TNBT will soon be officially unveiled!!

[festa_freak]

I hope TNBT is a single player game. Egosoft knows the strengths and weaknesses of the X series and I trust them to make keen decisions.

On the multiplayer issue. I would be fine with small servers for multiplayer where groups of friends or enemies could play and build or destroy (NPC stations or other players). I played WoW for years and I still haven't the faintest urge to play any sort of MMO. I tried LOTRO again when it went F2P and it was just more of the same boring take A to B and then get reward or kill ## of XX and get reward.

I want this game to be like... like the previous X games or even minecraft where you can do anything you wish anyway you wish.

But, I'd be happiest with a single player experience. SP games are able to be deeper without having to make sacrifices in the name of balance and fairness.

[handzon]

the x story is still open the sohen or old ones have yet to appear, and effect change again on the universe, given the knowledge theyd have, the power to alter all that is , im hoping they make a show and turn it all upside down

[Psychoclops]

If TNBT is MMO, and is subscription, i think it would be a nice gesture by Egosoft to give free lifetime membership to it's older fanbase. So let's pick a random date, let's say people who registered on the forums on 7th Jan 2007 and before get free lifetime membership

Still, April is turning out to be a very long and slow going month so far

[builder680]

If TNBT is MMO, and is subscription, i think it would be a nice gesture by Egosoft to give free lifetime membership to it's older fanbase. So let's pick a random date, let's say people who registered on the forums on 7th Jan 2007 and before get free lifetime membership

LOL.

[Big Bad Orca]

Maybe I'm getting old, but I hope it's new enough and different enough to recapture some of the charm of the original x games - you felt pretty vulnerable up against those bigger ships when you could only fly in an M3... and then that feeling when you were able to own the Orca... priceless.

[amtie]

Arghhh. 28th April... Just before my exams start... I'm not going to get any revision done...

[jinks]

TNBT will be this

Jumpgates removed now we use hyperdrive, better way to build stations and more easy to manage your empire, way better mission system and a revolutionary new political system. Battles... all kinds eyepopping super nice fleet battle that make star wars look like a kids brawl

I want to see big ships explode with fragments doing damage to nearby ships, drifting dead ship parts, detailed bording fights and most of all kick a** AI that make you cry into the night for revenge.

[Guest]

TNBT will be this

Jumpgates removed now we use hyperdrive, better way to build stations and more easy to manage your empire, way better mission system and a revolutionary new political system. Battles... all kinds eyepopping super nice fleet battle that make star wars look like a kids brawl

I want to see big ships explode with fragments doing damage to nearby ships, drifting dead ship parts, detailed bording fights and most of all kick a** AI that make you cry into the night for revenge.

All of this, and modular ship designs, allowing for individual ship parts to be targeted: engines, guns, bridge, each individual part has its own hull points, one overall shield stat. much more tactical, since destroying each part can have different tctical advantages, shoting turrets stops them from shooting, the bridge, makes all systems work less effectively, so turrets aim worse, ship might crash more often, destroy the engines and the effect should be pretty obvious.

before someone says that it would be too heavy on a computors power, it wouldnt. only M6, M7, M2, M1 and M0 would need modular parts, since smaller ships are, well, smaller. combining the current system of the one hull value and one shield value could become this:

ship has main hull value. the main hull can be targeted, but so can the individual pieces. as the individual pieces are attackked/ destroyed, the mainhull loses integrity/ health. once destroyed, pieces need to be taken to a shipyard to be repaierd, if they are just damaged partially, they will slowly regenarate as shiphands make repairs. if the mainhull is attacked rather than an individual piece of the ship, the ships hull integrity will fall, slightly faster than if just a piece of it was being attacked. as the hull integrity falls, the individual pieces dont lose health but they become easier and easier to destroy. if hull integrity falls to 0 the ship is destroyed

for those of you who are programmers and think this would be impossible due to the amount of bigships in the universe, let me show you how it could be done.

currently turrets go from 0 to 6 and guns from 0 to whatever the last gun the turret has. do the same for the ships engines, bridge, that kind of thing. in a new T-parts style file, each type of bridge, laser, turret, engine can have its HP value. then in the game, rather than store the whole value of this, have a large hexidecimal number for the ship. each digit is for each respective part, with the value from 0 to 16. then whenever the ship is interacted with or loads in the active sector with the player, it just looks at this number and loads the ships stats by doing this,

( piece HP / 16 ) * hex value for piece = HP for piece

It will mean that if a ship jumps out and jumps back into the active sector that its pieces will be rounded to a rough value, but it would make this method of modular ships take up a relatively small amount of the running space.

I hope what i said there made sence, looking back it is rather confusing, but i dont really know how better to word it

[JImmyrosso]

Modular HP/damage would be a major plus as this means tactical positioning would be very important instead of wading right into a firefight!

if your taking too much damage on port side - then roll the ship until starboard is facing enemy etc

However i bet their team has already noted this idea down and how tricky the memory coding is involved...if X amount of NPC ships take modular damage then the CPU has to remember their status as you could meet them again for a later battle etc. Having one hull HP was the simplest easiest option...

[Guest]

Hey, heres an idea! only store the main hull value, and just reset pieces to full hp when a ship leaves the active sector. that way only the ships in the active sector, and the players ships (since only AI get to cheat ) need each individual piece's hp stored.

If you attacked the ship and destroyed/damaged a few of its pieces, then its hull would have gone down a bit too, meaning in my little system that the piece would be easier to destroy anyway, making it slightly less unfair.

As for people getting annoyed at this, in my above idea remember that the pieces would regenarate slowly anyway, so lets just say that when out of sector the AI repair crews are epic

you know, mass drivers would suddenly be a worthy asset for a ship, since they could be used to disable key parts of a battleship without needing to remove its immense shields. so much tactical depth, i can only hope this is in TNBT!

[vukica]

oh, for crying out loud people.

with a multicore cpu, and with gpu support and 4GB+ memory you don't really have problems with such things, now do you? and with a "little" search algorithm optimization the whole TNB-thing can run with a gazillion values stored.

[Guest]

oh, for crying out loud people.

with a multicore cpu, and with gpu support and 4GB+ memory you don't really have problems with such things, now do you? and with a "little" search algorithm optimization the whole TNB-thing can run with a gazillion values stored.

Yeah thats generally my argument but many people need to be appeased.

[A5PECT]

Yeah, but does Egosoft have that kind of programming ability (resource-wise, I'm not trying to knock your programming skills )?

[festa_freak]

A thing I'd like to see in the new game is a space flight/RTS hybrid. You can select your ships in the sector map and right click on a station or sector and they will just fly there. Maybe right click the station and you can select different things like dock, protect and attack. I think it would just make the micromanagement a lot easier.

Then, once all your macro/micro management is done, you can get in your personal ship and go to town on the enemy or get trading.

[Guest]

A thing I'd like to see in the new game is a space flight/RTS hybrid. You can select your ships in the sector map and right click on a station or sector and they will just fly there. Maybe right click the station and you can select different things like dock, protect and attack. I think it would just make the micromanagement a lot easier.

Then, once all your macro/micro management is done, you can get in your personal ship and go to town on the enemy or get trading.

Yeah, i was thinking about this as i took 30 seconds to command a ship to dock when like that it would be much faster. thirty seconds isnt long normally, but when you are being tailed by a brigantine destroyer and you cant strafe about when in menus that thirty seconds gets awful long. the ability to pause the game and issue commands would be an epic improvement. i know its a bit contradictory against the whole real life style, but it gets so annoying in the heat of a fight when you give you ships the wrong orders because you are rushing so you dont blow up.

as for the resources, yeah i think they could do it

the basis is already partially there, the whole turret id and piece id for each scene would only need to be expanded slightly to make room, as would a new T-file with each ship part's HP. The hardes parts would be programming the behaviour of broken parts and the AI behaviour so that they shoot at them.

[normntaz]

oh, for crying out loud people.

with a multicore cpu, and with gpu support and 4GB+ memory you don't really have problems with such things, now do you? and with a "little" search algorithm optimization the whole TNB-thing can run with a gazillion values stored.

It shouldn't be too bad. As long as you limit it to the current sector and only M6 and above. It isn't revolutionary. This was done back in the the day with the X-Wing/Tie Fighter games. To kill a Star Destroyer, you had to first destroy the two shield generators on top of the ship's superstructure, and you could kill individual turrets.

Freespace and Freespace 2 also gave you the ability to target and disable/destroy individual subsystems, and X3TC is way beyond any of those games.

I will grant that X3TC has way more overhead because of the size of the universe and all of the information that needs to be stored. You could probably phase out some of the civilian traffic and the animated billboards, to get some memory/cpu cycles back.

[vukica]

I always had the feeling that there was a huge information redundancy in the x3 engine. And even more than that, unneccessary proccesing of redundant data.

but if it only had multicore support, nobody would have noticed that it's slow and huge. a modern day quadcore will chew up anything without a problem.

ah, well, we'll see what happens ... soon

[Nanook]

I always had the feeling that there was a huge information redundancy in the x3 engine. And even more than that, unneccessary proccesing of redundant data....

Just what 'redundant data' would that be?

For crying out loud (to coin a phrase ), it's processing a whole universe of well over 200 sectors worth of ships (tens of thousands potentially) and stations (1000+) in real time, resolving battles, conducting trades, flying ships, adding and removing stations and ships, and much, much more, and all of that OOS. And then there's all the other stuff going on in the current sector.

This is something that typically it would require an MMO server cluster to handle, except it's all being done on a single core of your relatively puny computer. I'd venture to guess that the amount of 'redundant data' is pretty insignificant.

Now TNBT, which will undoubtedly take advantage of as many cores as you have, should be much more capable of handling all the data the game generates, 'redundant' or otherwise.

[DeLuSioNaLSyKO]

On the topic of storing modular hitpoints (I just want to show you all that it takes literally almost no memory to do so)...

An M2 has like 5 shields, 60 guns... let's add 10 engine components, 3 or 4 shield generators, laser power plants, etc, etc. Let's round it up to an even 100 components. Then, let's spend 4 bytes to store the health for each of those 100 components as an unsigned integer (which means it has health from 0 (destroyed) to 4 billion some (more than any component needs).

So now let's say this particular x universe has 10,000 ships, which is a pretty high estimate. 10,000 ships * 400 bytes per ship = 4,000,000 bytes, which is 4,000 kilobytes, which is 4 megabytes.

That's right, a 100 more values for 10,000 ships cost us 4 megabytes of memory. It is so not a problem at all.

Where it might become a problem is that hitting ships with projectiles becomes more computationally intense - deciding what the shot actually hit. But even that is probably negligible, since it's really just as hard as deciding if a ship was hit in the first place. I believe most of the x engine's resources are spent A) rendering pretty firefights and big explosions, and B) figuring out what every single ship in every single sector is doing.

I'm basing this off the fact that my game lags when I have scripts that add too many ships to the universe, and it sometimes lags during really intense pretty firefights.

But either way, modularity is a nightmare from the game design end as opposed to the implementation end. Balancing it and making it interesting and what not.

[vukica]

I always had the feeling that there was a huge information redundancy in the x3 engine. And even more than that, unneccessary proccesing of redundant data....

Just what 'redundant data' would that be?

For crying out loud (to coin a phrase ), it's processing a whole universe of well over 200 sectors worth of ships (tens of thousands potentially) and stations (1000+) in real time, resolving battles, conducting trades, flying ships, adding and removing stations and ships, and much, much more, and all of that OOS. And then there's all the other stuff going on in the current sector.

This is something that typically it would require an MMO server cluster to handle, except it's all being done on a single core of your relatively puny computer. I'd venture to guess that the amount of 'redundant data' is pretty insignificant.

Now TNBT, which will undoubtedly take advantage of as many cores as you have, should be much more capable of handling all the data the game generates, 'redundant' or otherwise.

sometimes it can be a good idea to calculate some values only when needed instead of recalculating them over and over again or even just storing them. Also most of the ship/station models shouldn't even be loaded if they're not in the local area or a sector.

if this is the case with X engine, I really wouldn't know.
and i'm not saying that X engine is bad or broken. I'm just saying it's not good anymore in the year 2011. at any rate 2+ GB's in ram for a five year old engine is not exactly peachy.

regarding my many cores, well, I have none. Poor PC went dead a while ago, so I'm using the old P4 bucket. It can't really run X2 properly.