[Official] Behind the scenes

[A5PECT]

They aren't fences, they're lattice beams. I like them, they convey a sense of industry and utilitarianism. They don't belong everywhere, but they're nice little details on factories and the like.

If you look closely, they're simply two-dimensional planes with a basic texture and transparency map. But because they rely on those maps for their appearance, the textures need to be relatively high-resolution and the transparent textures need to have some form of anti-aliasing applied directly to them, else you get the jagged effect.

If they're too jagged in your game you can try increasing transparency anti-aliasing through your video drivers; anistropic filtering might help, too.

I'm guessing they're used a lot in XR because they're a very easy way to produce fine details on ships and stations without being too resource-intensive. This type of detailing was used a great deal in X3, you just never got close enough to stations and ships to get a good look at them.

[ezra-r]

They aren't fences, they're lattice beams. I like them, they convey a sense of industry and utilitarianism. They don't belong everywhere, but they're nice little details on factories and the like.

If you look closely, they're simply two-dimensional planes with a basic texture and transparency map. But because they rely on those maps for their appearance, the textures need to be relatively high-resolution and the transparent textures need to have some form of anti-aliasing applied directly to them, else you get the jagged effect.

If they're too jagged in your game you can try increasing transparency anti-aliasing through your video drivers; anistropic filtering might help, too.

I'm guessing they're used a lot in XR because they're a very easy way to produce fine details on ships and stations without being too resource-intensive. This type of detailing was used a great deal in X3, you just never got close enough to stations and ships to get a good look at them.

Thanks for your explanation I didn't know how to call them, hence the "fence" name

My main point is briefly described by you in your last sentence:
"you just never got close enough to stations and ships to get a good look at them".

I figure the means for that is to add some kind of industrialist or mechanical feel, but the point for my post is just that, in the example of the pic I posted, I believe if you would remove them, the ship would look much more slick designed and there are other elements that give the mechanical "tube" thing.

Anyways , not such a big deal, I just prefer clear detail for elements you see or to not see them at all if they don't look good enough.

[Tamina]

[...]I believe if you would remove them, the ship would look much more slick designed and there are other elements that give the mechanical "tube" thing.[...]

It is a part from one of the Teladi asteroid stations

Not a fan of them either but never got the energy to bother at all because there is other visual presentation aspects that bothers me more

[Gligli]

@Ezra-r @A5pect
I didn't look closely, and my gfx lvl could probably not display it well.
But textures (in modern games) have a file format that permit transparency in a side and the fact that the more close to it you are the more detail(resolution) will be use to display it...(I can't remember that file format)
There could be a tag missed or wrong thresholds. The texture could be bad too
Anti-aliasing shall affect on each "lines"
Anisotropic filtering adds "blur" to make the scene more lighter.

@Tamina

Did you already feedback your graphical irritation ? It could be interesting to talk about. Or its an other topic?

[linolafett]

All personal preferences with the aplha geometry i guess.
I try to not overuse this structural element, but for industrial buildings its just to tempting to add it as it makes the assets look more 'techy'.
As A5PECT said, its a very easy way to add graphical fidelity without performance issues. Leaving the alpha geometry out, the stations would look less interesting and detailed imo.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

@gigli: It took me a few reads to get a solid idea about what you are trying to say but even now I am not 100% sure. However, what I think you are trying to get at is this...

There are essentially 2 main ways to address how detailed 3D graphics are rendered in a game.

1. Model LOD - which can be used to help control the amount of model geometry shown and typically the longer the range the less (or lower fidelity) geometry is actually presented to the graphics card.
2. Texture MIPMAP - which can be used to help control the resolution of the textures used on given textures at given ranges.

Transparency/Opacity "colour" channels in textures have nothing directly to do with the above but can be exploited in textures to give the appearance of there being more detail geometry than there actually is.

Those are traditional techniques that have been around for at least 20yrs. There are additional more modern technologies/techniques such as vertex programs, vertex shaders, pixel shaders, and tessellation (DX11/OpenGL feature - arguably not that modern a technique though as it has been a feature of OpenGL NURB surface definitions for at least 20yrs) that can also be used to control/enhance the level of detail rendered.

As for whether the discussed detail is visible or not, you get to see such fine detail more in X-Rebirth if you make use of Trojan/Beholder ROVs... Possibly also when in the Skunk because stations in X-Rebirth are at least an order of magnitude bigger than they were in previous X games and we tend to spend more time flying close to the station geometry. Also in previous X games, most of the time we tended to avoid flying close to station geometry and the AI tended to not fly close to it either thus such details if present would have been less obvious.

Personally, I think the current usage of such detail structures in X-Rebirth is fine. I do not consciously take note of such fine detail but I think I would notice if it was not there.

[Gligli]

@gigli: It took me a few reads to get a solid idea about what you are trying to say but even now I am not 100% sure. However, what I think you are trying to get at is this...

I don't search to get, I only propose... most of time
But it's true that I just don't know what file format texture they are using, since it have probably evolve. But I remember the one I did use to. It was dds...

[A5PECT]

Mipmaps are very useful for minimizing resource usage, but they can only scale down, not up. So there's always an upper limit on how sharp a given texture can appear in-game based on the original resolution it was created at.

The only way to scale textures up is if they were vector-based; I'm not aware of any game or graphical engine that supports something like that.

Anisotropic filtering adds "blur" to make the scene more lighter.

You might be thinking of something else. Anistropic filtering is a 3d rendering tool that makes surfaces less blurry when viewed at extreme angles.

[Gligli]

Anisotropic filtering adds "blur" to make the scene more lighter.

You might be thinking of something else. Anistropic filtering is a 3d rendering tool that makes surfaces less blurry when viewed at extreme angles.

Seems clear
Excellent link, I shall dig from where this mistake comes... thx

[Skeeter]

Would be nice to see ships and stations not use generic textures that is shared with most of the things in the game. Unique paint jobs would be great with some design art in there instead of just a base color with a bit of paneling on. Like some decals etc.

[A5PECT]

Would be nice to see ships and stations not use generic textures that is shared with most of the things in the game. Unique paint jobs would be great with some design art in there instead of just a base color with a bit of paneling on. Like some decals etc.

Small ships in XR have a good bit of variety in terms of paint jobs, decals, and liveries. Pirate ships are a prime example, and stand out notably. Eterscels and Hesus' share the same basic model, but use two different sets of markings and color schemes.

Big ships, however, can be about the size of real-life skyscrapers. You don't see too many of those sporting elaborate paint work due to their sheer surface area being too impractical to embellish. Most variation in large, real-life buildings' appearances come from the different materials they're made of, and the shapes those materials are worked into. In XR, it stands to reason that most ships look very similar because they're largely made of the same materials, and the fact that there's less than a handful of shipwrights left in the Rebirth universe that are capable of producing capital ships.

Decals on specific areas of large ships would work, though. I noticed that XR has unique icons and logos for each faction in the game. It'd be great if they could be placed dynamically on ships to signify their ownership, and get a little more use out of all of the design work put into them. I may also just want to see lots of giant CHOW burger mascots floating around in space.

I will say I miss the stark visual contrast between ships of different races back in the X3 days. I'm awaiting the return of the old Community of Planets races into the new series, and hope they bring that sense of variety back with them.

[Tamina]

At this point it is probably a good idea to point out UniTraders logo mod (like decals but you can't set the position):
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=370297
It gives a totally different feel to the universe.

Why is this not part of official XRebirth?

It still works with version 3.6... oh um I think I strafed into offtopicness...

[Gligli]

You might be thinking of something else.

Was simply Mipmap filtering.
You could have make me earn some time. Never mind...

[ezra-r]

Shit! they found the holy grail!!

3.60 Beta 3
* Fixed issue causing performance to degrade slowly over a long game session.

I remember reporting this ages ago. So glad they found it!

PS: It seems all X games since Reunion have had one of this.

[vukica]

Shit! they found the holy grail!!

3.60 Beta 3
* Fixed issue causing performance to degrade slowly over a long game session.

I remember reporting this ages ago. So glad they found it!

PS: It seems all X games since Reunion have had one of this.

Yup, those are the nastiest kinds of bugs. Silent but deadly.
Hard to find, usually obfuscated by so-called 6 degrees of misdirection.

[linolafett]

I guess this was one bug, maybe there are others also causing slowdowns over time? Lets see what people report
Atm nothing nice to look at to present for you guys. So i stay a bit quiet.

[vadiolive]

my suggest to improve perfomace dimish XML save or split up in minor files

Start game i running around 60 FPS - save xml 40mb
i start buy things and build stuffs - save going to 70mb ( start lose great fps)
happens several times

And yes X-rebirth are on SSD Cosair Neutron GTX

[vukica]

my suggest to improve perfomace dimish XML save or split up in minor files

Start game i running around 60 FPS - save xml 40mb
i start buy things and build stuffs - save going to 70mb ( start lose great fps)
happens several times

And yes X-rebirth are on SSD Cosair Neutron GTX

i don't think disk performance has anything to do with this.

i'm *guessing* some sort of cleanup was not doing it's job at 100% and it caused zombie/orphaned objects to be processed even when they expired.

[CBJ]

Disk performance will only affect how long it takes to physically read the file when you load the savegame, which is just one element of the loading process. It has very little effect on framerate after that.

The savegame growing a little is normal; your property and activities have to be recorded. Continual steady growth with accompanying performance degradation over time, however, is not so normal, and we have recently found and fixed a couple of issues which could have caused this kind of problem. One of the problems was saved in savegames and would cause savegame size to increase along with game exit time, and the other of which would cause performance to degrade over the course of a single game session. If you want to try these fixes out then feel free to try the latest public beta version.

[linolafett]

A nice little feature was added for us artists to play around with: Damage areas.

We can now define hitboxes in which all objects recieve damage.
I added to all (big enough) engines damage areas. When you see an engineflame and fly into it, you recieve constant damage. It will kill you if you do not move away in a certain amount of time.
When a ship is stopped and the engines are off, you do not recieve damage of course.

[ external image ]

The hitbox for the damage area is marked in green.

I also added damage areas to all bigger flames visible in the game. If you see fire, do not fly trough it anymore or at least, do it quick!