http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOvher5E7Io
This is an German interview and my English is pretty bad. (You will propably get sick reading this
)So this is a free/loose translation!
I DO NOT GUARANTEE that everything I have translated here is actually true or was actually said or asked or is correct at all.
Also I think those information should not be too much discussed or interpreted, because different words and sentences in German can be meant differently even in a perfect English translation.
But I tried to make this as accurate as I can in a "word-for-word translation" - which was sometimes not possible.
Also this is not a text-to-text translation but a german speech to english text translation. This is another thing why I cannot guarantee that this is actually true what I am writing.
Speech doesn't has punctuation and stuff. Also Bernd fails at some points pronouncing some words correctly because he is lisping a littlebit I think - sometimes I cannot understand some words so I filled in the words I think he tried to say.
I'm only want to help the english-speaking community. This took me over 3 hours.
-> Pls feel free to correct anything I have written here.
The original video and interview is from PC Games Hardware and PC Games
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOvher5E7Io
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At some points I am using "[]" as a personal commentary. Often because I haven't understood him correctly.
> Do you think that the space-genre and also the X-series gets new input through Kickstarter-projects like Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous?
- Yes! Definitly! I do think that such big games like Star Citizen with such a big budget and PR could help the whole genre overall. As I said we were always there. We have done the last 15 years (?) nothing more than space games and for us it grew all the time.
But that does not mean that... we were always a niche as I said we are trying to change that with Rebirth. I am sure we are heading in the right direction to make this suitable for the mass market or at least more interesting for people who played in the past or the last 10 years only shooter because we are trying to improve the basic game mechanics.
But as far as that goes that the theme [... ? ...] it is sometimes just a trend. There once was the zombie games and it is much to be hoped that the space-games are the next - would be nice.
> The X-series got more complex with every title but also more complicated. What did you decide to do regarding to X-Rebirth?
- That was one of the objectives we have set at the beginning of the project. The X-series as it is, is good and great and we are also not excluding to work a little further on - to develop a real X4!?
But they are much too complicated in many areas. Too much text-heavy menus, you have to look up too much in the manual or recherche on the internet so you can really control every aspect of the game. And that was a really important design objective to improve that, that getting started is much simpler.
Instead of menus you are working with people[? (lisp)] giving them orders which is more intuitive, thats what people understand. Thats what you know from other games. Instead of complicated menus with lots of text, we are trying (if menus are needed) to use compass-menus which are working also with a gamepad controller.
These are all steps to make the game more beginner friendly.
[WARNING! THIS PASSAGE MAY INCLUDES SPOILERS]
> What's it all about with the ship and your co-pilot the player will be provided with?
- The ship of the player is a very special ship. Known as The Pride Of Albion in the past it is now only the Albion Skunk because she is sniffy and at the beginning of the game this ship is really damaged and you are alone and forsaken and in a pretty bad situation.
And the co-pilot you are running across at the beginning of the game is a little bit mysterious. You don't know her objectives, what she is doing. And you find out at the beginning of the plot she is having her own agenda which has something to do with, in this part of the universe were we are starting, prevalent Plutarch Mining Corporation.
She is a little bit against this corporation. And that is drawing the player inevitably a little bit into trouble, trouble which he actually would like to avoid.
A relativ thrillingly relationship develops between the player and Yisha [co-pilots name, thanks Alan Phipps].
> Why did you decide to relinquish classic jump gates and introduced highways instead?
- Our objective was to get bigger without getting slower, so you can simplify that. We have unbelievable big systems and we also need them to really make a space-game.
We had in X3 at last (in Albion Prelude) single sectors which were 150km multiplied with 150km and maybe again something around 150km in height big but this is actually still pretty tiny for space proportions. After all however spaceships and stations scatter in this cube really fast and even thousand ships are leading to running across every few minutes maybe just one ship.
The density is still very small because the volume is so big and we wanted to have cities, real cities in space with high density. We wanted that the space feels as GTA that it is really busy there. And still there should be emptyness. And to reach this structure we need as well as GTA streets.
And this is what we are doing with those highways.
There is basically a hierarchical network. There are super highways, those are the big highways with which you can fly over interplanatery distances, around moons, on the other side of planets.
And there are normal highways, local highways. The difference is you can leave local highways anytime but highways with which you can still bypass thousands of kilometers. And you can leave them anywhere in the middle, sometimes there are spacestations, sometimes it is just a big emptyness a big asteroid field where you can find scattered treasures.
We can really make the space bigger now and nevertheless we do not need to make the ships faster.
And the normal speed of the ships in normal flight is determined by the fight. That means we are bringing two worlds together, we want to make possible a really good fight behaviour and still have at the same time a big universe.
And highways are the only solution to reach this objective.
> Which possibilities of interaction do I have during flying through a highway?
- The flight in a highway should be fun. The most of the time it is propably relevant that you want to be fast, reaching your target very fast. And in order to make this fun you have the possibility to exploit quasi the slipstream of other ships. You have several lanes, you are switching, you are accelerating your ship and you can get even faster by maneuvering.
Additionally you can conduct exploration from the highways. You are using your scanners and if you are not so fast you can find things hidden near the highways.
And so we are making the highway flights interesting and exciting.
> How are profit and trading working in generell in X-Rebirth?
- The speed you are making money is pretty much based on the balance. There are a lot of sources of income, also new sources of income. The trading itself works much differently. [... (left something out here, he rethought his sentence)]. The BIG container cargo, the awful lot, will not be handled by the player himself. That means all of this slow gameplay we had before where you flew personally with the transporter from station to station - transporters had to be slow, sluggish - now you are having somebody to do it.
For this purpose you have freighters you can hire, you appoint a captain, you define the targets, you decide which wares will be traded, you are collecting the discounts to get the wares cheaper or you get a commission(?) to sell those wares pricier. So you are raising your profits through gameplay. But the slow things are doing other people for you.
We want to make it fun. Also that trading is fun.
And the balancing is totally different. The sources of income are established different, altogether. It starts with trading but it also applies to earning by shooting down ships.
I am able to be a policeman and get rewards by shooting down the bad guys or I can act as a pirate and raid people, stealing their wares or their ships.
And we have really accelerated this altogether. There isn't anymore such a long phase which is really slow where you are upgrading your ship first of all, this is happening anyway at the beginning of the game in the plot and after that it is the freedom of the player in which direction you are specialize yourself.
> How important is the community feedback in relation to X-Rebirth for you?
- That is a issue! Thats definitly a problem! Our game has the twist that it will be never finished. Even when X-Rebirth will be released, it is the state at the day when it comes out. And we had to release after six years at long last a game.
It was really helpful in the past to have a basis on which you could build on and to have always the feedback of the community.
Now we worked six years on this project and we are hungry to finally hear something again from the community what should change.
We are already having a lot of concepts which will be going way beyond the release date but with which priorities and if there are maybe new ideas from the community that will get very interesting and we really wait for it.
> How does a developer finances such a project over such a long period?
- The money has to be made most of all with the add-ons, thats the way it is. Without steam we would be history long ago.
[I didn't understood this part at all] We financed our game as time passed with an incedible amount of... first for Reunion, than TerranConflict was released which was itself a measure to finance Reunion, then there were released extensions for Terran Conflict which revived Terran Conflict again and again, we translated Terran Conflict in other languages, we developed Albion Prelude to basically finance this game and we amplified Albion Prelude again and brought it to Mac and Linux and really expanded the game, also on the new markets we got also even bigger in USA.
And it is great to see that even the existing games are alive so long.
> Were there areas as time in development passed in X-Rebirth you threw over?
- We have often threw stuff over as well as in graphics, there were experiments with ships. I already mentioned that one of the big objectives was to increase the interaction on the surface of stations.
We want to have turrets, shield generators. Interaction elements on the surface of stations and also at the surface of capital ships. A capital ship isn't just a block anymore flying around as a whole.
There aren't only egnines and a jump drive, a single capital ship can have hundrets of surface elements [...] with which you can busy yourself with.
The design of these ships has seen several iterations where we threw all over again, because we experiemented with claddings, how you get the propotions right - I believe this is what other games also... I think I have also seen that at Star Citizen struggling with that, on the one hand to place turrets on the surface of capital ships which are believable in their size but nevertheless as visible as possible.
Your are destroying very easily the design of a ship if the surface elements seem too big. Suddenly the ship appeals to be to small. Especially in space. Those were a lot of design difficulties we had in early development.
Similar problems existed in the programming.
Our AI is entirely new. We have made experiements with behaviour networks for the behaviour of the AI which we completely threw over.
The AI programming is very challenging because we have to calculate trajectories in a whole free 3D geometry.
There are a lot of premade solutions but they are all based on having a level with a floor - sadly that brings us all nothing.
So that was very difficult.
[In German "threw over" means often "to redo something from scratch" which is the case here and it doesn't mean they have removed the feature - sorry that was the nearest translation I could find. (The question itself inherits both meanings)]
> X-Rebirth is still relying on Direct X 9. Was this a conscious decision?
- Conscious only insofar as that it is enough for us. We reached all objectives we wanted to reach with it. We could implement all optical tidbits with DirectX9.
That doesn't mean we won't make maybe a DirectX11 version maybe. As I said I already addressed that we will propably make this game also for Mac and Linux, that means for us OpenGL and it is quite possible that we will use that to change the windows version backwards again. In which direction exactly will be decided later.
As I said our game will be never finished, when it is out it is 1.0 and after that many stuff will follow.
Now ain't that something.
) or on the X Rebirth engine, I'm not sure.
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