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Rebirth had very good and dramatic art direction for its system graphics but functionally no it's horrible compared to X4
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Dec 4, 2018 17:31
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Communist Bear posted:I'm tempted to reinstall Rebirth now and see how far it's come along...although riding about the Albion Skunk makes me resistant to that idea. I think in general X4 looks better technically but the smaller scale of X:R lead to some really dramatic areas and systems since you generally went to more places in them/Devires was absolutely stunning for a system. edit: At the base X4 feels like I wanted with regards to X:R keeping most of the good and getting rid of most of the bad, though some mechanics need another run or two like scanning can still be a pain in the rear end compared to what you get. I'm pretty excited to see how this gets with patches. Gorelab fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 17:34
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OwlFancier posted:Rebirth had very good and dramatic art direction for its system graphics but functionally no it's horrible compared to X4 Hmmm a shame really.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:36
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OwlFancier posted:Rebirth had very good and dramatic art direction for its system graphics but functionally no it's horrible compared to X4 This. It does underline the scrappy nature of you against the universe, because you start off extremely powerless, but you're railroaded to a style of play that involves a relatively high amount of risk to step forward, and it becomes an absolute pain in the arse dealing with a faction that hates you, but also holds all the marbles. It has it's moments, but generally the downsides are kinda bad. On Litcube's: It's geared more towards active play because you have a couple of grand menaces, so sitting with SETA on is actually going to impact you in the long term. It also impacts the Teladi stock market to make it more for long term investment, so no flipping the + and - anymore for short term gains. Generally I had a brisk trade in lightly used vehicles that actually worked out pretty well. Generally a very pleasant total conversion.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:46
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pixaal posted:X3 was also pretty broken at launch some people go as far as saying the expansion made it playable. Oh I know that X3 was a dumpster fire at release and it's had 4 years of dev polish followed by another 6 years of mods to get it where it is today. I find it ironic that X4 is called Foundation as in many ways that's what it appears to be. I like the vast majority of things X4 added. I think given time it'll be a vastly superior game to X3. What it comes down to is that right now, I have an X4 game where I make 10m per hour, can't think of anything interesting to do with it, and have a system that will render my game unresponsive if I enter it. So that's where the "Geez I should just play X3" feeling comes from. Ultimately I think that the biggest mistake X4 made was separating gun energy from the ship reactor. I have no idea how they will balance Paranid ships and their superior travel speed now that they are no longer crippled by less weapon energy than other ships of the same class. Modular ships also do nothing for me - but everything else is a vast improvement. I never thought I'd give a poo poo about being able to walk around inside the ship, but getting out of the pilot seat and having an NPC take the helm while I get a snack feels really cool. Being able to stand on the dock of an M class and watching defense drones take off in combat looks really cool. I love these things and they make the game feel way more immersive than being stuck in the cockpit.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:49
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Hav posted:This. So basically we've got one game is thematically good but structurally bad, even patched up, and we've got another game that is structurally a bit better but thematically bad, not patched up. I knew buying another Egosoft game was a mistake.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:51
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Communist Bear posted:I knew buying another Egosoft game was a mistake. Think of it like buying an early access game. They can't patch it if they go out of business.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:55
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I do feel like with X4 they’ve thrown out a bit of the baby with the bath water regarding Rebirth. I miss the nice trade computer interface they had where you could just get a list of all known goods with the best buy/sell prices listed and the distance between those stations, and you could easily queue up trades by finding the ones with the best profit margin and shortest travel distance. The stations in X4 also feel smaller than the ones in rebirth - although if the AI expands them over time that would be less of a big deal. I’m not sure they do though - I know they’ll build NEW stations but once a station is constructed do they continue to enhance it with more modules?
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Dec 4, 2018 17:57
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Communist Bear posted:I knew buying another Egosoft game was a mistake. Egosoft makes a unique product. There is simply nothing like their games. I wish they took time to polish their releases but ultimately I've never regretted the purchases - even if the game didn't ever finished till 2 years after release. Fact is that Egosoft gives a poo poo about their games. The fact that they actually spent a lot of time fixing and improving Rebirth and got it to a playable state from being simply broken at release speaks volumes. Other devs would just have scrapped it and stopped investing money into fixing it. For some reason Egosoft didn't... X4 will be a superior game to previous releases, but I can't say that it is the case today.
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Dec 4, 2018 17:59
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hobbesmaster posted:Think of it like buying an early access game. They can't patch it if they go out of business. It’s a type of game no big studio will make, and I doubt they’d pull it off with Early Access. It’s akin to Flight Sim stuff - stupidly expensive and in constant development, but scratching an itch for a very particular group of people. It sucks if you get roped into it by accident and I think in case of games like X the return period should be extended to, like, 10 hours.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:03
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I think a lot of people in here are recalling X3 with a bit of tinted glasses. X3 without mods was okay, but purely vanilla, trade was pretty bad (How many trading mods were there again?), the universe was mostly stagnant and peaceful with a few pockets of activity, the economy functioned mostly, but without a really solid rhyme or reason to it. Egosoft may not be great at building fleshed out games, but they've built a pretty solid base yet again that even if they can't fix up some of the lacking areas, there's the tools and capability for modders to fill in at least 90% of the issues. Just a reminder, in X3, you could not save except in stations unless you carried around a pile of an item you had to buy up without using the cheat engine to have infinite supply.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:08
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TC/AP had a few sectors that were enforced perma war through spawns at least?
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Dec 4, 2018 18:10
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FileNotFound posted:Egosoft makes a unique product. There is simply nothing like their games. I wish they took time to polish their releases but ultimately I've never regretted the purchases - even if the game didn't ever finished till 2 years after release. True, but it's extremely frustrating to buy a product and go "Cool. I'll come back in 2 years time now and play this when it's in a functional state." It would be the equivalent of me giving you a fridge that only works one day every month, and for me to tell you that eventually it'll start working more days, just bare with me. I might well be endearing to you, but i'm still giving you a broken product.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:13
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FileNotFound posted:Oh I know that X3 was a dumpster fire at release and it's had 4 years of dev polish followed by another 6 years of mods to get it where it is today. They have 2 Planned expansions that are included with the Collectors Edition (I grabbed it because I know I'd just pre-order them and this will probably end up cheaper). With 2 expansions you can do a lot. I suspect when both are released we'll have a much larger map. I don't think it's an excuse to ship something lovely, and if Egosoft didn't have a track record of releasing buggy messes and fixing them I'd be pretty upset at the current state and pointing to the expansions as greed and proof they aren't planning on fixing anything until the expansions are out. Mokotow posted:It’s a type of game no big studio will make, and I doubt they’d pull it off with Early Access. It’s akin to Flight Sim stuff - stupidly expensive and in constant development, but scratching an itch for a very particular group of people. It sucks if you get roped into it by accident and I think in case of games like X the return period should be extended to, like, 10 hours. It's closer to Euro Truck Sim, but in space, also their are pirates. The X universe is fairly peaceful unless you go out of your way to make it hostile. The game is much more about building a trade empire than a military power base. It very much scratches the itch to run a large space company. I'd like to do some combat stuff, mostly because I have a strong feeling that I'll need to restart my save at some point due to patch / bug, also it's always a good idea to start fresh with an expansion. I remember a lot of complaints that major events didn't trigger if you carried over a save from vanilla X3.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:15
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Slickdrac posted:I think a lot of people in here are recalling X3 with a bit of tinted glasses. X3 without mods was okay, but purely vanilla, trade was pretty bad (How many trading mods were there again?), the universe was mostly stagnant and peaceful with a few pockets of activity, the economy functioned mostly, but without a really solid rhyme or reason to it. Egosoft may not be great at building fleshed out games, but they've built a pretty solid base yet again that even if they can't fix up some of the lacking areas, there's the tools and capability for modders to fill in at least 90% of the issues. Yeah unmodded X3 was a mess and even the 'final' DLC'd version needed MARS to make turrets actually useful on capital ships because vanilla they'd shoot at an M5 all day instead of larger ships. Really X3 didn't 'click' for me until MARS got released and suddenly capital ships actually DID things besides creating a pretty light show. My salt with X4 is that they clearly must have known that turrets were a huge issue in X3 and that MARS was basically a must have mod - and what do we get at release? Turrets that can't loving hit anything at all...really guys? "Oh it's a known issue, we're fixing it." for fucks sake they released a game where turrets don't loving work and are the main weapon of M and larger ships...
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Dec 4, 2018 18:17
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FileNotFound posted:Turrets that can't loving hit anything at all...really guys? "Oh it's a known issue, we're fixing it." for fucks sake they released a game where turrets don't loving work and are the main weapon of M and larger ships... The reason they don't hit is because they failed to notice how many resources updating every single turret every frame was using. They should work perfectly fine if you increase the refresh-rate on turrets and have the CPU to handle that. I'm guessing the minimum requirements were hilariously high. They are already pretty drat high. I see why the did that, but I probably would have delayed the game until I found a fix. At least it seems like something that is solvable, even if that means on low settings using a set percentage rate of hits and on high settings actually using the turrets.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:31
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pixaal posted:The reason they don't hit is because they failed to notice how many resources updating every single turret every frame was using. They should work perfectly fine if you increase the refresh-rate on turrets and have the CPU to handle that. I'm guessing the minimum requirements were hilariously high. They are already pretty drat high. I see why the did that, but I probably would have delayed the game until I found a fix. At least it seems like something that is solvable, even if that means on low settings using a set percentage rate of hits and on high settings actually using the turrets. Dude - for real - turrets could hit things fine with MARS back in 2008 in combat with more ships that I have ever seen in a single X4 system. Really they could hit things fine without MARS - but MARS added target prioritization and ability to have a capital ship with different turrets for different target types - also something that is missing in X4. For fucks sake - Freespace 2 was released in 1999 and had working turrets - which ALSO had specific targets I seriously cannot wrap my head around what hosed up code they are using that is causing excessive CPU utilization if turrets are meant to actually 'hit' things. Really games being programmed to have the AI be able to lead to hit target is a thing that's been mastered for oh I dunno 40 years now? It's absolutely inexcusable that they "failed to notice" that their turret logic would be broken at release. It doesn't matter if breaking turrets allowed the game to run on min spec hardware. The game is not playable with M or better ships being useless in combat. I don't know how you can even try to defend this.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:38
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So I just got the PHQ and I blew up my starter ship and took over the Kestrel I bought from a Wharf. But now i have the AI pilot hanging out in my Kestrel and taking over whenever I get up. Can I assign him to chill at my PHQ or not take over flying? Or assign him to a different roll on my ship?
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Dec 4, 2018 18:42
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hobbesmaster posted:The problem is that the people whose poo poo you blow up are part of the economic simulation. That means if you go through xenon space and kill all their miners/haulers during a raid congratulations you just won the game - the xenon can't recover. An end game I'm curious about (never got far in any X games, this game seems like less of a grind?) is creating my own weird pirate faction / going rogue once my empire gets big enough and trying to gently caress with everyone. Is that feasible?
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Dec 4, 2018 18:46
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Popete posted:So I just got the PHQ and I blew up my starter ship and took over the Kestrel I bought from a Wharf. You can fire him by talking to him or move him to a different ship. I think you can reassign the pilot in the ship info menu but I don't have the game open to check. I like having an AI pilot around in my main ship since he can just taxi me around while I look at the map
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Dec 4, 2018 18:47
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You want to keep your ai pilot though because you can't order the ship around when you aren't in it without one.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:48
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Ok I'll just leave him around then, thanks.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:50
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Popete posted:So I just got the PHQ and I blew up my starter ship and took over the Kestrel I bought from a Wharf. You can fire them - but you really shouldn't. For whatever weird reason, NPC pilots fly your ship much better than autopilot does and can accept complex orders. It's very handy to have a pilot on your ship as you can get up, tell your pilot to fly you to wherever and dock while you are AFK. It also makes later stages of the game easier as you can just get a different ship and tell the pilot you already have to either follow you or fly somewhere or defend one of your traders in a system that they keep being hassled in.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:53
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androo posted:An end game I'm curious about (never got far in any X games, this game seems like less of a grind?) is creating my own weird pirate faction / going rogue once my empire gets big enough and trying to gently caress with everyone. Is that feasible? The problem with doing that is that the people you blow up won't buy from you. You can just go blow everyone up though.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:55
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FileNotFound posted:Dude - for real - turrets could hit things fine with MARS back in 2008 in combat with more ships that I have ever seen in a single X4 system. Really they could hit things fine without MARS - but MARS added target prioritization and ability to have a capital ship with different turrets for different target types - also something that is missing in X4. There is a thread on the ES forums where the guy who wrote the MARS script had a supernerd breakdown of the calculations to do the aiming and how completely expensive they can be if done "right". Basically, he had a calculation originally likely similar to what ES made for this, but the problem was it either devoured CPU cycles, or didn't update quickly enough to be useful (which is basically what ES has right now). He had to cheat and shortcut math calculations to get the functional mod he has. ES likely didn't test their actually good turret calculations in the full universe and just in smaller tests where it worked fine, and didn't have the time after finding out how intensive it was to completely rebuild the calculations, so instead, they just reduced the refresh/recalc rate. Yeah, it's ridiculous that they are as poor as they are. But you're specifically calling out an example when the person who made that example is also defending ES.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:57
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Slickdrac posted:There is a thread on the ES forums where the guy who wrote the MARS script had a supernerd breakdown of the calculations to do the aiming and how completely expensive they can be if done "right". Basically, he had a calculation originally likely similar to what ES made for this, but the problem was it either devoured CPU cycles, or didn't update quickly enough to be useful (which is basically what ES has right now). He had to cheat and shortcut math calculations to get the functional mod he has. ES likely didn't test their actually good turret calculations in the full universe and just in smaller tests where it worked fine, and didn't have the time after finding out how intensive it was to completely rebuild the calculations, so instead, they just reduced the refresh/recalc rate. I'd love to see a link because I legitimately cannot wrap my head around how in the world of mutitheading and muliticore PCs we can have issues with the game slowing down due to CPU utilization that could be easily offloaded to one of my 8 cores. I can literally have a core dedicated to each of my loving turrets...
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Dec 4, 2018 19:01
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FileNotFound posted:For fucks sake - Freespace 2 was released in 1999 and had working turrets - which ALSO had specific targets There's more ships active in any given sector in X4 than I think the entire Freespace 2 campaign had. The game has a *lot* of turrets. Almost every station module can have a few turrets on them. And then there's also the economy calculations and the various ships going around that need calculations as well. There are almost certainly code inefficiencies but comparing it to a far simpler game decades old is laughable.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:03
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FileNotFound posted:You can fire them - but you really shouldn't. Also when you unlock the teleportation, you can teleport to any ship you own, which will let you stage pilots & ships in places where you need them and teleport wherever you suddenly decide you need to be. It's honestly a huge load off my mind knowing the universe doesn't take that long to traverse through without SETA. Now if only I knew how to build a stupid station.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:05
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Taerkar posted:There's more ships active in any given sector in X4 than I think the entire Freespace 2 campaign had. If you have an X4 universe where there is actual combat happening in populated sectors that are not me in west bumble gently caress fighting a lone pirate - I'd love to see it. Only place I've had 'real' combat has been diving into Xenon sectors and even those were light by X3 standards of getting absolutely mobbed by xenos. As laughable as you may thing it is to compare it to F2, it's not as laughable as releasing a space sim with turrets that don't loving work. Name me a space sim other than X series where turrets were complete trash at release. What is this magic code that other developers have that makes their turrets work. For fucks sake - even starcitizen has working turrets - even if nothing else works in that scam of a game they somehow managed to make turrets hit poo poo. What wizardry... FileNotFound fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 19:08
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FileNotFound posted:I'd love to see a link because I legitimately cannot wrap my head around how in the world of mutitheading and muliticore PCs we can have issues with the game slowing down due to CPU utilization that could be easily offloaded to one of my 8 cores. I can literally have a core dedicated to each of my loving turrets... https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=402779 Gazz is in this thread.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:16
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The turret thing is especially baffling since they work fine in rebirth which is the same engine and ships have 5x more turrets overall? That's just no excuse really.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:19
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FrickenMoron posted:The turret thing is especially baffling since they work fine in rebirth which is the same engine and ships have 5x more turrets overall? That's just no excuse really. Yeah that's the weird thing, in Rebirth everything was covered in little pea shooter guns.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:27
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Variable 5 posted:I finally set up Voice Attack for this and now I fly around barking commands to my ship like a goober. Game owns bones. Holy poo poo this is a great idea. My emergent game-play story from lastnight: I was dicking around in HOP space, exploring and trying to find somewhere to buy antimatter for this quest. I ended up in a Xenon area called Faulty Logic. Fought a little then ran away when it got dicey. Went deeper into apparently a cluster of Xenon space and found an abandoned capital. Sent my two marines to board it and defended the marines from a swarm of small Xenon jerks for a good 15-20 minutes while they hoofed it to the bridge (super cool that it took time, makes sense). Once we took the ship, I landed on it and went to pilot it. I Decided to try my luck and go deeper since the way home was a huge loving swathe of mine-covered and asteroid-filled space and while my fighter lucked through, this huge cap probably would not. I Ended up finding the Xenon warf and did a very nice Tokyo drift right-the-gently caress-back-through-the-gate. This found capital had no weapons, and no fighters but I had to try and make it back to HOP space so I decided to try and thread the mine-needle. Well that poo poo did not work out. I made it about 80km off the in-gate towards the out-gate and mines took out my engines. I went eva to repair the hull and the 3 repair drones tried to restore the subsystems. While i'm slowly plinking away with my hull repair laser in my eva suit I see a bigass Xenon capital traveling towards my in-gate. This is when I realized I had a problem. The repair drones had made 0 visible progress restoring my engines from the mine damage and the capital was decelerating and turning my way, not good. I launched my little fighter to fend off the smaller ships as they burned into me and the repair drones worked. Was doing fine but the enemy capital was at 19km and closing quickly. I saw that finally I had a single engine online so I landed my fighter and took the bridge of the damaged capital. My tiny fleet limped about 15km, slowly pulling away from the Xenon capital, before an unfortunately placed minefield sent us to the pit. 10/10 goty.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:30
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hobbesmaster posted:https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=402779 Meh he has like 4 vague responses saying "Well it's not that easy...." I know I'm having a fit here - but do you guys not have M class ships? It's a HUGE issue. The game is fundamentally broken if M ships have turrets that can't hit anything. You can no longer target missiles yourself either, they do not despawn, and they WILL hit your M ship eventually while it's futilely shooting at where the enemy was 5 seconds ago. I'm not even touching on the fact that many times the turrets will simply not fire at enemies that the are easily able to hit - they just don't feel like shooting today. This applies to NPCs as well. You're not the best space pilot in the world because you can take on M's in your starter S ship and win. They can't loving hit you even if you just hold W down to keep moving while your speed is at 0. I found a xeno miner and his 1 turret was a joke to watch as it shot in my general direction as if he was repeatedly warning me to back off. I'm less upset about the actual game breaking bug that my game has where entering a system causes the game to crash if I'm piloting the ship than I am about the turrets. I can avoid the system - but the turret issue renders everything above S pointless. Oh and before someone says "Use the beam turrets!" - they also refuse to shoot much of the time and when they DO choose to shoot, the damage they do is not noticeable. It takes me much longer to kill a S in a beam fitted M than in even the starter ship.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:36
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The turrets really do need fixing I agree. What's weird is that the enemy ships seem to manage quite well with them, all the xenon I fight seem to be able to point guns at me quite easily. Unfortunately nobody though to put guns on the shell of a K so that doesn't stop me parking my cerberus upside down behind it and letting the roof guns shoot at a static target until it dies 
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Dec 4, 2018 19:40
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Seriously get the paranid corvette with 5 forward guns. Throw in 5 medium chainguns or whatever. Xenon Ps last like 3 bursts.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:40
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Some other issues I found: -Any recovered ships you boarded and took over with marines refuse to let you dock. -Selling ships does not sell your components! You do not get credited for them.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:43
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Am I missing something with EVA? Like how do I stop my dude? Or do I have to do all fancy physics poo poo to do that? I'm tired of bouncing off everything trying to scan some poo poo.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:43
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^^ backspace. You might want to rebind it to something else. I like shift-z when using keyboard/mouse.FrickenMoron posted:
Since ever other X game did this I assume it’s a (dumb) feature
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Dec 4, 2018 19:44
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mods changed my name posted:Am I missing something with EVA? Like how do I stop my dude? Or do I have to do all fancy physics poo poo to do that? I'm tired of bouncing off everything trying to scan some poo poo. Hit backspace.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:45
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