X-Rebirth: The story of the failed console game

[Trialbyfire]

Who cares if Rebirth has references to Xbox in the code. This means nothing other than Egosoft might have copy/pasted code fragments. This is not uncommon in the industry. Why should everyone have to reinvent an existing wheel? Sure they use the Xbox controller. Why wouldn't they? Far more gamers have such controller than a joystick.

As for this being a "failed console game", that's a bit absurd. Agreed this game is piss-poor, but I seriously doubt its woe's are due to console focus.

[tuareg]

Who cares if Rebirth has references to Xbox in the code. This means nothing other than Egosoft might have copy/pasted code fragments. This is not uncommon in the industry. Why should everyone have to reinvent an existing wheel? Sure they use the Xbox controller. Why wouldn't they? Far more gamers have such controller than a joystick.

As for this being a "failed console game", that's a bit absurd. Agreed this game is piss-poor, but I seriously doubt its woe's are due to console focus.

it's not about copy/pasted code fragments. shaders are visual effects applied to all the graphical elements. generally all the visual optimisation is XBOX in the game. That's quite a different level compared to the PC world. that makes really the textures and models look cool or mediocre. if it is not optimised to xbox, why would the choose the mediocre shaders?

[Trialbyfire]

generally all the visual optimisation is XBOX in the game.

Nonsense plain and simple. What you call "visual optimization" has nothing whatsoever to do with Xbox. It has to do with artistic and performance decisions, and can easily be changed by Egosoft, and possibly changed by modders if/when they obtain the shader source-code, or when modders gain sufficient understanding of adjustments accessible to them. This constant ranting about Xbox is going nowhere because the argument is not based on reality.

[Cdaragorn]

Who cares if Rebirth has references to Xbox in the code. This means nothing other than Egosoft might have copy/pasted code fragments. This is not uncommon in the industry. Why should everyone have to reinvent an existing wheel? Sure they use the Xbox controller. Why wouldn't they? Far more gamers have such controller than a joystick.

As for this being a "failed console game", that's a bit absurd. Agreed this game is piss-poor, but I seriously doubt its woe's are due to console focus.

it's not about copy/pasted code fragments. shaders are visual effects applied to all the graphical elements. generally all the visual optimisation is XBOX in the game. That's quite a different level compared to the PC world. that makes really the textures and models look cool or mediocre. if it is not optimised to xbox, why would the choose the mediocre shaders?

The shaders aren't mediocre, they just have the _xbox tag on them. All this means is they experimented with the xbox at some point, likely early on.

This game could never have been run on an xbox, or any other console for that matter. I can believe that they started out looking at making a console space game, then decided they could do better.

Everything in this thread is pure speculation. Nothing here proves they intended the final game to be for console, then suddenly switched gears and ported it to PC. It only shows that they may have started out experimenting with the console.

I agree the game is a joke in its current state, but this feels too much like ppl are just trying to find more reasons to hate it.

[Trialbyfire]

The shaders aren't mediocre, they just have the _xbox tag on them. All this means is they experimented with the xbox at some point, likely early on.

Precisely! Thank you for contributing to putting this tired debate into proper perspective.

[tuareg]

generally all the visual optimisation is XBOX in the game.

Nonsense plain and simple. What you call "visual optimization" has nothing whatsoever to do with Xbox. It has to do with artistic and performance decisions, and can easily be changed by Egosoft, and possibly changed by modders if/when they obtain the shader source-code, or when modders gain sufficient understanding of adjustments accessible to them. This constant ranting about Xbox is going nowhere because the argument is not based on reality.

you know what you wrote doesnt even have a meaning anything can be changed by ego or the modders, the bad side of it, and thats why ego didnt do it probably is that they would have to redo all the thousands of shaders got already optimised to xbox... one of the biggest work would be (after remaking all the models and textures)

[Trialbyfire]

you know what you wrote doesnt even have a meaning anything can be changed by ego or the modders, the bad side of it, and thats why ego didnt do it probably is that they would have to redo all the thousands of shaders got already optimised to xbox... one of the biggest work would be (after remaking all the models and textures)

There you go exaggerating yet again. Look in the shaderfx directory. You won't see anything close to "thousands of shaders", and as for modders being able change the shaders, have you ever actually done any shader development? No, I didn't think so. For that matter, have you even extracted the Rebirth files to look at them? No, I didn't' think so.

The only reason I am countering your statements, is after biting my tongue and keeping my silence for quite a while, I decided that its time to put some of these false arguments to rest, so that other forum members aren't lead down a path of illusion by those who really don't know what they are talking about.

[tuareg]

you know what you wrote doesnt even have a meaning anything can be changed by ego or the modders, the bad side of it, and thats why ego didnt do it probably is that they would have to redo all the thousands of shaders got already optimised to xbox... one of the biggest work would be (after remaking all the models and textures)

There you go exaggerating yet again. Look in the shaderfx directory. You won't see anything close to "thousands of shaders", and as for modders being able change the shaders, have you ever actually done any shader development? No, I didn't think so. For that matter, have you even extracted the Rebirth files to look at them? No, I didn't' think so.

The only reason I am countering your statements, is after biting my tongue and keeping my silence for quite a while, I decided that its time to put some of these false arguments to rest, so that other forum members aren't lead down a path of illusion by those who really don't know what they are talking about.

thosands of shaders doesnt need thousands of files but it doesnt matter, it needs thousands of objects, each has materials attached and each materials has shaders attached to them. do you know what is the bottleneck in xbox gamedevelopment? dont think so ^^ sry (anyway, 1500 hit of "xbox" is really not thousands, just one and a half... thousand)

[Trialbyfire]

..do you know what is the bottleneck in xbox gamedevelopment? dont think so..

What does "bottleneck" in Xbox development have to do with anything - let alone Rebirth? Answer: nothing.

[einna]

If you take a look on Egosoft's website you can find design specifications for X-UNIVERSE (2002). Stated to "play after X2-The Threat" it is clearly X3: Reunion. However, the design documents make it clear that this is for the Xbox and there is a section on key features the Xbox can provide, as well as figures showing the controller inputs. Naturally, this was never released on the Xbox.

If you dig a little bit more, you can find an Xbox Concept Submission for X-UNIVERSE (2004). Again, this game appears to be X3: Reunion.

In the section "Milestones of the company development" we have:

X – Universe (2005) Xbox not yet signed to any publisher.
X² – The Return (2004/2005) addons for X² - The Threat and Gold editions above publishers.
X³ – The Conflict (2006) PC signed for Europe by Deep Silver
X³ – The Conflict (2006) for the new console formats announced by Sony and Xbox.
Online-Universe.net (2007) still under development.

While none of this seems to have anything to do with X: Rebirth, it's pretty clear to me that Egosoft have always been trying to make a console game, and not as an afterthought.

[mangar]

If you take a look on Egosoft's website you can find design specifications for X-UNIVERSE (2002). Stated to "play after X2-The Threat" it is clearly X3: Reunion. However, the design documents make it clear that this is for the Xbox and there is a section on key features the Xbox can provide, as well as figures showing the controller inputs. Naturally, this was never released on the Xbox.

So I can , see that in many respects, that brings me to ask a few things.

1. Does all the extra code bog down the performance of the PC cpu running through it to ignor it?
2. upon relase of a tool drop will modders be able to clean up the files that ref such gamestation code that is not even used.
3. I could see if they really really wanted to make a game console game, why did they not call it something else rather than X, and just say "????" from the makers of Egosoft and games series X.

you sound like you have a little better insight behind the door than most. or maybe I precive that you do?

Is there any idea when they might drop a tool? days, weeks or a year? If it will be longer than 6 months I may just go back to mod something else till then. Or maybe mess around with a X3 engine till then.

Thanks

[Captain Lemmiwinks]

If you take a look on Egosoft's website you can find design specifications for X-UNIVERSE (2002). Stated to "play after X2-The Threat" it is clearly X3: Reunion. However, the design documents make it clear that this is for the Xbox and there is a section on key features the Xbox can provide, as well as figures showing the controller inputs. Naturally, this was never released on the Xbox.

So I can , see that in many respects, that brings me to ask a few things.

1. Does all the extra code bog down the performance of the PC cpu running through it to ignor it?
2. upon relase of a tool drop will modders be able to clean up the files that ref such gamestation code that is not even used.
3. I could see if they really really wanted to make a game console game, why did they not call it something else rather than X, and just say "????" from the makers of Egosoft and games series X.

you sound like you have a little better insight behind the door than most. or maybe I precive that you do?

Is there any idea when they might drop a tool? days, weeks or a year? If it will be longer than 6 months I may just go back to mod something else till then. Or maybe mess around with a X3 engine till then.

Thanks

1: no,unless they hooked the game code to use them by mistake or forgot to unhook them.

2: yes,if that tool ever gets released,time is the enemy here,as if another game with modding ability is released all the top modders will migrate.

3: none of the fanbase who liked the X games would buy it,better to add "X" to the title and constantly compare it to the games we wanted.

also would need a blanket ban on releasing anything to gamers or reviewers BEFORE selling it,just in case we found out what was happening.

one important thing to NOT do though is if the game is bashed by 99.9% of the buyers and 100% of the reviewers is then to declare it a success.
this would tell everyone that they have no plans to actually release a game we were waiting for.

but as with everything these days time is the enemy.

[einna]

I've no more insight that anyone else here. As such, I've no idea about any modding tools and the like.

3. I could see if they really really wanted to make a game console game, why did they not call it something else rather than X, and just say "????" from the makers of Egosoft and games series X.

Regarding your third question, my point is that they've always been trying to make the X games for the Xbox. It's not as if they've only experimented, or that Rebirth is the first plain-as-day console attempt.

The history is supposedly that X3: Reunion started out as X2: The Return but the old X2 engine was abandoned and rewritten as it was too limited.

However, that's nonsense according to these documents. The X3 engine was started for X-UNIVERSE which was slated to be an Xbox game. The Xbox submission explictily states "the newly developed graphics engine makes full use of the shader capabilities of the Xbox". There is nowhere a mention of it being scheduled for a PC release. For whatever reason that project didn't work out, and eventually it was released on the PC as X3: Reunion.

X3: The Conflict was, however, going to be for both PC and Xbox360 and was to be an extension of the work done on X-UNIVERSE given development of it was already "well underway". Once again though, the console side of the project failed and it was only released on the PC as X3: Terran Conflict.

Egosoft and failed console projects go hand in hand. As such, there is no way that Rebirth wasn't also console project. It's just what they do, and it has been what they've wanted for many years.

[fenix67]

around 2005 was the time space simulators as a genre went down the drain for good. What else happened in 2005? Oh yes, the start of the new console generation with the release of the Xbox 360 followed by PS3 a year later in 2006. After Reunion's pretty rocky launch plagued by heaps of bugs, problems and lackluster reviews, I think the Ego guys had to sit down and think about the future. Face it, the space sim genre was dead, and with the advent of the new console generation, PC gaming was in decline too.

sorry if someone mentioned this already.

Your Joking right, current new consoles are at best equivalent to a $400 pc, even then the $400 PC still wiped them in tests, and the space sim dead, What about games like Star Citizen for instance.

Ive had consoles until the xbox360 but the new generation compared to a good gameing system. not even close. so i now have returned to the PC and will not look back.

And X-rebirth well ill leave it up to Egosoft and modders to sort out, they've done it before and the games turned out great in the end.

[TerminalVelocity3DR]

I don't know if I'm right here but;

Isn't Rebirth only running in 32 bit? Can't remember, but when I checked once, it said (* 32) behind the exe in taskmanager, so... Xbox360 and other next-gen's run on 64bit if I'm correct.

I'm just assuming, but the only reason the game is running in 32bit would be because the games are still optimized for win XP, I read that in another post the Devs take the people very seriously who still run XP. XP doesnt have 64bit support?

What I'm getting at is, performance should (WILL) be better in 64bit, same with coding possibilitites; as far as i remember, in CPU and coding, 64bit means simplified, more code/longer code and more functions can be processed side-by-side, increasing processing speed.

Since all the X's have been running in 32bit so far, that explain why people get that humongous lag even with high-end machines - a crappy slow-ass engine won't get any benefit from a fast system.

That'd explain why Rebirth is lagging like shi-t even for people with insane hardware and OC'ing, esp. since the graphix were pimped.

But OH MY, look at Berndy-Bernd saying "[Rebirth]... isn't about fancy graphics".

Make a Meme out of that; Take Bernd's pic, then on the top write:

Says "We don' need no fancy graphics"

and on the bottom write:
Puts in HQ shaders and hires textures

How illogic his statements are.

Bernd is the ultimate troll.

[einna]

I don't know if I'm right here but;

Isn't Rebirth only running in 32 bit? Can't remember, but when I checked once, it said (* 32) behind the exe in taskmanager, so... Xbox360 and other next-gen's run on 64bit if I'm correct.
Since all the X's have been running in 32bit so far, that explain why people get that humongous lag even with high-end machines - a crappy slow-ass engine won't get any benefit from a fast system.

That'd explain why Rebirth is lagging like shi-t even for people with insane hardware and OC'ing, esp. since the graphix were pimped.

Yes, Rebirth is a 32 bit application. And yes, the Xbox360 is 64 bit. However, even if Rebirth was a 64 bit application there would not be a drastic performance increase; the main effect would be that the application could address significantly more RAM but it doesn't seem like that is the limiting factor anyway.

You can't directly compare a PC and console in rough terms like the bit size. While less powerful in a general purpose sense, the 360 doesn't run like a regular PC; it does things differently and has specialized components that greatly speed up certain calculations and some graphical effects can be performed with minimal performance overhead.

Console to PC ports suffer often because the game engine is optimized to take advantage of these features which have to be calculated in a far less efficient manner on a PC. Very often these things are just offloaded to the CPU, even when there are GPU pathways that could have been used instead.

The 360 also has a single, well defined architecture and thus a common way to split tasks, but there is no standard number of CPU cores for PCs. You may have 2, or 4 or 8. Or 4 cores with 4 virtual ones. Getting multithreading right is hard at the best of times anyway, and it's perfectly possible that the game turning into a slideshow has essentially nothing to do with how powerful your computer is, but rather is because one process is waiting for another to finish which is itself waiting for something else, and so on, slowly creeping forward like a phantom traffic jam.

What's actually causing those problems is anyone's guess though.

[mangar]

Yes, Rebirth is a 32 bit application.

Thanks for posting and answering that to another tech question I had that nobody would reply too , maybe I could still install it on my old computer 32 bit pc, the game release spec (and box) said 64 bit only? was wondering why when it crashed or tried to use task manager to close it would display "Error - 32 bit .... not responding.."

[einna]

Yes, Rebirth is a 32 bit application.

Thanks for posting and answering that to another tech question I had that nobody would reply too , maybe I could still install it on my old computer 32 bit pc, the game release spec (and box) said 64 bit only? was wondering why when it crashed or tried to use task manager to close it would display "Error - 32 bit .... not responding.."

It's a bit messy to explain, but the game really should be run on a 64 bit operating system. It's to do with how much RAM a game can use.

Simplified, it's this:

32 bit application / 32 bit OS: 2 GB
32 bit application / 64 bit OS: 4 GB
64 bit application / 64 bit OS: Lots of GB

The game requires a fair amount of RAM and more than can be safely addressed on a 32 bit operating system. If it hit the limit it would crash.

Since the game requires a 64 bit operating system for RAM reasons, it should really be a native 64 bit application, but it isn't.

There is probably a lot of old stuff under the hood which is causing problems, even disregarding theories of it being geared towards a console. If I remember correctly, Homeworld 2, which is quite old now, performs more badly the better your computer is, since the application doesn't know about newer optimisations and the like -- it's very inefficient on new hardware. This game may be similar to a certain extent.

[mangar]

LOL make perfect sense, I remember the old x-com games from Win98, and the XP you needed to down load the Dos Box to slow it down and time it right. HAHAHA

I agree the game is a joke in its current state, but this feels too much like ppl are just trying to find more reasons to hate it.

Even I tried posting stuff from the focus of bashing it, to what can be mod towards its engine and flexiblity of it or not. But I guess the NDA may restict any people like that to say "Hey, don't lose hope, the engine allows use to... and we can change the ..... and expand the ...."

I rather see future hope posts what will come AFTER what is currently on the bug and issue fix list. It would give the novice fans an OH WOW you guys can do that!? and leave room for more hope discussions then play it silent
But my post is meant in a good way:)

[Cdaragorn]

Yes, Rebirth is a 32 bit application.

Thanks for posting and answering that to another tech question I had that nobody would reply too , maybe I could still install it on my old computer 32 bit pc, the game release spec (and box) said 64 bit only? was wondering why when it crashed or tried to use task manager to close it would display "Error - 32 bit .... not responding.."

It's a bit messy to explain, but the game really should be run on a 64 bit operating system. It's to do with how much RAM a game can use.

Simplified, it's this:

32 bit application / 32 bit OS: 2 GB
32 bit application / 64 bit OS: 4 GB
64 bit application / 64 bit OS: Lots of GB

The game requires a fair amount of RAM and more than can be safely addressed on a 32 bit operating system. If it hit the limit it would crash.

Since the game requires a 64 bit operating system for RAM reasons, it should really be a native 64 bit application, but it isn't.

There is probably a lot of old stuff under the hood which is causing problems, even disregarding theories of it being geared towards a console. If I remember correctly, Homeworld 2, which is quite old now, performs more badly the better your computer is, since the application doesn't know about newer optimisations and the like -- it's very inefficient on new hardware. This game may be similar to a certain extent.

Actually, 32 bit application / 64 bit os is still limited to 2 GB. I ran some tests on this just to verify it after I saw that Rebirth is running 32 bit and Windows consistently would not allocate anything past the 2 GB mark.