Impact of 6.0 beta on mods

[Darlandra]

than u need to make a workarround for that problem .. i doubt that all modders who provided the ship mods will rework there modsbecause u change something....

*runawayandhide*

seriously.. e have tons of ships of ship mods and other stuff.our change will basicaly like u say " mess it up", isent there a way to avoid that a trouble ?

As a modder on other games in active development...no it's not on them.
We UNDERSTAND this kind of thing can happen and are signed up for keeping our creations up to date with the actions of developers.
While it would be NICE for egosoft to make it easy to update things, or at the very least be able to identify for us exactly what changed/needs changing, that's all it is: nice.

[thomassanford]

Hi guys,

This is to let you all know that a change of physics engine in 6.0 can negatively impact mods with assets (e.g. station or ships models). They will basically have incorrect collisions.

THIS IS EXPECTED

And soon there will be an announcement on that and what awaits us in future, so stay tuned.

Link to 6.0 beta announcement

I have asked many times over the years, but I will do it again given the latest mod breaking changes. PLEASE Release 3D CAD files for asset modding. The community figured out after pain staking effort how to port old ships and make stuff work for the most part, but I haven't seen anything entirely new and many ports are broken in ways you understand with no clear navs and collisions. Given a simple ship with all layers, textures,collision and nav meshes to look at how everything is laid out it would make new ship creation worthwhile. How about a rigged character to work with some new animations and variety or even a full room layout. Oh the possibilities... If it were not just guessing making it worth while for people with limited time to figure it out, but would be willing to draw.
Edit - To the point, I would figure all modders realize things change that break mods. It has happened in every other X game. I am just suggesting 'Official' layouts would make fixing them easier.

[|K.O.S.H.]

Hi guys,

This is to let you all know that a change of physics engine in 6.0 can negatively impact mods with assets (e.g. station or ships models). They will basically have incorrect collisions.

THIS IS EXPECTED

And soon there will be an announcement on that and what awaits us in future, so stay tuned.

Link to 6.0 beta announcement

I have asked many times over the years, but I will do it again given the latest mod breaking changes. PLEASE Release 3D CAD files for asset modding. The community figured out after pain staking effort how to port old ships and make stuff work for the most part, but I haven't seen anything entirely new and many ports are broken in ways you understand with no clear navs and collisions. Given a simple ship with all layers, textures,collision and nav meshes to look at how everything is laid out it would make new ship creation worthwhile. How about a rigged character to work with some new animations and variety or even a full room layout. Oh the possibilities... If it were not just guessing making it worth while for people with limited time to figure it out, but would be willing to draw.
Edit - To the point, I would figure all modders realize things change that break mods. It has happened in every other X game. I am just suggesting 'Official' layouts would make fixing them easier.

I support that.
many of the X3-Modders have stopped creating content for X4, just because its too hard/time taking to get into modeling for X4.
I have tons of ships i created or added into X3, but it was a pain to even get one ship into (stupid) blender and never was able so see it textured there. (used 3d max for about 15 years)

Thats a sad thing, because there are many free good quality 3d models, that we could get into the game, e.g. Star Trek and Babylon 5 stuff.

[user1679]

since the collision is affected and not the model itself you most likely still can use the mods but they will be wonky. thats a baseless guess from my side.

My concern would be will the player be able to walk on the ships. Having ships not register collision with other ships, stations or asteroids can be
overlooked by players until modders can update. But if the incorrect collisions make players unable to walk on the ships without falling through
then the mods actually become completely unuseable until they're updated.

I would recommend if people have the extra disk space, installing a separate copy of 5.10 and updating that one to 6.0 so you can still play
your old saves until your "must have" mods are updated.

[Newinger]

I would recommend if people have the extra disk space, installing a separate copy of 5.10 and updating that one to 6.0 so you can still play
your old saves until your "must have" mods are updated.

Agree.

I currently have 4 installations of X4 (one 6.0 beta, one 5.10 vanila, one 5.10 with X4RSGE and one 5.10 with Star Wars mod).

[Shuulo (EGO)]

Also note that shields and engines now have "standard" tag, which means modded-in engines and shields without that tag will not be compatible with vanilla ships. And modded-in ships require this tag now as well to use standard equipment.

[linolafett]

I have asked many times over the years, but I will do it again given the latest mod breaking changes. PLEASE Release 3D CAD files for asset modding. The community figured out after pain staking effort how to port old ships and make stuff work for the most part, but I haven't seen anything entirely new and many ports are broken in ways you understand with no clear navs and collisions. Given a simple ship with all layers, textures,collision and nav meshes to look at how everything is laid out it would make new ship creation worthwhile. How about a rigged character to work with some new animations and variety or even a full room layout. Oh the possibilities... If it were not just guessing making it worth while for people with limited time to figure it out, but would be willing to draw.
Edit - To the point, I would figure all modders realize things change that break mods. It has happened in every other X game. I am just suggesting 'Official' layouts would make fixing them easier.

Just to point out, there are no "CAD" files.
The assets are in a 3dsMax file format, most of them. We are now switching to Blender, so all Boron DLC assets are exported from there.
Without the exporter the source file is not that useful, as it does not tell you much about how the final converted files work and look like.

We are still trying to get parts of the blender tools available for modders, but its not that straight forward.
But in case the tools are available, i would be happy to zip one ship up for modders to use as a starting point.

Same for the characters, there its even worse as its some old proprietary pipeline, which we simply can not supply.

[magitsu]

I hope you find a business case for investing in the character pipeline for next dlc/game. There should be plenty of unrealized potential based on how significant character customization is these days. Though other more unique to X macro level personalization like ship paints might be even more necessary to expand.
Crafting new mechanics for cosmetics and AI diplomacy/personalities might be an interesting challenge.

But lets see first how this 6.0 transition ends up working.

PS. I loved the message of this listing* when I read it few years ago. To me it represents a process which is honed through years of cooperation first enabling mod development, then the community does experimentation at a large scale. Some get integrated into the game and few modders might get hired as well. So many great projects like Litcube, Mayhem, Farnham, CWIR/New Frontier, VRO/SWI built on X series mechanics...
https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence ... +X+Rebirth (* Player mod concepts entering X Rebirth)

[user1679]

I'm glad that modders are getting this news ahead of time. It reminds me of the recent Bethesda update for Skyrim AE where they gave some of the modders early access
to the update so they could make sure their mods were ready on patch day.

Even if this thread is about BETA, it's still nice that modders are being made aware so they can begin anticipating changes or even deciding they might not want to
continue their mod at all.

[thomassanford]

Just to point out, there are no "CAD" files.
The assets are in a 3dsMax file format, most of them. We are now switching to Blender, so all Boron DLC assets are exported from there.
Without the exporter the source file is not that useful, as it does not tell you much about how the final converted files work and look like.

We are still trying to get parts of the blender tools available for modders, but its not that straight forward.
But in case the tools are available, i would be happy to zip one ship up for modders to use as a starting point.

Same for the characters, there its even worse as its some old proprietary pipeline, which we simply can not supply.

I don't know how much simpler I can make this ask...

The assets are in a 3dsMax file format, most of them. We are now switching to Blender

Umm.. These are the CAD files I am referring to. Thanks anyways for your efforts to try to get something working.

[linolafett]

I don't know how much simpler I can make this ask...

The assets are in a 3dsMax file format, most of them. We are now switching to Blender

Umm.. These are the CAD files I am referring to. Thanks anyways for your efforts to try to get something working.

You probably mean the source files, source meshes/geometry or something similar.
3dsMax files or Blender files are not CAD files.
CAD is a different way of creating 3d geometries, used for real world applications.
CAD is not used (regularly) in games development. I just want to avoid the word "CAD" being used to describe non CAD files. This is confusing when working with these things.

[thomassanford]

I don't know how much simpler I can make this ask...

The assets are in a 3dsMax file format, most of them. We are now switching to Blender

Umm.. These are the CAD files I am referring to. Thanks anyways for your efforts to try to get something working.

You probably mean the source files, source meshes/geometry or something similar.
3dsMax files or Blender files are not CAD files.
CAD is a different way of creating 3d geometries, used for real world applications.
CAD is not used (regularly) in games development. I just want to avoid the word "CAD" being used to describe non CAD files. This is confusing when working with these things.

As you can maybe tell I am an engineer not a game designer, I do play with them in my spare time when I have it. Everything produced in a Computer Aided Design program is a CAD file to us. Anyways, I have worked with Autodesk products for the last 3 decades like 3DS max, Autocad, Maya, etc and they are very commonly used for physical design in many engineering fields these days both mechanical and electrical I can assure you. That said, I find it hard to believe that at the end of whatever pipeline, process, drawing process, or whatever you do not end up with a completed model for whatever object before it is imported into the engine, call the files what you will. Still Just asking you to share them to make new content if you have them. If not ,take it as a suggestion for modding. Thanks regardless.

[|K.O.S.H.]

I don't know how much simpler I can make this ask...
Umm.. These are the CAD files I am referring to. Thanks anyways for your efforts to try to get something working.

You probably mean the source files, source meshes/geometry or something similar.
3dsMax files or Blender files are not CAD files.
CAD is a different way of creating 3d geometries, used for real world applications.
CAD is not used (regularly) in games development. I just want to avoid the word "CAD" being used to describe non CAD files. This is confusing when working with these things.

As you can maybe tell I am an engineer not a game designer, I do play with them in my spare time when I have it. Everything produced in a Computer Aided Design program is a CAD file to us. Anyways, I have worked with Autodesk products for the last 3 decades like 3DS max, Autocad, Maya, etc and they are very commonly used for physical design in many engineering fields these days both mechanical and electrical I can assure you. That said, I find it hard to believe that at the end of whatever pipeline, process, drawing process, or whatever you do not end up with a completed model for whatever object before it is imported into the engine, call the files what you will. Still Just asking you to share them to make new content if you have them. If not ,take it as a suggestion for modding. Thanks regardless.

If you want a generel name, you can say "3D-model".
The problem here is, that you refer to a specific file-type and thats wrong.

E.g. if you talk about a text file you don't say "word-file", because "word" is a specific format and "text" is general.

[chew-ie]

While we are at it - I'd appreciate the source files of the engine as well.

[linolafett]

If you want a generel name, you can say "3D-model".
The problem here is, that you refer to a specific file-type and thats wrong.

E.g. if you talk about a text file you don't say "word-file", because "word" is a specific format and "text" is general.

I am not talking about a specific file type though.
I tried to differentiate between a volume based creation process, vs a polygonal approach.
You can not load a polygonal mesh into a CAD program and importing CAD files to a polygonal tool is creating a messy model, which is incredibly difficult to adjust.
Both are used to create 3d meshes, but they are very different while working with them. Not splitting the two types is creating a lot of confusion and thats what i want to avoid.

If we would communicate, that we will share "CAD" files, a lot of people could be disappointing, that their software cant work with the supplied files.
On the other hand the people working with the non CAD software would be mad, because they think they wont be able to create such assets.

That being said, packing one completely set up example ship, ready for export, would make sense, as i agreed on before.

[|K.O.S.H.]

If you want a generel name, you can say "3D-model".
The problem here is, that you refer to a specific file-type and thats wrong.

E.g. if you talk about a text file you don't say "word-file", because "word" is a specific format and "text" is general.

I am not talking about a specific file type though.
I tried to differentiate between a volume based creation process, vs a polygonal approach.
You can not load a polygonal mesh into a CAD program and importing CAD files to a polygonal tool is creating a messy model, which is incredibly difficult to adjust.
Both are used to create 3d meshes, but they are very different while working with them. Not splitting the two types is creating a lot of confusion and thats what i want to avoid.

If we would communicate, that we will share "CAD" files, a lot of people could be disappointing, that their software cant work with the supplied files.
On the other hand the people working with the non CAD software would be mad, because they think they wont be able to create such assets.

That being said, packing one completely set up example ship, ready for export, would make sense, as i agreed on before.

Yes, i know the difference between boundig (BREP) and geometric representations. I studied computer science
Just wanted to have a simpler analogy, because many people dont have an idea about 3d modeling at all.

CAD uses a special "format" (mathematical functions, controolpoints and boolean operators) to encode its information, you have an implicit shape, while BREP just defines points, their connections (triangles or edges) and the triangles direction (by the order of its points (implicit) or a normal(explicit)) and optionally for ligthing a normal on each point and/or triangle (or edge), depending on the format.

A similar difference applies to .txt and .word. The former one is plain text, the latter is text with markup (in later versions via xml).
You can also convert .word to .txt, but lose information (the markup, like "bold") as you would lose information when converting CAD (every point is defined by a function/set of functions) to BREP (finite number of points).

Computer games allway use BREP, because graphic cards are constructed to compute point and triangle related stuff in parallel.


I just wanted to keep it easy

[aurumgallente]

We are still trying to get parts of the blender tools available for modders, but its not that straight forward.
But in case the tools are available, i would be happy to zip one ship up for modders to use as a starting point.

Same for the characters, there its even worse as its some old proprietary pipeline, which we simply can not supply.

Can you specify what these tools can do in case we will see them in the future? Will it be only collision generator or modders will also be able to create ID-codes, ANI animations, source code of UV-animations and boxes of visibility, live preview of materials and light sources, decompile vanilla assets and work with multimat materials?

[linolafett]

Can you specify what these tools can do in case we will see them in the future? Will it be only collision generator or modders will also be able to create ID-codes, ANI animations, source code of UV-animations and boxes of visibility, live preview of materials and light sources, decompile vanilla assets and work with multimat materials?

I can not specify any details, as i dont know what we will release.
I can assure you, that the Character pipeline is not part of the initial release - its still built on proprietary software and was not yet rebuild to use open software.

[BrummBear02]

Can you specify what these tools can do in case we will see them in the future? Will it be only collision generator or modders will also be able to create ID-codes, ANI animations, source code of UV-animations and boxes of visibility, live preview of materials and light sources, decompile vanilla assets and work with multimat materials?

I can not specify any details, as i dont know what we will release.
I can assure you, that the Character pipeline is not part of the initial release - its still built on proprietary software and was not yet rebuild to use open software.

can u speculate around what time we get new infos or even tools? or at least if we can fix our ships before the boron dlc releases or after?

[linolafett]

I can not and will not speculate, because whatever i say will be incorrect and will annoy more than it helps.
Therefore i wont say anything aside of "we are close and are working on it".