums here, too.

[snapychriz 0]

How long until the mac version is available ?

[kevinh 409]

Re: whether it will run on Windows XP... I honestly don't know, since we did not test it on XP. We are a tiny completely independent startup, so we do not have a formal config lab, but have relied on our team, friends, and beta testers to spot-check common configs. For Windows, we are aiming to run on 3-year-old or newer machines with discrete video cards. For Mac, we run quite well on machines back to 2007. It's certainly a new experience for me to know more about Mac configs (code-signing excepted) than those for Windows.

 

Our Minimum System Requirements skew higher than we will likely end up, but we are still waiting for config test results from Nvidia and ATI. I'm hoping we will be able to gather more config data from the forums here, too.

Thanks for the info.  Any chance of releasing a demo version so people can check if it runs on their system before buying?

[kathief 2]

Top priority is getting the Mac build out - we are working with Apple and Unity support to resolve this ASAP. Following that, marketing outreach is next on the list, which includes releasing a demo version and promo videos. The limited edition of the game we created for the Sea Monsters: Revealed exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry may fit the bill for our demo, but we need to explore this idea a bit more before committing.

 

The Sea Monsters show was created by the same people who did the popular Bodies show that traveled around the world several years ago, but features ocean creatures and environmental education, so is a nice start to our outreach into the broader market.