Ship interiors... Worthy?

[A5PECT]

I'm wondering how moving about the ship will occur.

Will it be full-on WASD?

Or will you simply hit an interface element and the camera will pan/cut to the selected area?

I think I'd prefer the latter.

[ragamer]

I'm wondering how moving about the ship will occur.

Will it be full-on WASD?

Or will you simply hit an interface element and the camera will pan/cut to the selected area?

I think I'd prefer the latter.

If I'm forced to bet... BOTH... Like in SH5... You could actually walk around (WASD... With vertical climbling even. With optional places not accesible by a "shortcut") and you also have a series of shortcuts that will place your viewpoint at specific possitions and angles encompasing a set of "controls".

[cmdnenad]

If I could choose between one player ship with nice interiors and bunch of NPCs to interact versus many ships with no interiors at all, I'd choose the latter.

Silent Hunter is a very good example. SH3 had limited interior, almost no NPC interaction but was a damn good game, with the ability to choose between different boats. SH5 has more interiors, more interaction, but only one boat. It's fun to move around the sub, but it wears off in one afternoon. At the end of the day you are left with a hollow game.

Hope it will not be the case with XR.

[ragamer]

Silent Hunter is a very good example. SH3 had limited interior, almost no NPC interaction but was a damn good game, with the ability to choose between different boats.

The similarities with SH series die in a very specific detail...

...How about having a SH5 sub... You could actually heavily modify?

What's a "ship"? A bunch of pixels? Or a set of capabililties you expect to use to achieve specific goals in the Universe?

On previous X's games... You tried to do everything on the same ship? Or had to swap ships to achieve certain goals? There was a single "winner" ship on Vanilla? Or there were few? How many different ships you had regularly on your fleet?

What's the difference between swaping ships to achieve goals and reconfiguring one to do the same?

[stabile007]

For all the SH comments I would like to point out even SH3 had a very detailed interior which you could sort of walk around in. Sure you couldn't talk to anyone but otherwise it was rather well detailed. When you were hit the enviroment reflected that. Its the same for Star Trek Bridge Commander it all adds atmosphere. Unlike X3/X3TC which you don't see anything not even a cockpit (without the mods)

We are getting one ship as that is the direction Egosoft is going with. So since that is the case then I would like to be able to explore the detailed interior of that one ship and be able to customize it to fit my game play. I do not think Egosoft will limit us to controlling stuff only by talking to NPC's but to have it there as an option does nothing to make the game any worse IMO.

[Ulfarus]

SH5 is a brillaint example of how to kill off your loyal fan base and it demonstrates how interiors are a pain in the arse.

Give me quick switching between stations by a key press.

A suggestion of a solution for X would be to steal the idea of tabs from browsers, multiple stations multiple tabs to access them. Rather than having just tabs at the top of the screen, I would have a line of tabs all round the screen. So you could have all the common functions in tabs at the top or bottom. I would then have a set of turret tabs on the relevant screen edges.

I still want multiple ships but then nothing is going to change my view on that.

[ragamer]

SH5 is a brillaint example of how to kill off your loyal fan base and it demonstrates how interiors are a pain in the arse.

The interiors weren't the main reasson of SH5 "sink" as you could operate your Sub integrally without "walking" at all (Sorry, couldn't resist)...

...Was the lack of support from Ubi Soft (Thing we can all assume is not the case on ES) the innoperative AI (I wasn't sure how bad ... Wasn't there most of the time, things simply didn't react) and the lack of realism on the simulator side of things.

Certainly the above flaws could be triggered by the excessive ammount of resources put into making the whole game look "pretty"... But can't be sure of it as the flow of information with Devs/Publisher was almost non existant.

[Atmus]

Maybe have it like on Independence War 1, where you could fast switch to any of the stations.

The pilotting station let you control the ship directly, and the turrets would try to keep up with you. The fire control station let you control the turrets directly, and the ship would try to keep up with you. I don't know if XR would have any use for the damage control station or not, but you get the idea.

I did like how in X2, you could manually dock your fighter inside the station if you wanted, but I was glad when I discovered you could skip it. Having both as an option for whatever you do inside the ship in XR would probably keep everyone happy.

[AkrionXxarr]

SH5 is a brillaint example of how to kill off your loyal fan base and it demonstrates how interiors are a pain in the arse.

And other things such as the always-online DRM had little to do with harming the game. It was specifically the sub interiors that caused game's failure, yes?

[stabile007]

SH5 is a brillaint example of how to kill off your loyal fan base and it demonstrates how interiors are a pain in the arse.

Give me quick switching between stations by a key press.

A suggestion of a solution for X would be to steal the idea of tabs from browsers, multiple stations multiple tabs to access them. Rather than having just tabs at the top of the screen, I would have a line of tabs all round the screen. So you could have all the common functions in tabs at the top or bottom. I would then have a set of turret tabs on the relevant screen edges.

I still want multiple ships but then nothing is going to change my view on that.

As others have said SH5 sank not because they made the game too pretty. In fact SH3 and Sh4 were beautiful at the time they came out (I still think SH4 is lovely) it tanked because of other short comings and instability.

[Ulfarus]

Sorry didn't make myself clear enough SH5 interiors were a pain and other factors as well helped to sink the game. DRM and instability being two, see the threads about steam to see some other fans reactions.

The same could be said of X:R, I don't like interiors as I think they are a waste of time. I am much more annoyed by the lack of multi ships.

VR and drones just don't do it for me. I like the fact that if my ship gets blown up I die. Yes I can reload but this will usually be from much earlier.

I am also not impressed with all the talk of co-pilot and crew, AI just isn't good enough and going on the past x games the AI has sucked. It has taken the efforts of modders to improve the game immensely. Some of these modders have been quite vocal that they don't like the way the scripting/modding is being changed.

Rebirth will have a real problem if some of these modders decide to not bother.

[Aydan]

This is just my opinion about ship interiors, nobody should feel criticised personally.

Ship interiors in an X game are redundant or even obsolete by default.

Every feature which would require to talk to an NPC in order to manage your empire/ship takes up time on interactions which are driving the player away from the gameplay itself. Some examples on how/what will break the flow in the game.

A communications room... every time you want to comm someone, or to chat with a NPC, you need to change your seats and you're not able to fly your ship. You leave your ship on autopilot which is alreay confirmed for the drone feature, as Bernd Lehahn stated that your Copilot will fly the ship while your managing a single drone. one would have to ask if the idea of headsets was never carried over to the near future, and why you need to wriggle through your ship just in oder to reachthat specific microphone?

A cargohold.... every time you want to check your inventory, you need to change the room. It's not that there could have been a list displayed.

A lounge for your marines.... aye, there won't any communication build into the ship to yell "Charge!" If you don't need to leave your seat and walk calmly over to that boarding crew... "Girls, would you like to put on your pink, fluffy space suits? We have just reach boarding range, and my admirable Copilot is sure that our shields will stay some seconds while she still tries to park this piece of junk metal right beside the main artillery turret. So it would be best to get into action as soon as possible, or as soon as you have put on enough hairspray?"

A room for advanced tactical operations... would be as near as possible to that single mic mentioned above for communication. Again, you'd leave your seat to trust in that auto pilot, even in the middle of a battle, just to tell one of the r******* captains to fly to the left, instead in a straight line into the fire of the enemy. Giving orders remotely keeps the player outside of combat actions. As long as giving orders and not participating in combat is the main focus of the gameplay, this feature is contraproductive.

A dedicated trading room... that would require a certain functionality. Everything else is just dreaming about the look. If there are dedicated displays for productivity, personal, costs.... it would just be eyecandy. We are sitting in front of a PC/Laptop/Tablet while reading this, which is able to display and calculate any form of these values for our bank account, while reading e-mails, browsing forums, prdering a pizza and playing games on the same machine. We certainly don't need to walk over to the trading room to have a look at the advanced stock exchange news. We left these days of good old Commodore/Atari Computer a while ago.

Sorry, ragamer, this should not criticise your ideas personally, but just to give some examples

Why is it so redundant? Because the gameplay itself happens exclusively outside of your own ship. If you interact with something, it's always outside, regardless if you manage your station or flying a drone. Everything which takes you to go to another room to manage it is an unnescessary distration, driving you away from the actual problem you're handling. There's a mission offer an you need to go to the comm room to accept it, or to get more details? Sure, the first three room changes will look cool. After the tenth time you had to leave for that comm room you'd start swearing. You have a tactical room with nice blinking ship symbols for the enemy and your minions? Cool for the first 30 seconds. If the first enemy symbol vanishes you'd start wondering what it would have looked like if you watched it from your seat? The whole new graphic angine praised and rewritten for space combat was just a waste, because you're staring at a map, or a simulation of ships so tiny that you can't even see the bullets/missiles zipping around. Again, the player was taken out of the gameplay itself to fulfill a passive role.
The boarding crew room... erm yes, that's a bit self explanatory. If you need to walk over to give them orders, while a Copilot is flying your ship, nobody of us will have a good feeling. After the third time, you'd start to wonder where this hotkey went, or even the vanilla menu option. Having a cargo hold you can visit, just in order to check your current cargo would be a pain after the second time. Visiting your engine room... wait, why would you do that? To initiate repairs during combat? You wouldn't want to do that in the middle of combat, do you? "CHEEEWEEYYYY, start that XYZ drive and hand me that ****** screwdriver!" While you sinply know that C3PO has just taken over the pilot seat and R2D2 is occupied to produce another lightsaber or ice cold Budweiser from his internals. Or to update your engine, after you have completed that glory plot mission which grants you an engine/shield tuning after 3 days of pointlessly flying from A to B? That would mean a whole work of several month, a core feature ES was working on is wasted just to give a bit more eyecandy for some seconds. I'd hate that thought if i'd be one of the developers. We have seen a similar case in TC before in the Aldrin plot, where a whole new massive modelled Khaak station, which probably took weeks to do, got just a single appearance when you jumped into that unknown sector, and later on it was completely removed from the game, never appearing again.

The thing is, this game is developped by the same team that did X3TC, and we should expect the same persons with the same abilities and opinions doing X:Rebirth. X3TC wa a big disappointment to me. Nobody should feel offended, this is just my personal view. I played X3TC vanilla maybe 8 weeks and was able to achieve any goal i set myself twice in this time. This included building a fleet so massive that the sector lagged, taking over the whole economy and operating even 20+ trading stations successfully to distribute my wares. The plot was more than disappointing, and getting to the Hub Plot was just a WTF?! moment the first time. I was even able to finish this plot without having any station beside the hub itself, just by using automated traders. I was able to finish the entire Balance Of Power plot with only a single fight and wrote even a guide on that. I expect the same to happen in Rebirth, as having someone exceptionally well educated on the MD code doesn't automatically make him a gifted storyteller. Behind every eyecandy feature, there must be an actual use for these rooms. Behind every Captain you hire for your capital ships or your station must be a script which gives you a possibility to interact differently than in TC. I simply can't see that happening.
To improve a game from the TC standards, it would need to simplify the menu structures and commands. If the command structure is taken over and just redistributed to NPCs, the users will be drown in options. Interiors won't change a single thing about the technical access to commands and the commad structure itself. Therefor internal rooms you can visit on your ship is just eyecandy and by default redundant in the way the game works on the technical side. Giving a command to a NPC by chatting to him is not in the slightest anything different than selecting that command from a list. The player just needs to make a choice.
I played TC for some weeks, but i kept modding it for over two years, not because i particularily liked TC vanilla. A plain vanilla game was so annoying to me that i started modding it. What i really appreciated was the ability and freedom to adjust that game to my preferences and even to share it with others, without being restricted by the company. The ability to mod, and the support to mod that game by ES is outstanding, i haven't seen this on any other game, except Morrowind or Oblivion maybe. I'm rating the X series at the same level as those games, and that should give some hints why i simply loved to play and mod games made by Egosoft. I like the freedom to do things like this :
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/19 ... der1v.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/garret1.jpg/

The announced ship setting with the split from the old M<putinhereyourfavoriteclass> to simply drones and caps is to me the inability to handle the differences between the old ship classes from the developper side. I'm not agreeing about this, as it is to me pretty easy to introduce decent distinctions between shipclasses in X3 Reunion and TC. It's just that the developpers don't feel comfortable with the result of their work. Again, nobody should feel personally offended. Modding ships can never satisfy 100% of all gamers, that's even true for the ES team. I'm fine with a fresh start, as it may result in a better gaming experience. But again, judging about the ship setting, stats, and scripts in TC, i have to see it working first before i'm convinced that Rebirth will contain better AI fighting and flying scripts, or even better distinctions between ships that i'd prefer to see. Still, even after numerous patches, some ships don't have a suitable setup, just because the according fight and flight scripts are missing, which is probably a design decision. The boarding procedure was completely moved to hardcoded (it was almost 95% hardcoded in 1.0 but at least a bit moddable) by a patch. Now given that strict behaviour to cut down the players gameplay to the desired way of the developpers in the past, and given the fact, that the exact same team is doing Rebirth makes me wonder how this will work, and why we get interiors? As the game will be tied to steam, and DLCs are already hinted as a future source of income for ES, i wonder what that would include, and how much restriction is put upon modding in order to make DLCs worth their money. A second player ship made available, wrapped up in a short story like the actual steam DLC? Some new internal room outfits, or even a different race for the crew? Making these interiors hardcoded is just logical from the point of view of a game developper. But that means also no modding on these things, as mods would be available for free, directly in competition to a possible DLC you have to pay for. Apart froma different ship to fly with, the internal rooms are the only possible target for a DLC which will be accepted by the players to pay for. The only other DLCs would be ship packs or a new story, giving a certain incentive. As we will see quite some drone and ship models made by users, the work to do a decent ship addition by ES would be enormous. Only if there would be no suitable and working GMax/3dsMax exporter making it almost impossible to import new models into the game would keep that profitable. Given the nature of the collision model and how bob/bods/scenes are working, i think that an adjusted version of DBox is possible. Otherwise it'd mean that the graphic engine was changed so radical that the detailed game mechanics would have been rewritten down to the last script and point. In this case we won't see any user models at all. I don't hope so, as i don't expect to see ES giving away their exporter. I expect to see a rewritten graphic engine and a different mission scripting engine, to enable multi core support and to lessen the stress on a single core, but it should still lean heavily on the mechnics seen in the former games. This would give the game a performance boost, which is currently causing all those MD script lags even in vanilla.

The only possible use for internal rooms in the player ship is to increase the role play as a core feature of the game. The interaction with the surrounding universe would be splitted up, to give the playe more indirect control about things he can interact with, like stations or other ships. Keeping this in mind, from a dveloppers perspective, it's more likely to see more and more rooms with more and more dialogue choices, keeping the player occupied by watching the things happening around him than actually getting involved into. Maybe a way to change the X series into a roleplay game with some strategic planning, and to define a new gameplay. Time will tell if it'll be accepted by players. But as it's always pointed out, X:Rebirth is not X4, and the community which has played the former games of the series may not like it at all, so the move to release it on a platform like steam may actually be the try to compensate an already expected loss of players, as it's easier to get the attention of new players by using steam.

I, personally, and really no one should feel offended, not community members nor developpers, don't like the route the game takes, so i don't think internal rooms are worth it, as it is a wasted effort, unless a very clever functionality would expand the gameplay. If not, it's just eyecandy, it doesn't change any part of the gameplay, unless it's needed for roleplaying.

[Falcrack]

I will sum up the above post by stating that I too feel that having ship interiors I can walk around in is gimmicky and a waste of developer resources at best, and a serious hindrance to the ability to easily control what is going on at worst.

I play the X series for what is going on outside the ship, not what is happening inside.

[Bill67]

I dont know how many here have tried Shores of Hazeron, its kind of a hyrbrid space and colony building sim mmo.

Graphically it could use some work but the details of things in that game made me play it nonstop for months. It was the first time in many years I was playing pc games again into the wee hours of the next day. Why? several reasons. But 1 of those was having my own spaceship where I wasnt confined to a HUD screen 24/7. It has consoles for different crew members that were working functions. Engineering,Sensors, Nav, Transporter, Sickbay, Helm, Power, Shields, weapons. The captains chair could use most of these stations but you could control each one if wanted.

My main point tho , is the interior didnt feel gimmicky or cheap but more immersive than anything else I ever played. Outside of the consoles, there wasnt much to do, if had friends along you could play cards, and still if felt like this ship truly belonged to me. More so than anything done in the past were I was stuck with a HUD all the time.

I believe this feature will bring a new level of immersion in XR that was never achieved before. This isnt like ME or even KOTOR where the ship was a static base and only travelled via cutscenes, but would be travelling while you might wander through the ship. It might be a small difference to some but to me it changes the way the ship feels.

Now with all that being said there are a few things I would like to see for the player ship that to me would make it even more alive.

Crew that skill levels. I am hoping this is in by the fact he mentioned hiring/firing of NPCs and there must be some reason for firing them if it isnt they are learning quickly enough.

Interactive crew that arent just static control centers but show some life by possible interacting with each other or doing things like taking a smoke break.

Dynamic Modules - if you have a cargo hold would like to see if actually being filled or barring that , crates representing the goods you bought.

Interactive consoles - while I dont have a problem with being able to pull these menus up while I am flying, would also like to see areas where I can access functions of the ship elsehwere as well.

Damage indicators - if the ship is damaged I think would be cool to see stuff smoking and sparking. speaking of which, I am still not sure how damage will work in this game. Even with attachment/modules, will they take % of damage or working/destroyed. I would even like the ability to get my hands dirty and help with repairs.

We wont have SETA so time will flow the same all the time. If I am going from point A to B, I think the interior will fill in some of the travel time boredom but only if there are things to do inside the ship. I am not asking for mini games but maybe interactive stations as well.

Right now it starts with 1 ship interior, but who knows what that may bring going forward, station interiors, more ship interiors, ship to ship battles fought inside a ship. Why dismiss new ideas because you dont like it or past games havent done it that well when we havent even really glimpsed what Egosoft has in store for us, just took a quick peek really.

Yes the AI wasnt the brightest color in the box, but I imagine if they are advertising drones fighting within stations and capitol ships that they must have a better handle on pathing, otherwise why bother with that setup if all you had to do was get close to an object and let them run into it.

Time will tell but so far I am sold....

[ragamer]

As long as giving orders and not participating in combat is the main focus of the gameplay, this feature is contraproductive.

This is the main difference between players in X...

...You think combat is the main focus of gameplay...

...Some others perceive X's as multiple gameplays coming together (Building and exploring just another typical examples).

This can change on XRB, ofc, but the Combat in X has never been particularly thrilling for me... There are better Space Combat Sims (Or to be precisse Air Combat Sims)...

...Was the results of those combats on an alive Universe what made X series interesting for me.

I'm investigating if this new feature "Interiors" could add to this particular subject or not, again, if done properly.

As the game will be tied to steam, and DLCs are already hinted as a future source of income for ES, i wonder what that would include, and how much restriction is put upon modding in order to make DLCs worth their money. A second player ship made available, wrapped up in a short story like the actual steam DLC? Some new internal room outfits, or even a different race for the crew? Making these interiors hardcoded is just logical from the point of view of a game developper. But that means also no modding on these things, as mods would be available for free, directly in competition to a possible DLC you have to pay for.

Here we share views... And not because of Steam or whatever, but the desire to charge for things that the Community that has Supported this game has been doing for free (And Devs have taken advantage for on the different releases)... Yes DLCs are a direct Moding killer feature, and without free modding, this game will be over because there is no way to release content as fast as the Modding Community of this game is capable of... It's a matter of numbers and diversity... And also the always present shadow of the "console port" that will really kill the series gameplay for good.