Question about the ship designs.

[Dreez]

I know ES is a small development studio, but this very studio created utterly amazing capitalships like the Boreos and Tyr. Alot of large ships with amazing designs
and when you flew beside them in your fighter, you felt like a tiny ant compared to these benemoths, and you know if ONE of those guns hit you... you might die.

And then... we go from these amazing designs https://www.egosoft.com/games/x_rebirth ... en_037.jpg to this ....https://www.egosoft.com/games/x4/screen ... en_013.jpg. Now yes.. i know it's comparing a Carrier vs a Corvette , but it's still the overall feel it lack of detail.

And it's not only the design itself that has aggravated me, its the fact that our capital ships are TINY when compared to any other X-game..
Back in X-Rebirth were we were flying our Corvette, the Skunk made fighters feel small. But when we flew our CORVETTE next to the Arawn or Taranis or any other of the capitalships, our Corvette felt like an ant in comparrison.

So why have we gone from beautiful ships like the Arawn and Boreas, to the ugly ship like the Paranid destroyer in X4 ?, and WHY are the capitalships SO small compared to even the smallest fighters ?.

In all honesty. The Arawn, Taranis, Tyr, Boreas.. and the majority of the older capitalships feels like they were designed by someone who had a passion for sci-fi ships, while these new X4 ships looks like they've been designed by someone learning the 3D program, by comparrison.

[Alewx]

Hmm compared to the new argon carrier, not so sure if it is really that small. Standing outside my elite landed on a carrier, I still feel tiny next to the capital.
But never really got into XR so do not know about the comparison between them.

But the abrupt and massive change in design philosophy between the argon ships from one game to another is quite bugling.

[naisha]

Yes, for some strange reason, ship design is a major downgrade from past games. I dont understand why they couldnt have used at least some of XR ship designs ...

That ship from XR (dunno its name since I didnt play much XR) is just gorgeous.

[Alewx]

Yes, for some strange reason, ship design is a major downgrade from past games. I dont understand why they couldnt have used at least some of XR ship designs ...

But they all kept their names it is a bit of a joke.

[battou]

Yeah, first thing I notoced when took a look at the shipyard and warf is that designwise ships look just ugly. Postet about it on day one. Second maaaassive downgrade is music. Thankfully music if fixable with mods. For ships I can say the same.

It looks like Egosoft lost entierty of their design and creative staff.

[Max Bain]

It is really so sad. The ships are always one of my main reasons to play space ship games and I am so far very disappointed. Also the number has been reduced a lot.

edit: the smaller ships are okish at least.

[Karvat]

Argon ships, and small Paranid ships design in x3 were really better than x4, i don't understand why

Also the number of ships for now really isn't enough

[Dreez]

Many years ago i used to build homemade hifi speakers, and the one thing i know is that for every speaker i built, i became better, i learned new tricks and each pair was improved in quality but took less time because i already had more knowledge. After a while i even started getting build-orders from people who had seen my work.

So i don't understand how X4 ships can be so much worse in design-quality than X:Rebirth or X3:TC .

[xLunacy]

This is probably my biggest gripe with the game, like the biggest. Everything else will get fixed and fall into place, but why did we have to go from the amazing works of art in X3 & X:R to the stitched-together-box model in X4?

I understand Vulkan's limitations, but I'd honestly pay another 30$ just to have the ship variety and art back in the game, I'm that bothered by it. X:Rebirth having some really good ship designs does not help Egosoft's case either...

[Alewx]

Also the number of ships for now really isn't enough

I second this massively.

[Entrau]

I agree whole heartedly with this. The design for the frigates( cerberus, osprey, gorgon) is just copy/paste, why goes EVERY ship have the same door. Playing this game, I feel a strong urge to play X3 or maybe I'll get rebirth...

[Nexuscrawler]

I understand Vulkan's limitations

That has nothing to do with Vulkan. ^^

[R_Romach_R]

Yep. First thing I did was loking for shipyards to see new ships. Well...some of them good, some ok, but MOST of them are fantastically UGLY!!!! (Teladi L and XL ships for example or paranid S fighters...)
P.S.: and yes, there are too few of them...

[ilDade]

Hope we will arrive again to this situation, in one way or another: https://i.imgur.com/kY55v.jpg

[Grimmrog]

Maybe some stuff changed and there is now less skill there, or just a different art preference.
These kind of things do happen to studios.

[xLunacy]

I understand Vulkan's limitations

That has nothing to do with Vulkan. ^^

It doesn't? I was under the impression that the modular (box design) that they chose was so that Vulkan is more streamlined and uses less resources than in previous X games, also easier to manage I assume. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Nexuscrawler]

They are probably using the box design because everything you attach to a ship is modular and looks differently, so a flat surface at the position where those parts are attached makes things a lot easier.

Performance wise Vulkan is a better choice than OpenGL or Direct X, because the API is a lot more explicit, so you can tell it exactly what it's supposed to do and save some unnecessary steps that other APIs are doing automatically for you.

It's a bit complicated to explain unless you have a programming background, but Vulkan is so explicit that you need somewhere between 800-1000 lines of code just to start the thing up and draw a triangle.

[xLunacy]

They are probably using the box design because everything you attach to a ship is modular and looks differently, so a flat surface at the position where those parts are attached makes things a lot easier.

Performance wise Vulkan is a better choice than OpenGL or Direct X, because the API is a lot more explicit, so you can tell it exactly what it's supposed to do and save some unnecessary steps that other APIs are doing automatically for you.

It's a bit complicated to explain unless you have a programming background, but Vulkan is so explicit that you need somewhere between 800-1000 lines of code just to start the thing up and draw a triangle.

I know a bit of programming, so I understand. Thanks for the explanation.

[Tomonor]

I understand Vulkan's limitations

That has nothing to do with Vulkan. ^^

It doesn't? I was under the impression that the modular (box design) that they chose was so that Vulkan is more streamlined and uses less resources than in previous X games, also easier to manage I assume. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Vulkan is just a rendering engine, and X-Rebirth VR used it already.

The design choice is an artistic interpretation of the game mechanics. The new surface docks pretty much limited the design directions. For instance, the docking platforms always have to be on top of the ship (thus inner docking modules are out of the question), they also cannot be obstructed by anything. Then they also pretty much limited the sizes of the ships - they can't be too wide (any X3 Argon ship) or too tall (X3 Pegasus) or else they just wouldn't fit, rendering that core game mechanic useless.

As for the details of the ships, once again, artistic choice. I on the other hand, welcome it, because I disliked Rebirth's designs. I wouldn't mind if they came back (the more, the merrier), but they were never a favourite.
The only thing that bothers me in the current designs is the outcome of some ships - namely the Buzzard (should be more curvy like in X2), the Callisto/Pulsar/Quasar (these are just random assets welded onto already existing cockpits), Odysseus (damn, that glorious ship needs a serious redesign, at least on its top part), the Sentinel variants (unless you haven't noticed, there's no visual difference between Vanguard and Sentinel models shamely), and the secondary transport ships that have a different name from the original version (Tern, Ides, Hermes, Mokosi), but they only sport a different type of cargo crate (which was a useful feature in Rebirth, but here it's just an empty design choice).

[A5PECT]

Docks are standardized to accommodate all ships within a size class. Frigates have an issue with this, as they all have to be able to fit an S dock with an S ship landed on it, but then also have to be able to land and fit on an M dock themselves. The result is that The S dock on a frigate takes a massive proportion of the ship's overall volume. Since docks are standardized, the end result is a large proportion of every frigate being visually identical: every frigate has a flat top side with the same landing pad on it.

The thing is, fighter docks were also standardized in X2 and X3 (XR didn't have any M/L ships with functioning docks for S ships, at least not in vanilla). But frigates in those games had much fewer constraints on size because they didn't have to fit on a landing pad in a dock. So you could make frigates much, much larger, and the fighter bays would be a much smaller proportion of the ship's overall design.

X3's TM ships had similar lookalike issues to X4's frigates, as they all ended up with the same fighter bay section that takes up most of the model.