NEWS: Screenshots from X³: Terran Conflict - updated 20/7

[googlemeier]

It's a game. Not a device to perform precise operations.

What I like in the X-Series is the atmosphere provided throughout sound and moving pictures.
Having on-screen buttons to click is disturbing what the X-series was meant to be. (I think most of the players use the keyboard for control and the mouse merely for steering)

In racing games you could change the view mostly in three steps: cockpit, just the bonnet or without anything, which was kind of weird, because you didn't have the feeling of being in a car anymore.
But there were only about twelve cars or so...

You could just alter the view, but the problem is with all the ships around it means an awful lot of cockpits...

So the best solution is actually having part of the ship visible in front of you - which saves a lot of work, as the models are there anyway.

However - I wouldn't mind having cockpits (Nanook mentioned Privateer, a game many people liked, although you couldn't see much apart from a filthy cockpit ) -if not created by the vast community, maybe as an add-on?

(last post was long ago...)

[RustyBayonet]

Perhaps this has already been mentioned but the piloting experience between flying a fighter and commanding an M2 should be quite different. If you’re piloting a fighter you are concentrating on throwing the thing around hitting what you’re chasing, and avoiding being hit by what’s chasing you, obviously the interface needs to reflect this. With something huge like an M2, such a thing is hardly going to be piloted in the same way, instead we’re looking as putting the vessel in strategic positions, directing fire control, fleet orders etc – essentially C3 interfaces for control and a sensor feeds to get a feel for the situation.

Personally I’m none-too-fond of cockpits I feel they clutter the screen, I have imagination enough to pretend I’m flying a spaceship – hell when I was a kid you needed it when you loaded games off an audio tape, 15 minutes later you were presented with beeps & pips four sound, 16 colour graphics where you just pretended the 8x8 pixel sprite looked like what it was meant to

[mad_axeman]

Although lack of immersion can kill a game, the lack of a wide enough audience kills many more games. And one of the problems with the X games is that they do not appeal to a wide enough audience and are simply too difficult for the average gamer to get into. And this is the X games real problem. It sells well enough to warrant returning to it by the developers but it doesn't do well enough to warrant the the big investors that are required for what Egosoft ultimately want to do.

Most things that broaden the appeal to the mass market, gets extra sales and thus increases profit, even if it implements something that you personally don't like (like lack of cockpits or a more obvious menu system), is to be a good thing.

Saying that, I hope that the new menu is:
a) hideable when not in stations.
b) comes with suitable improvements in the menu system
c) comes with windows of a fixed width size that are too small to see more then 10 lines of text (preferably resizable and moveabl, but we can dream.

[Tenlar Scarflame]

Man... Nanook's on the battle path

Though I do confess that I agree with him. We're all okay with "phunsics" instead of real Newtonian physics (well, mostly... ) and that's pretty far from realism. So are the space gate system, pretty much all the weapons, the ability to amass gigantic fortunes in the span of a couple days, and many other things I could mention. Enforcing realism on the interface between ship and human when realism is not enforced on any of the above things is... mmmm.

Re: mad_axeman's post, my roommate is what you'd call "the wider audience." He's a fan of shooters, Grand Theft Auto, Super Smash Bros., and Tiberium Wars. I, to him, am a strange and cult-like fanatic for my interest in the much more obscure and difficult-to-dive-into X series. And yet, he's quite interested in it, and he's just ALMOST to the point where he would dive in and play it.
The very, very first thing he said when he was watching me fly was, "so wait... are you in a ship right now?"
No cockpit, no ship.

[Gothsheep]

Of course, nobody who wants 'visibility' is even mentioning the view-obstructing hulls on a good many of X3's ships. Hop in a Boron fighter and tell me those wings covering over a third of the screen are less obstructing than a well-made cockpit would have been. Of course, not all ships have hull showing, and that's even worse, IMO, because you have no real way of even telling what ship you're in, unless you either pull up the ship's details or go into third person view. And that's just poor, IMO. In short, 'visibility' is just more eye candy, the same argument made against having cockpits in the first place.

The most awesome ship in X3 to fly is, without a doubt, the LX, just because of all the struts that make you feel like you're piloting some kind of giant space spider.

No arguments. Seriously, none.

[pgllrdp]

As for the new menu system im going to wait till we get some gameplay footage before i pass judgement (It will probably turn up on some foreign website tho as new vids/pictures usually is anywhere but here first. )

Nice only 2 days and a trailer pops on the main page ....... Now all that I want is a playable demo (crosses fingers)

[Demotruk]

As for the new menu system im going to wait till we get some gameplay footage before i pass judgement (It will probably turn up on some foreign website tho as new vids/pictures usually is anywhere but here first. )

Nice only 2 days and a trailer pops on the main page ....... Now all that I want is a playable demo (crosses fingers)

The demo has been available for two years.

[MHOOO]

Hi all,
now I didn't really find anything on the topic (and this forums search seems somewhat limited) so I'll just ask here.

Is there going to be an overhaul of the menu system?
Going back to one of my old saves on my game, I just noticed why I stopped playing it: The menu system.
For example the view of all owned ships/stations/satellites is way to clustered. With several hundreds of ships in there its impossible to find anything, the rows don't have a fixed size and right at the moment where you find that one trader you were looking for, it jumps into another sector and you have to start searching over.
Now I know this is not something that's difficult to do, but a simple (regex) search for names or an advanced search form, as well as the ability to choose which columns to display, just as changing the font size would make this _so_ much easier to handle.
Another thing would be the complex station building menu - which, pretty much isn't there to begin with.

Now, I'm not expecting a (scriptable) windowing system here, where we could stack and move windows to arbitrary positions since that would in most cases require some serious rework on the code - but if its just adding the user-friendlyness, I think that should pretty much be possible - and make the game a lot easier for new players.

Err, so the question was... is there any info on what the X3:TC menu system is going to be like?

Regards,
MHOOO

[Rapier]

There was quite a bit of discussion of the new menus arising from the new screenshots. So here we are...

[MHOOO]

Well, took me one hour to get the basic picture of the 20 pages full of misleading posts about implementing multithreading, discussions on whether it is more realistic to have cockpits or not, and the comparison of X3's graphics to those of Nexus 2(?).
But only a handful of posts - speculation on top of that - about the new menu system.
Oh well, guess there simply is no information on it so far and I'll just have to check out a pre/review of the game when its finished.
I would have loved if someone could have just told me that in my original topic T_T.

Cheers anyway,
MHOOO

[NavyAICS]

I don't see what the big deal is. We get a new menu system. Great! I didn't like X3's too much anyway. From the screenshots it looks like they've done some serious improvements. I guess we'll just have to wait until the game comes out to figure out how it works.

Still can't wait.
-NavyAICS.

[Mugenjin]

I don't see what the big deal is. We get a new menu system. Great! I didn't like X3's too much anyway. From the screenshots it looks like they've done some serious improvements. I guess we'll just have to wait until the game comes out to figure out how it works.

Still can't wait.
-NavyAICS.

There probably will be (minor or major) improvements to the menu system, but I don't think that we'll see a completely overhauled menu in form of a more confortable GUI.

But I do hope so! xD

[Pirate hater]

Depending on the specs requirement and new game play addons I may ditch X2 for X3 which I never made the transfer as it was too similar with high specs requirements.

[eladan]

Well, took me one hour to get the basic picture of the 20 pages full of misleading posts about implementing multithreading, discussions on whether it is more realistic to have cockpits or not, and the comparison of X3's graphics to those of Nexus 2(?).

You could have saved yourself a lot of time and effort by only looking at the OP for each of the three posted news items relating to X3:TC. If it's not in one of those, or linked from it, it's simple - no-one knows. The rest of the discussion in any of the threads is speculation only.

But only a handful of posts - speculation on top of that - about the new menu system.

Point in case. However, some of the screenies linked from (guess where?) the OP, show changes in at least the way things are presented in the interface, along with extra info, which naturally leads to speculation that perhaps the menu system is something which has been visited by the devs for X3:TC.

[Atkara]

Concerning the new UI, there's a tickmark-shaped button at the lower end of the menu bar. It seems to me that, this button closes the whole menu bar on demand. The menu bar itself, is propably tied to the 'ENTER' and 'ESC' keys. Same like what currently happens in X3-Reunion.