X Rebirth: A proper look by an old X Fan.

giskard · Post by **giskard** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 15:42

Before you read what I have to say below understand I have played X Rebirth for 40 hours and have a history around here going back to the original XBTF and the original Egosoft forum.

I know most issues for past X games, such as the huge number of complaints X3 got for looking totally out of date when it was released 7 years ago (should put that in bold caps to make the point clear). So what chance would X4 have had 7 years later if it rehashed an already outdated system and a flawed system at that....

Anyway, here is a proper look at X Rebirth put in its proper context within X history.

You should find it interesting.

http://www.theengineeringguild.co.uk/node/329

Levk · Post by **Levk** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 15:55

Very well said Giskard.

matthewfarmery · Post by **matthewfarmery** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:05

hi giskard, long time no see, in that article, you said that the game uses 64bit, but judging from what I seen on the forums, and steam forums, the exe is still 32bit, and some people are stating it only uses 2.4gig of ram.

not got the game, I had a feeling this wouldn't turn out to be a good game, so at least I saved £40 on been very disappointed. but nice seeing you again, long time no see.

pixel · Post by **pixel** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:08

Interesting post with some good points.

I would add:

- You CAN see your whole inventory, I have done it, went through some sub menus. I agree the manual needs work!!
- You CAN drop items, I have done it. Can’t remember how but went through some sub menus of the above and found the option to drop them
- No way is this stripped down to xbtf levels, it has a lot more than xbtf ever did. Owning ships, traders, drones, cap ships etc types of mission etc
- I thought Benrd said radar is being added, or certainly looked at. I agree it was a silly omission in the first place.
- You mention speed matching being impossible to implement. Sorry I don’t see why it would be difficult to add at all?

Anyway, good post, some comments I think are wrong but I agree with the final line about good things to come

p.s. Hi Giskard



H.F._Mudd · Post by **H.F._Mudd** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:09

okay...
First, good analysis over all,

but, a couple of points...
You can match speeds with a ship in escort missions IF you have a joystick with an analog throttle. You just need to fiddle around with the 'gamepad' configuration a bit.

Also, you can tell when the bad guys are coming once you learn how to read the new HUD. All you need do is keep an eye out for the little red triangles around the edges of the HUD.

Sure, it's not as good as a proper gravidar display, but it is not a show stopper either.

I cannot speak to the rest of your post, because I've only done escort and assassination missions so far.

Dogfighting IS a bit too easy, but it's fun once you get a joystick set up right.

PS

The only impediment I encountered to setting up a joystick is that you CANNOT reassign buttons 1, 2, or 3... That's kind of a pain, but not too bad if you have a decent multi-button stick. My logitech has 12, I think.

I was able to set up pitch, yaw, roll, throttle, primary weapon, secondary weapon, and boost to my stick without too much trouble.

giskard · Post by **giskard** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:16

Hi all

Matt:
Good to see you, one thought for you, if you had 16gig of ram, does a game need to use it all ? Same with 64bit, the upper limit of 32bit is 2gig, thats all it can handle, this game already exceeds that but leaves plenty of room for more features.

pixel:
Can you post details about your inventory and cargo drops mate, I have not seen a way to do it. Any help would be appreciated.

H.F._Mudd:
Joystick support is incomplete right now, otherwise I would be using mine. For me its the firebutton problem. So I am using keyboard and mouse.

Post by **Henkie** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:16

Nice read giskard... Personally I find the gamer community way too harsh and aggressive towards game developers nowadays, especially PC gamers. What most PC gamers do not understand the level of complexity to develop games, or other kinds of software. Heck, even with $1 Billion (source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamac ... /id/532856) the US was not capable to produce a bugfree website.

I hope that PC gamers will start to realize that they are driving developers away from the PC platform in favor of consoles. Sure, everybody is entitled to voice his or her opinion.. But there is a difference between voicing an opinion and ranting the forums.

giskard · Post by **giskard** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:18

Henkie

I think its the degrees of bugs we are expected to suffer with. Most people over look minor bugs.

pixel · Post by **pixel** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:18

giskard wrote:Hi all

Matt:
Good to see you, one thought for you, if you had 16gig of ram, does a game need to use it all ? Same with 64bit, the upper limit of 32bit is 2gig, thats all it can handle, this game already exceeds that but leaves plenty of room for more features.

pixel:
Can you post details about your inventory and cargo drops mate, I have not seen a way to do it. Any help would be appreciated.

H.F._Mudd:
Joystick support is incomplete right now, otherwise I would be using mine. For me its the firebutton problem. So I am using keyboard and mouse.

will do when I get home tonight mate

Cyjack · Post by **Cyjack** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:20

A fair and insightful analysis.

But yeah, the fact that the game *isn't* true 64 bit is a source of contention.

giskard · Post by **giskard** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:20

Thanks Pixel, appreciate the effort mate

To all

Has anybody noticed that since X Rebirths launch, there has been no complaints what so ever about the DRM Steam uses.... Just wanted to point out since its why Steam wins fans so easily

Captain Lemmiwinks · Post by **Captain Lemmiwinks** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:24

Henkie wrote:Nice read giskard... Personally I find the gamer community way too harsh and aggressive towards game developers nowadays, especially PC gamers. What most PC gamers do not understand the level of complexity to develop games, or other kinds of software. Heck, even with $1 Billion (source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamac ... /id/532856) the US was not capable to produce a bugfree website.

I hope that PC gamers will start to realize that they are driving developers away from the PC platform in favor of consoles. Sure, everybody is entitled to voice his or her opinion.. But there is a difference between voicing an opinion and ranting the forums.

at the same time surely devs have to also accept responsibility when pc games for the last few years have been riddled with over hyped rubbish and completely deviant methods to sell thier games.

i still fume over games like Mafia 2 and dragon age.

sure its the gamers fault for fuelling the practice by buying sight unseen,but who is selling them sub par games in the first place.

the way i see it is either gamers need to stop buying pre orders and pre release,and devs need to start treating customers as a valued resource again.

dubnium · Post by **dubnium** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:24

TL;DR: rebirth is a tech demo, come back in 3 years when egosoft releases an actual game and see if it's worth buying.

Henkie wrote:Nice read giskard... Personally I find the gamer community way too harsh and aggressive towards game developers nowadays, especially PC gamers. What most PC gamers do not understand the level of complexity to develop games, or other kinds of software. Heck, even with $1 Billion (source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamac ... /id/532856) the US was not capable to produce a bugfree website.

I hope that PC gamers will start to realize that they are driving developers away from the PC platform in favor of consoles. Sure, everybody is entitled to voice his or her opinion.. But there is a difference between voicing an opinion and ranting the forums.

the reason PC gamers tend to be harsh nowadays is because they get awful console ports saddled with terrible DRM peddled to them. if console gamers had to deal with shit like that they would be just as cross with devs.

Cyjack · Post by **Cyjack** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:26

Henkie wrote:Nice read giskard... Personally I find the gamer community way too harsh and aggressive towards game developers nowadays, especially PC gamers. What most PC gamers do not understand the level of complexity to develop games, or other kinds of software. Heck, even with $1 Billion (source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamac ... /id/532856) the US was not capable to produce a bugfree website.

I hope that PC gamers will start to realize that they are driving developers away from the PC platform in favor of consoles. Sure, everybody is entitled to voice his or her opinion.. But there is a difference between voicing an opinion and ranting the forums.

I do wish people disappointed with the game would be more civil. It's fine to be disappointed and to say so, but too many people on the boards right now are outright insulting to the human beings on the other end of those rants. Just because someone made a game that disappoints you, it doesn't give you license to behave like an animal and insult their character or intelligence, or to make moral judgements about them.

The agenda of kicking Egosoft when they're down won't get you what you want in the short term, and in the long run you're only hurting yourself by alienating one of the few proven developers of a rare niche game you enjoy.

Swibble · Post by **Swibble** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:30

Henkie wrote:Nice read giskard... Personally I find the gamer community way too harsh and aggressive towards game developers nowadays, especially PC gamers. What most PC gamers do not understand the level of complexity to develop games, or other kinds of software. Heck, even with $1 Billion (source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamac ... /id/532856) the US was not capable to produce a bugfree website.

I hope that PC gamers will start to realize that they are driving developers away from the PC platform in favor of consoles. Sure, everybody is entitled to voice his or her opinion.. But there is a difference between voicing an opinion and ranting the forums.

I think PC gamers are the most forgiving when it comes to bugs. If a console game was in this state it would be beyond a disaster especially with the bureaucracy of getting a patch onto a console game. Most of the hurt is directed at things that are not really bugs in the first place but design flaws. I'm sure there were bugs in xbtf but I never installed any patches and it's still one of my favourite games.

qwizzie · Post by **qwizzie** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:38

i hate to type this but X Rebirth is indeed a 32bit game that needs a 64 bit environment (64 bit OS) to make the most use of the available 4 GB RAM limit.

Having 8GB RAM available will help overall system performance but this game will still hit a 4GB RAM wall.

FYI

qwizzie

kpettersen · Post by **kpettersen** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:40

Giskard,

Not sure if you figured this out yet, but to drop personal inventory items:

Pull up your personal data screen: Enter|2|1

Then open your inventory. Finally click on the small DR button to the right of any inventory item that you want to drop.

( Sorry if you already figured this one out... )

matthewfarmery · Post by **matthewfarmery** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:47

I dont have 16gig of ram, but there are very few true 64bit games out there, but it depends on the game, a FPS wont need that much, look at COD ghosts, activision claiming it needs 6gig of ram, but when you see the amount of ram it does use its just 2.6gig, even though the exe is 64bit, but they changed it probably to 64bit to stop third party programs from working, now in a recent patch, they removed the 6gig requirement.

but for a FPS, it more gcard heavy, and a lot of games are still gcard heavy, there is planetary annihilation that is in beta, and uses 64bit as default, not sure how much ram that will use, but saying that, as you can have multiple planets, asteroids, it probably use a lot of ram, but saying that a fair wack of the calculations are handled server side, which would make a lot of difference.

we might see how well SC and ED does, but a lot of the calcuations for both games will be heard server side,

to be honest, I can't think of any other games that use both 64bit and is demanding on the hardware,

but as you should know, the X games have both been CPU hogs, and ram hogs, as everything is done on your computer, the fact that the XR exe is 32bit, and from what I seen from here and other forums, the memory limit is capped and doesn't go any higher, that and there seems to be evidence of memory leaks, which wouldn't help matters either. I do feel the X games probably would have run better if they had access to more ram, so in that view, keeping the exe to 32bit was probably a mistake.

JClosed · Post by **JClosed** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:50

Very well said Giskard..

I indeed think there is a solid foundation laid. I really am curious to see how the game will look within a few months, a year and later.

tcw · Post by **tcw** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 16:59

I'm sorry, but the fact that you're banging on about 64-bit tells me you're running out of arguments in trying to defend this game. This isn't 10 years ago where people were thinking 64-bit was gonna be a revolution.

You can be nice to the developers if you want, but please don't use fake arguments...

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

X Rebirth: A proper look by an old X Fan.

X Rebirth: A proper look by an old X Fan.