New Interview by PCGames

[SunofVich]

Oh, good. Thanks for the clarification.

[Wana]

Errrrr...

Is he really saying he will try to convert his DirectX game to an OpenGL one ?
did he checked the price asked from OpenGL developers?

This is really weird, this kind of choice should be made at start, before the first line of code.

Oh by the way, there is Cider, this crappy wrapper, in case of.

And if Bernd will make the effort to convert to OpenGL, well, he deserves respect from all the gaming world.

Thanks for the translation !

[Night Nord]

Errrrr...

Is he really saying he will try to convert his DirectX game to an OpenGL one ?
did he checked the price asked from OpenGL developers?

This is really weird, this kind of choice should be made at start, before the first line of code.

Oh by the way, there is Cider, this crappy wrapper, in case of.

And if Bernd will make the effort to convert to OpenGL, well, he deserves respect from all the gaming world.

Thanks for the translation !

OpenGL is free for use. You have to pay high fees if you want to enter OpenGL Consortium - i.e. being able to develop and publish your own extensions. And even then... Mesa did that without paying a thing - they are just not calling themselfs OpenGL, but rather "3D library with interface very close to OpenGL" and that's fine =)

[Santi]

Thank you very much Spami for the translation, really interesting interview.

[MegaJohnny]

Thanks for the translation, much appreciated.

we were always a niche as I said we are trying to change that with Rebirth. I am sure we are heading in the right direction to make this suitable for the mass market

I hate this whole concept of "let's bring it to the mass market". It stinks of the usual trend of sacrificing deep mechanics and challenge in favour of fancy graphics that entice all the kids to buy it and so you make lots of money. read: elder scrolls, mass effect, battlefield, splinter cell, etc. I don't want X to be one of those series.

Having said that I'm very glad they're doing a fresh start, considering that the old X series ended up being a big ball of mud, new features slapped over the existing game. But I just hope they don't continue in the direction of "let's make it easier to learn!" because there's only so much you can do in that department before you erode the mechanics themselves.

[BarrenEarth]

Errrrr...

Is he really saying he will try to convert his DirectX game to an OpenGL one ?
did he checked the price asked from OpenGL developers?

This is really weird, this kind of choice should be made at start, before the first line of code.

Oh by the way, there is Cider, this crappy wrapper, in case of.

And if Bernd will make the effort to convert to OpenGL, well, he deserves respect from all the gaming world.

Thanks for the translation !

OpenGL is free for use. You have to pay high fees if you want to enter OpenGL Consortium - i.e. being able to develop and publish your own extensions. And even then... Mesa did that without paying a thing - they are just not calling themselfs OpenGL, but rather "3D library with interface very close to OpenGL" and that's fine =)

I am not sure if you understand that in order to use OpenGL someone has to code for it... those who have that skill charge MASSIVE amounts in compensation...

DirectX developers are more competitive because there is 13 of them for every OpenGL writer.

So, you are either ignoring the cost of hiring these people, or woefully un-knowledgeable about the process of conversion.

[Gupster]

Errrrr...

Is he really saying he will try to convert his DirectX game to an OpenGL one ?
did he checked the price asked from OpenGL developers?

This is really weird, this kind of choice should be made at start, before the first line of code.

Oh by the way, there is Cider, this crappy wrapper, in case of.

And if Bernd will make the effort to convert to OpenGL, well, he deserves respect from all the gaming world.

Thanks for the translation !

OpenGL is free for use. You have to pay high fees if you want to enter OpenGL Consortium - i.e. being able to develop and publish your own extensions. And even then... Mesa did that without paying a thing - they are just not calling themselfs OpenGL, but rather "3D library with interface very close to OpenGL" and that's fine =)

I am not sure if you understand that in order to use OpenGL someone has to code for it... those who have that skill charge MASSIVE amounts in compensation...

DirectX developers are more competitive because there is 13 of them for every OpenGL writer.

So, you are either ignoring the cost of hiring these people, or woefully un-knowledgeable about the process of conversion.

So you think that people here are Un-knowledegeable earth ?

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

BarrenEarth came back again to cry rivers, letting us all drown.

[dougeye]

I think on the issue of transporting your own cargo etc Bernd is trying to make the point that there are many new categories of wares now.

for example rather than saying we have little TS freighters who have tardis cargo holds that can carry 1000 units of ore that are the same size as the ship now you will have transporters who realy can fit 1000 units of ore in there cargo holds.

but on the other hand

maybe there were precious jewels found when mining and the player can take those and trade them as more low labour high value items. this being the case building up early funds to get your first factory of the ground etc will be less tedious.

I also suspect you can hire pilots to work for you with their ships to begin with but as you develop the appropriate resources etc you can then build / buy your own capital size transporters and hire your own crew for a better rate.

[Geek]

You can imagine a small scale trading feature all day, it has never been mentioned. Not a single time trading questions were raised.

[EmperorJon]

And neither has it been discounted.
And I, myself, have seen one thing in the videos that has suggested to me that it might be possible.

[Chris0132]

I know that in the future, we lost the technology to make pockets, but I hope we didn't also lose the technology to make shelves.

I mean, if we did, I can understand that it would be completely impossible to store even one iota of cargo in your house-sized spaceship, but barring that, you would be a little hard pressed to justify not being able to stuff a crate of booze in the mess hall fridge, or maybe a few plasma TVs behind a console somewhere for sale when you land.

[Geek]

We are talking about a game, not reality. Games have rules, sometimes arbitrary ones.

ie in X3 if you fly a Nova, you can not transport ore, even if the ore crate looks much smaller than the Nova.

So if Rebirth rules out trading with the playership, you can cry about the available space, it will not be there.

[dougeye]

it always bothered me that every race in the universe essentially had tardis cargo holds and time travel drives but they couldn't make a freighter fly faster lol

[Capsup]

Are the people in here speaking about DirectX and OpenGL even knowledgeable about this topic or what? It sounds like the lot of you are just taking information out of your asses for the heck of discussion.

Take it from an actual game developer working with exactly this thing:
Direct3D -> OpenGL development is not very hard PROVIDED your original code is not completely ****** up. A game should not care how it's content is drawn onto the screen. In fact, the actual 'game' stuff and the 'engine' stuff are completely seperated. The game will just call functions like Draw(), DrawBatch() etc while the actual engine takes care of these things behind the scenes. Changing the drawing functions to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D is not a very hard challenge, especially considering Egosoft already has decent programmers aboard. The game part doesn't even notice the difference.
Now, the hard part is porting ALL the code from DirectX to OpenGL & friends, since DirectX is a game tools API, whereas OpenGL is strictly a rendering API.

[EmperorJon]

Well if there's no playership trading the bit where the guy picks up stuff from the crate will take some explaining.

[Chris0132]

We are talking about a game, not reality. Games have rules, sometimes arbitrary ones.

ie in X3 if you fly a Nova, you can not transport ore, even if the ore crate looks much smaller than the Nova.

So if Rebirth rules out trading with the playership, you can cry about the available space, it will not be there.

There's a difference between understandable design choices and arbitrariness.

All crates look the same in X3, but perhaps we can assume that the 1 unit of microchips does not ACTUALLY occupy the same amount of space as ten thousand units of ore, hence the transportation requirements, even though they're both represented in game by a crate.

I certainly doubt that your ship in X:R would be a particularly good way of making money by trading. Your ship never is a particularly good trade income maker in an x game, and you know why of course? Because if your ship makes 10k a trip, a hundred of your ship with make a lot more.

You ALWAYS do most of your trading with a fleet, because your fleet simply does it better because it can be in a hundred places at once selling hundreds of times the volume of goods to hundreds of places at once.

I don't see why this precludes the ability to fly somewhere, buy something, fly somewhere else, and sell it for more money. It'd be a bit weird if you couldn't make any money by trading until you could buy a capital ship.

It might not have a very big cargo hold, it might not be able to transport every ware, it might not be able to beat a freighter in profits made, but it'd be really weird if you could load up another ship but they just really really didn't want you to be able to add a little number to your own that says you're carrying 100 units of space drugs to sell to the space crack den or whatever.

[ravisoul]

I think you can do small stuff trading with your ship and big loads with hired or bought? Capital traders,
if you want to trade so bad just get in the cap ships gravity well and fly all the way with it to the location or sale order you gave it..

its the same with mining we have seen a mining laser coming from your ship in 1 video,
my though was that you can pick the wares up and deliver them to any station that buys it, or get a capital and fill that baby up with the wares?

[EmperorJon]

And we've seen the playership picking up "ship wreckage" before, whatever purpose that actually serves.
The point is, the ship clearly has a cargobay, and giving you a cargobay and not allowing trading seems entirely nonsensical.

[BarrenEarth]

Errrrr...

Is he really saying he will try to convert his DirectX game to an OpenGL one ?
did he checked the price asked from OpenGL developers?

This is really weird, this kind of choice should be made at start, before the first line of code.

Oh by the way, there is Cider, this crappy wrapper, in case of.

And if Bernd will make the effort to convert to OpenGL, well, he deserves respect from all the gaming world.

Thanks for the translation !

OpenGL is free for use. You have to pay high fees if you want to enter OpenGL Consortium - i.e. being able to develop and publish your own extensions. And even then... Mesa did that without paying a thing - they are just not calling themselfs OpenGL, but rather "3D library with interface very close to OpenGL" and that's fine =)

I am not sure if you understand that in order to use OpenGL someone has to code for it... those who have that skill charge MASSIVE amounts in compensation...

DirectX developers are more competitive because there is 13 of them for every OpenGL writer.

So, you are either ignoring the cost of hiring these people, or woefully un-knowledgeable about the process of conversion.

So you think that people here are Un-knowledegeable earth ?

When people here make uninformed and completely irrational statements like "sure lets just move over to opengl and everything in the world will be filled with rainbows" then yes.

I don't think many people here think beyond "egosoft is perfect" or "I want it my way"... such is the study of individual motivations in a group like setting.