EGOSOFT and Deep Silver announce X Rebirth (updated 2011-07-29)

[Yapa]

Been a follower of X games since BTF beta... but gotta say reading that Russian/Romanian article is very very dishartening and disappointing too.

1) Only 1 ship, cant fly any others? Why are we going backwards?

2) Express Highways for AI ships to travel through... no more dynamic flight, this sounds like FREELANCER.

3) No more dockign with ships/stations, simply teleport goods instantly. < this is a simplifcation that takes away from gameplay and immersion. X has been a sim, not an action game. We WANT complexity and interaction.

These 3 simplifications of the game point to a reduction in development time and effort, these things existed before but now are too hard to do? Come on guys?

I guess X is aiming at the more casual action orientated crowd, and I think this might backfire on it with the hardcore fans who made the game what it is and appreciate the complexity and sim like nature of the game.

[X2-Eliah]

Wait, what's this about no docking at stations?

[Santi]

Officially nobody said there is no docking at stations, they said that you don't need to dock to trade. I presume, that is the docking computer replacement feature. The being 5 km away and suddenly being docked wasn't really immersive. On the other hand manual docking it is, and is fun when you want to do it, so hopefully will be in the game.

[PTR]

The docking computer was great when you were losing a fight, I'll miss it. But then again, you'll fight with drones, so as long as I have enough money I don't care about it being destroyed (except for when you have to hunt the galaxy for the shields and weapons... )

I guess the goods you purchase will be beamed to your ship or loaded in your fright drones...

On an other note: should you be able to save only when docked, or everywhere? I liked only being able to save while docked: no saving in mid-fight and no saving in hostile areas. This can be annoying, but it's also more challenging!

[perkint]

Since it's been said that you can go out and hire managers & deliver them to your stations using your ship, I suspect docking is still in. Just you don't need to do it to trade...

Tim

[Shootist]

You gotta wonder what a, "parallelepiped in a sphere", is.

A parallelepiped is a three-dimensional parallelogram:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelopiped

Thanks, I never thought to look it up, thought I had a goofy translation.

[Mightysword]

Officially nobody said there is no docking at stations, they said that you don't need to dock to trade. I presume, that is the docking computer replacement feature. The being 5 km away and suddenly being docked wasn't really immersive. On the other hand manual docking it is, and is fun when you want to do it, so hopefully will be in the game.

I'm a bit skeptical about this, and also hope it's still in. But so far I see this pattern of things that doesn't work so well in the past are taken out instead of improving upon on, and docking is definitely classified as "didn't work very well". It seems that while we don't get an official confirm, but usually we received buttered up description about this new feature (remote trading) that improves upon this one not working feature, until later we get a confirmation that we can't indeed do the old thing any more (docking). The no capital ship flying announcement was of the same pattern if you remember.

[Shootist]

I'm a bit skeptical about this, and also hope it's still in. But so far I see this pattern of things that doesn't work so well in the past are taken out instead of improving upon on, and docking is definitely classified as "didn't work very well". It seems that while we don't get an official confirm, but usually we received buttered up description about this new feature (remote trading) that improves upon this one not working feature, until later we get a confirmation that we can't indeed do the old thing any more (docking). The no capital ship flying announcement was of the same pattern if you remember.

No. I don't remember.

The player can walk about on stations. I suspect one would have to dock at the station to actually walk about. And even if you cannot dock, and somehow transport over, life is still good.

Docking/no Docking is not something of any import anyway. In fact this non-issue is like adding bathrooms to the Normandy and begs the question, Why?

Everything about this new game, with the possible exception of the external moving bits on stations and ships, I'm real pleased with.

Carry on, Egosoft.

[Auntie]

Yerp, XRebirth may have strong competition in Infinity. Really sweet engine, with being able to enter a planet from outterspace with no loading screens, fly right in (its never been done before). But I haven't heard anything about a Economy in Infinity yet, does anyone know if its going to have one with trading n stuff like X series/freelancer?

Check out www.starwraith.com , they've been doing space to planet flight in their games for quite a few years now.

Now if I could just get Evochron, I-war 2 and the X games to meet, fall in love and produce an offspring, I'd be a VERY happy camper.

[StarTroll]

I'm a bit skeptical about this, and also hope it's still in. But so far I see this pattern of things that doesn't work so well in the past are taken out instead of improving upon on, and docking is definitely classified as "didn't work very well". It seems that while we don't get an official confirm, but usually we received buttered up description about this new feature (remote trading) that improves upon this one not working feature, until later we get a confirmation that we can't indeed do the old thing any more (docking). The no capital ship flying announcement was of the same pattern if you remember.

No. I don't remember.

The player can walk about on stations. I suspect one would have to dock at the station to actually walk about. And even if you cannot dock, and somehow transport over, life is still good.

Docking/no Docking is not something of any import anyway. In fact this non-issue is like adding bathrooms to the Normandy and begs the question, Why?

Everything about this new game, with the possible exception of the external moving bits on stations and ships, I'm real pleased with.

Carry on, Egosoft.

Was the "The player can walk about on stations" fact really stated and confirmed ? because I don't remember even seeing taht feature.
I believe we still will need to dock at stations, at least for immersion. Unless a new way has been included, you still need to dock to repair your ship (also useful for taking a break and stuff like that).

[Nanook]

...
The player can walk about on stations....

Not sure where you got this. It has been said that we can 'move about our ship', but not in a true 3D way, which implies a 'click on door icon to go to next room' mechanism. I highly doubt Egosoft is going to create a separate game engine (which is what they'd have to do) just to walk about on stations. This isn't a first-person shooter or RPG, after all, it's a flying-in-space type of game. Those are two totally diffferent types of game engines.

[perkint]

The walk on stations (including being able to "explore every corner" or something like that) is in the Romanian preview here

You'll need to feed it through a translator (eg Google) unless you can read Romanian (obviously!).

Tim

[Nanook]

Really? I'd like to know how they were able to do such a preview. Did Egosoft give them an exclusive alpha release of the game to play? Or did they steal the code from somewhere? Or is it simply unsubstantiated speculation based on a mistranslation through Google? Until I hear further, I have to go by what Bernd said in a tranlated interview in your own thread:

Krawall.de: Can we now actually exit the ship and maybe even walk around stations?

Bernd Lehan: No. You won't be able to walk around the stations.

This was in the post that was translated by NetHawk.

He did seem to imply that you could move around the stations, and if so, I'd guess it's similar to my interpretation of how the mechanism works on the player's ship, i.e., point, click, enter, interact with objects, point, click, enter another area, etc. 2D or pseudo 3D, not true 3D.

[Mightysword]

No. I don't remember.

To me it feels the same. In the beginning we never get a straight out answer that "no, you can not pilot capital ship". Instead we got a lot of "there are many cool new ways to interact with your capital ships" (but can I fly it?) and "now you can hire crew and give your crew order" (ok, but can I directly fly it!?!?) ...etc... It's not until GameCon that's yup, we aint flying any cap ship.


This docking is the samething, so far we're being sold on the idea of "you're no long need to dock because of drone/transportation" (but I can still dock right?) or "you will be able to walk around your ship" (but can I manually dock it?) ....etc... Even if what you claim is correct (which a few posters above seems to contest) the manual docking can only be at best "assumed to be there", like because in X2 I see cutsceen on the planet I can assume we have plantery landing which is false. And like I said, I see a pattern, I might be wrong but I'm still worried.

Docking/no Docking is not something of any import anyway. In fact this non-issue is like adding bathrooms to the Normandy and begs the question, Why?

Unimportant for you. And seeing how you compare it to adding a bathrooms to the Normandy I can see why you don't see it as important. And no, I don't agree with that. But I won't argue with matter of taste, we're talking about the existence, not what it means.

I highly doubt Egosoft is going to create a separate game engine (which is what they'd have to do) just to walk about on stations.

They don't have to, they just need to animate "walking spaceship" again

Come to think of it, Freelancer was able to intergrated personel pretty well, why not XR.

[rusky]

Really? I'd like to know how they were able to do such a preview. Did Egosoft give them an exclusive alpha release of the game to play? Or did they steal the code from somewhere? Or is it simply unsubstantiated speculation based on a mistranslation through Google? Until I hear further, I have to go by what Bernd said in a tranlated interview in your own thread:

Krawall.de: Can we now actually exit the ship and maybe even walk around stations?

Bernd Lehan: No. You won't be able to walk around the stations.

This was in the post that was translated by NetHawk.

He did seem to imply that you could move around the stations, and if so, I'd guess it's similar to my interpretation of how the mechanism works on the player's ship, i.e., point, click, enter, interact with objects, point, click, enter another area, etc. 2D or pseudo 3D, not true 3D.

I am Romanian, and I didn't find anything about being able to walk around inside stations in the article.
The closest thing I found was a reference to the X2 cutscenes which happened sometimes inside a station or ship.
He only specifically mentions being able to walk around on your own ship.

[Nanook]

...
They don't have to, they just need to animate "walking spaceship" again

lol is right. We all remember just how much praise they got for their 'human animations'.

Come to think of it, Freelancer was able to intergrated personel pretty well, why not XR.

Freelancer didn't have a true 3D first or third person walk-around, either. It's certainly not what I'd consider the ability to freely walk around stations.

[Mightysword]

Freelancer didn't have a true 3D first or third person walk-around, either. It's certainly not what I'd consider the ability to freely walk around stations.

What I meant is the Freelancer engine was perfectly cabable of rendering good human animation. As long as your engine can process the animate data from model via script, you only need to write an interface between the model and user input.

[LTerSlash]

...
The player can walk about on stations....

Not sure where you got this. It has been said that we can 'move about our ship', but not in a true 3D way, which implies a 'click on door icon to go to next room' mechanism. I highly doubt Egosoft is going to create a separate game engine (which is what they'd have to do) just to walk about on stations. This isn't a first-person shooter or RPG, after all, it's a flying-in-space type of game. Those are two totally diffferent types of game engines.

There no need for a separate engine, as the person can be a "ship" and use exactly the same things used for space fight.

You known that simple people have made planets, structures, with defenses and with it, planetary battles around cities using the Freespace 2 Engine? and for what i hear, there nothing big stoping people from developing a first person shooter with that engine, for boarding ops. It just need people to do it, and artists to do the graphics.

But a this point, they better left off any kind of first person control over the character out of game, or this gona be EXACTLY like Mass effect, and if i want to play Mass Effect ill but Mass Effect, not X:R.

[pjknibbs]

What I meant is the Freelancer engine was perfectly cabable of rendering good human animation. As long as your engine can process the animate data from model via script, you only need to write an interface between the model and user input.

It's entirely possible the X2 engine was perfectly capable of it, too. However, it takes a lot of work to properly animate a human being (lots of moving parts compared to a ship), plus there's the problem that we see real humans walking around all the time and thus anything slightly "off" in the animated character's movement is immediately noticeable.

To be honest, I never saw what the issue was. Considering it isn't Egosoft's area of expertise, they did a surprisingly good job of the animation in X2. Yes, everyone looked like a robot just pretending to be human, but I'm sure a couple of months' tweaking would have got it looking just fine...unfortunately, that was a couple of months that simply weren't available.

[EDIT] Actually, thinking a bit more about it, I'm rather disappointed that Egosoft didn't develop the X2 engine further. There were certainly things it handled much better than the X3 engine--shadows, nebulae, and bright light, for example--and with some development they might have been able to use actual 3D animated faces in the comms chatter rather than the same old video animations they've had for years. I also believe that the X2 Akeela's Beacon was the most beautiful sector in any X game, ever--there's nothing in either X3 game that even comes close.

[Shootist]

Really? I'd like to know how they were able to do such a preview. Did Egosoft give them an exclusive alpha release of the game to play? Or did they steal the code from somewhere? Or is it simply unsubstantiated speculation based on a mistranslation through Google? Until I hear further, I have to go by what Bernd said in a tranlated interview in your own thread:

Krawall.de: Can we now actually exit the ship and maybe even walk around stations?

Bernd Lehan: No. You won't be able to walk around the stations.

This was in the post that was translated by NetHawk.

He did seem to imply that you could move around the stations, and if so, I'd guess it's similar to my interpretation of how the mechanism works on the player's ship, i.e., point, click, enter, interact with objects, point, click, enter another area, etc. 2D or pseudo 3D, not true 3D.

I am Romanian, and I didn't find anything about being able to walk around inside stations in the article.
The closest thing I found was a reference to the X2 cutscenes which happened sometimes inside a station or ship.
He only specifically mentions being able to walk around on your own ship.

This is what google translate provides,

"why it was decided to use one ship will be at that you could walk through it.

The concept is somewhat similar to that in X2, which have many cinematic sequences that occurs on ships and space stations were inside. But even here you can walk through the ship at will, exploring every corner."

And is probably what I misread. Apologies.