NEWS: First X3TC Teaser Video released

alollini · Post by **alollini** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 10:26

HI,
your games have the lead on visuals, as none of the vandetta, EVE, FFE equals your planets, nebulaes and ships. (you have also the domination in MUSIC)

For me to be completely blown away by your game here is what is missing :

- full celestial mechanic (rotating and moving planets at least)
- continuous space (space not made of rooms)
- newtonian motion of ships ( boost, rotate while moving, then fire! )

- ship engines should be more linked to real world space shuttle, with attitude control small trusters, and main rear engines wich use different mixture of mass and energy (rocket and ionic use different mixture of both)

the speed limit is due to the technology (speed of ejected particles), the acceleration is due to the consuption of mass and energy

propulsion should use at least 3 different technologies on the same ship
a rocket drive, a planetary drive and a star drive (the last one may be a jump system)

the lack of true intertial gameplay is really what made me stop playing X2 and then X3.

- optionnal is to make the game an mmo, but it would then need a balance in pvp, pleayers should have a way to avoid a fight if they want.

if i was a big company making games, I would like X3 visuals, EVE targeting system, EVE ship fitting screen, Elite2/Elite3 navigation movement trust system (and vast real size universe of 100 milions planetary systems ok a 800kb disk).

Gothsheep · Post by **Gothsheep** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 10:36

alollini wrote:
For me to be completely blown away by your game here is what is missing :

I know this isn't really the right place for such a discussion, but..meh.

- full celestial mechanic (rotating and moving planets at least)

Again, meh. Planets do rotate, but they don't move in relation to another. Or maybe they do. I honestly wouldn't notice one way or the other.

- continuous space (space not made of rooms)

It kinda' is. You can pick a direction and start flying. It isn't like Freelancer, where you can more or less fly anywhere by flying long enough, but hey. Maybe someday.

- newtonian motion of ships ( boost, rotate while moving, then fire! )

There have been games like this, and by and large, players -hate- it. It makes for abysmal gameplay. [ EDIT: I'll say this. There has been one game, Tachyon: The Fringe, which had a good idea. They had full Newtonian physics which you could toggle on and off with a button. So you could flip a switch and have your ship behave under normal inertial laws, turn and fire backwards, then flip the switch again and have your ship behave more like a videogame space shooter. That was a slick move and I loved it. It was there when you wanted it, and gone when you didn't. ]

- ship engines should be more linked to real world space shuttle, with attitude control small trusters, and main rear engines wich use different mixture of mass and energy (rocket and ionic use different mixture of both)

the speed limit is due to the technology (speed of ejected particles), the acceleration is due to the consuption of mass and energy

propulsion should use at least 3 different technologies on the same ship
a rocket drive, a planetary drive and a star drive (the last one may be a jump system)

Ummmm..How about I just set my speed and point my ship where I want it to go, kthxbye.

kotekzot · Post by **kotekzot** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 10:43

alollini wrote:full celestial mechanic

not much more than eye candy.

alollini wrote:continuous space (space not made of rooms)

you see, the space is really really really big. and the fun stuff happens in a relatively small portion of it. might as well cut to the fun stuff, eh?

alollini wrote:newtonian motion of ships ( boost, rotate while moving, then fire! )

having played homeplanet for a while, i can say that newtonian physics aren't all that fun in a game. homeplanet managed to pull it off - barely - but its space was uncluttered, compared to x3's. autopilot is bad enough as it is, without having to compensate for a possibility of encountering a space station while drifting at 3km/s.

alollini wrote:ship engines should be more linked to real world space shuttle, with attitude control small trusters, and main rear engines wich use different mixture of mass and energy (rocket and ionic use different mixture of both)

imagine the joy of waiting a couple of hours for your ion thrusters to give you propulsion of 1m/s.

alollini wrote:mmo

stop. just stop.

alollini · Post by **alollini** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 10:50

kotekzot wrote:
alollini wrote:ship engines should be more linked to real world space shuttle, with attitude control small trusters, and main rear engines wich use different mixture of mass and energy (rocket and ionic use different mixture of both)
imagine the joy of waiting a couple of hours for your ion thrusters to give you propulsion of 1m/s.

i'll go back to station and fit something more appropriate to my 2megaton transport ship...

what i wanted to express is that think should have a real world value;
in a ship you can have a powersource tha gives infinite power, we are in a game, but knowing at a given moment how much mass you use per second and how much watt could be fun.

Take real world units and principles => then scale it so that the game works and play almost like today. This would show the gaps to fill

Veselin · Post by **Veselin** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 11:02

48 seconds with the logos is so superbly disappointing. I expected a longer trailer. Would you release something that shows more content (at a later date of course)?

And will there be any improvements to the autopilot?

Gothsheep · Post by **Gothsheep** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 11:05

Veselin wrote:48 seconds with the logos is so superbly disappointing. I expected a longer trailer. Would you release something that shows more content (at a later date of course)?

And will there be any improvements to the autopilot?

I'm quite certain they'll release more at some point. As a teaser goes..well, I suppose you can consider me teased.

nirwin · Post by **nirwin** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 11:15

Well, I can't say this teaser knocks my socks off. Looks good an all, but nothing really exciting. Maybe this is a consequence of the fantastic work the mod community has done since X3's release?

New ship models, meh, some of the new ships look ok, like what I perceive to be the new Nova, but I wouldn't have cried if they'd stayed the same.

Missile (and possibly ship) trails - thank god, really wished they were in X3, but at the same time, some of our modders have put them into X3, so I'm not really blown away (but satisfied that they are there).

Rocket Barrage, okay, that looked like fun.

New explosion effects, looked ok, need to see more to make up my mind.

Still the same old rubbish nebula effect

Could only spot 1 or 2 instances of engine light flare, but if it is in the final game I will be pretty happy. All space games need engine flare IMO.

BTW, that first station they show, the edge panels look a little like advertising screens to me.

The things I really want (and could reasonably expect) to see, but have not seen are:
Improved cap-ship explosions (this is pretty essential)
Ships/stations breaking apart when they are destroyed. (was in X3 teaser)
Improved UI
Improved space backgrounds (X3s really are looking too low res for me now)
No more "?" holograms when looking at products/ships to buy, I mean they have the models, and the means to display them, so why not display them?
Planets with rings around them... it's in the promo artwork, so surely it should be in the game (saturn system perhaps?).
Better BBS
Better pilot comm videos (just not flashing to an image of someone who isn't in the conversation would be a start).
Comm chatter.
And personally I would like to see lots of improvements made on the scripting side of things. And other under the hood improvements.

But really (and I know this makes me an oddball), I'm quite looking forward to where they are going to take the plot. "Terran Conflict" as a name fills me with eager anticipation.

Anyway, that's enough of my rantings, but before I go, it says "Coming Soon", so how soon is soon?

j/k

Post by **Cycrow** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 11:56

Veselin wrote:48 seconds with the logos is so superbly disappointing. I expected a longer trailer. Would you release something that shows more content (at a later date of course)?

its a "Teaser" not a trailer. Teasers are sposed to be short

silenced · Post by **silenced** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 12:35

Zoed Vega wrote:I
Also, I have ALWAYS wondered while playing the game, in the future,
what is ever going to happen to NASA ???
I hope eventually when you guys get around to finding earth some day,
that you include NASA some how.......

read the backgrounds for space-approach, even clears things up why everything is held in neo-japanese

nasa ? NASA ? ... crappy people ...

bob hope · Post by **bob hope** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 12:44

hmmm from what i see here, the rumour that the XTM group were working on the expansion seems to be holding out, this was mentioned in this link http://www.nlgaming.com/article-15-Rumo ... nsion.html well before the release of the 2.5 update patch and they got that one right, so who knows

Al · Post by Al » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 15:15

Much as I dont think this is the place for speculation, if X3:TC was done by the XTM team, what have the Egosoft guys been working on......

Anyways I'm just hoping they dont raise the required specs for it as my PC isn't going to be getting an upgrade for a long time. Hopefully they'll have sorted things like the slowdown caused by PPC (IIRC) fire and other such things.

eldyranx3 · Post by **eldyranx3** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 16:31

Well its a good thing I just upgraded my rig. The old guts chopped a bit in XTM. I cant say that Im overly impressed with the teaser as opposed to the XTM one, but hey, at least Egosoft / XTM team is still hard at work. And bear in mind the teaser wouldnt show small things, such as improvements to complex building and interface management.

The only thing I can say is that Boron capital ship ... didnt it look like a mesh of Argon technology? The Queen Shall hear of this!

kondor_be · Post by **kondor_be** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 16:48

I'm hoping that they also change something about the think and trade part of the game instead of only the fight aspect like X2 -> X3.

Sure, it ain 't easy to capture on film but fingers crossed anyways.

esd · Post by **esd** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 16:59

Al wrote:Anyways I'm just hoping they dont raise the required specs for it as my PC isn't going to be getting an upgrade for a long time. Hopefully they'll have sorted things like the slowdown caused by PPC (IIRC) fire and other such things.

I must admit I'll be a bit miffed if the specs go up by any real margin. If anything, given that it's an expansion and not a new engine, I'd expect the engine to become more optimised, not less.

ezra-r · Post by **ezra-r** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 17:07

Very nice video, hope they include many improvements over X3 in this version.

Smarter AI, better managemente, etc..

Great work egosoft,keep it up. Im in to buy it!

Eloking · Post by **Eloking** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 17:57

Maybe I'm hopeless hoping this, but I would personally love a different sector system. "Square like" sector with gates to travel between them is the only things that feel really old in the X serie

kotekzot · Post by **kotekzot** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 18:11

the engine is one thing, the sheer amount of calculations is quite another. xtm is a good example of that. i expect that at least gpu requirements will go up.

esd · Post by **esd** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 18:16

kotekzot wrote:the engine is one thing, the sheer amount of calculations is quite another. xtm is a good example of that. i expect that at least gpu requirements will go up.

The "calculations" have no bearing on the GPU, unless they are graphical calculations. Anything that's not graphical will affect the CPU, not the GPU.

Besides, my point is that the engine should be better optimised in an expansion. While the expansion's additional content may well add to the system requirements, this should be offset either completely or by a very significant amount by engine optimisations. We know the game didn't release in the best shape, so it's almost unimaginable that there's no significant optimisation possible.

Personally I'd consider engine optimisation to be a quite high priority.

kotekzot · Post by **kotekzot** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 18:24

esd wrote:
kotekzot wrote:the engine is one thing, the sheer amount of calculations is quite another. xtm is a good example of that. i expect that at least gpu requirements will go up.
The "calculations" have no bearing on the GPU, unless they are graphical calculations. Anything that's not graphical will affect the CPU, not the GPU.

do i need to specify that increase in graphical calculations will increase the gpu requirements?..

Carlo the Curious · Post by **Carlo the Curious** » Thu, 6. Mar 08, 18:31

Yes, when you're talking about a game like X3 that includes a mass of non-graphical calculations.

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

NEWS: First X3TC Teaser Video released