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The collision detection can be slightly weird in that it is sometimes easier to get stuck in something than out of it 
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Apr 27, 2020 18:28
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As a general rule, the impermeability of solid matter in this game becomes increasingly negotiable the faster you're moving and the smaller you are.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:34
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They did remove collision for AI pilots in Rebirth in some situations and I think X4 does it too, just not for your autopilot for some reason.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:36
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Obviously so that they could include the cheeky voice bit when it pinballs you around an asteroid field. Ideally there would be some kind of panic system where the autopilot realizes it's stuck and temporarily disables collision to rescue itself. In fact I'm not 100% convinced such a thing doesn't already exist, but the way the game is it's hard to tell if a temporary lapse in corporeality was intentional or not.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:24
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The autopilot panic system seems to be "arbitrarily disable autopilot and let you cruise the circle highway for 20 minutes while you're tweaking other ships'/stations' orders"
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Apr 27, 2020 20:30
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Hey as long as it keeps you moving and out of reach of hostiles and police scans. Which reminds me of a fun early game trick. Buy the cheapest bare minimum ship you can and give it a fly to order that will take it on the main highway loop. Once it's on the loop, cancel the order and the ship will ride around in circles forever, continually refreshing trade data on the nearby stations in all of those core sectors. Make sure to give the ARG-Nascar a go fast paint job while you're at it. My favorite is the canary yellow.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:47
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I've watched several lasertowers whiz past on the highway loop, I really would like to see if it can be done with a satellite. Does raise the question of who has to occasionally flush the drat thing of like, lasertowers, the odd mine, ships where the pilot had a heart attack, small rocks.
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Apr 27, 2020 21:00
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Some sectors where the asteroid fields intersect with the highways have asteroids blocking the highway so that your ship crashes into it. At least that's what happened in my game, just now. Then my game crashed.
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Apr 27, 2020 22:39
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D. Ebdrup posted:Some sectors where the asteroid fields intersect with the highways have asteroids blocking the highway so that your ship crashes into it. For me my ship always just clips right through those asteroids with no issues.
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Apr 27, 2020 22:54
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Thom12255 posted:For me my ship always just clips right through those asteroids with no issues. I don't know why the crash happened, and stupidly of me I turned off crash reports, so 
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Apr 27, 2020 22:57
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Pretty sure X4 ties its collision tests to the frame rate to ensure that the simulation itself doesn't slow down in big battles or on lower end systems. That means that the lower your FPS the better you are at phasing through asteroids, in addition to the benefits of being very small and moving very fast. It works the way it works because it's cheaper for the collision test to only check if you're intersecting the surface of the asteroid than it is to do that and additionally test if you're completely inside it. Both of those are much cheaper than the "real" test of checking the swept volume of your ship for a physics frame vs the swept volume of the asteroid for the same physics frame. Highly accurate collision tests like that are only really feasible when using very simple collision shapes, and X4 wants you to be able to hug the nooks of ships and asteroids closely which requires that their collision shapes be complex meshes that very closely match the rendered model. Ergo, you can fly through poo poo. Please use responsibly and don't think about it too hard.
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Apr 27, 2020 23:45
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So what you're saying is if I alt-tab away which caps the FPS to something like 5 while traveling at 20k m/s in my riced out pegasus vanguard, I should be able to clip straight through any object up to 4 kilometers long. Edit: OwlFancier posted:I've watched several lasertowers whiz past on the highway loop, I really would like to see if it can be done with a satellite. I had to test this because I wanted it to be true. Unfortunately, satellites, nav beacons, resource probes, and mines just clip straight through the highway if you drop one and then boop it forwards with your ship. Laser towers seem fixed in place and will not budge no matter how hard you ram them, but if you initially drop it close enough to the highway belt it will get sucked in and start making the rounds. The upshot is that laser towers do have vision on the map, as wide as a ship's. So if you want to save a few credits it will work at the cost of any prospect of retrieval becoming much more interesting. timn fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 00:03
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Hey, quick question! (Sorry - lotta those coming from me, lately!  ) If I set up another big factory for ship technology (I'm thinking mostly shield and turret components, but also a little of other resources, like claytronics, field coils, advanced electronics and maybe weapon+missile components. The last two mostly being for future shipbuilding/equipment dock work) and get a couple of freighters set on 'distribute wares' in my sector, will they ferry goods between each one? Since I noticed that turret and shield components seem to need a very small amount of hull parts - so I'd like to automate it if possible, so that a freighter goes over to my hull part factory and picks up a box every now and then.Also, on that topic - just thought. If they do trade between my stations (instead of only selling my station's products to other races, or vice versa), will they trade 'intermediate wares', or only finished products? Since my hull part factory has a decent surplus of refined metal - which would help my future ship tech factory out, if they could have some of it delivered. (I'm a bit wary of having a giant mega-station though. Since someone here mentioned performance issues. So I'm trying to stagger my stations out, around my sector) Oh, and lastly...I have a few rent-free SCA drug factories in my sector, (bit rude! They even built two AFTER I claimed the sector! I don't recall getting a fee for their plots) and I'm just curious about whether I'll get a relations hit with SCA if I destroy them, after I eventually bring my own drug lab online. Since I know you can get into fights and kill SCA ships without issue, even while in range of stations. But I assume attacking their own stations would take me down from -5 relations to -30. Hopefully not though, but I expect that I can't get away with murder on that scale!
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Apr 28, 2020 03:10
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Any freighters assigned as a trader for your factories will buy from your own factories, so if you reserve basics for yourself they'll essentially be mules (without using the mule mods).
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Apr 28, 2020 03:35
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I'm trying really hard to like this game but working out a profile using only a Thrustmaster t16000m joystick without the hotas (I'm a lefty so it's a no-go) + keyboard has been an exercise in absolute frustration. I don't even know where to begin with spacesuit flight. I'm absolutely flabberghasted. I have no idea how I got through the spacesuit flight tutorial. I am desperate for some sort of halfway decent profile.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:32
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I've never honestly been able to stick with any X game on a joystick because you spend so much time in menus that it seems not worth it. X4 improves the menus a great deal, visually and functionally, but it's still a very menu heavy game, lots of stuff to manage.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:37
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I used a joystick with X3TC, but yeah a lot of the time I ended up using KB+M. I've been using an xbone controller with X4 though, which has worked pretty well. No easy way to roll (compared to Q and E) but aside from that it's been good.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:56
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I feel that the available key mappings in this game are just nowhere near robust enough to really support a joystick/HOTAS well. There's just too much in this game that's far easier to do with a mouse instead. It's quite the opposite of Elite's totally comprehensive control binding options.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:10
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Woah, so if you assign ships to station defense, they escort your traders / miners. That's pretty awesome, gonna get a few fast M3s for that.
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Apr 29, 2020 04:33
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I've settled on HOTAS for dogfighting, but have come to the conclusion that the game simply isn't made for menuing with a joystick - there are simply missing keybinds for all the things you do differently with a mouse. For example, let's say you wanna move between the vertical and vertical tabs? That should be possible to bind to a separate hat whereas movement inside open windows should be bound to a differrent hat. As it is, you're left backing in and out of menus constantly. There's also no way to move to the filter menus without doing some sort of complicated stick waggling to move the mouse cursor over there. It is possible to fix these issues, but it requires a lot of UX attention that I'm not sure Egosoft has the interest or man-power to do, since they're a small team that's clearly focused on other parts of the game. EDIT: Long-distance traveling when exploring is also a lot more fun, because with a small Paranid Scout with the biggest travel engines and all-round trusters, you can boost into travel mode to get started - and when you need to make sharp turns or use jump-points, you simply flip off flight assist and drift your way to your objective. It feels insanely satisfying! BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 11:15
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So I bitched earlier about my station traders doing very little thinking it was the limitation of the piloting skill, however it turns out in my specific case it was actually a separate bug biting all the stations I was building. Turns out if you set drone level top-ups in the logistics view when constructing a station traders will be stuck looking for drone components! So the base information page shows "looking for trades" but in the detailed view you can see if they're stuck in this state. Setting station drones to zero and re-assigning all traders worked fine and my ships sold tens of thousands of chips in no time. (TBF I also installed DFSI for better levelling too which seems very nice)
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Apr 29, 2020 13:51
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Xenons are beginning to slay the Teladi and I've only got $20M in the bank, and they're my only +10 Rep faction. oh dear.
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Apr 29, 2020 17:56
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They tend to take out Ianamus Zura and sometimes Hewa's Twin but neither of those are actually strictly required for the teladi, their ship production facilities are all located in the northern ring and they have several sectors in the center with rich resource production facilities so they should be functionally OK even if they lose those outer sectors, especially as once they're taken the xenon are fighting the paranid instead. The bigger issue is proabably that the xenon might take two grand and completely cut off the split territories.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:09
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You just need to think like a Teladi. That's a great opportunity to quickly boost your rep up to 20+ by blowing up the ample supply of Xenon fighters roaming their sectors. Once you hit 20 rep you can nab their trade subscription license which means more profitssss. You're going to want to work on increasing rep with another faction anyway because Teladi combat ships are pretty underwhelming. Once you've got some sweet military hardware you can take a more serious look at helping them take back any lost sectors.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:14
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OwlFancier posted:The collision detection can be slightly weird in that it is sometimes easier to get stuck in something than out of it Almost every time I move to space suit mode in any ship, if I left my HOTAS throttle forward (100%) it WILL toss my space suit into the cabin/bridge and I either have to boggle around to try to break out of the ship mesh, or reload my save.
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Apr 29, 2020 21:12
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D. Ebdrup posted:I've settled on HOTAS for dogfighting, but have come to the conclusion that the game simply isn't made for menuing with a joystick - there are simply missing keybinds for all the things you do differently with a mouse. Hey Debdrup, yeah the menus aren't very HOTAS friendly because of so many up/down/left/right options. Although this X game is better about it than the previous ones. I suggest either mapping the menu controls to an easily reachable (from your L or R hand) part of the keyboard, like the +10 key portion usually assigned to looking outside. Or grabbing one of the +10key USB pads for about 15 bux to put right next to where your hands are. I noticed your post before talking about using the X52 and I loved that system, but the X56 has 2 extra analog axis for thumbsticks and the game actually supports them, it's a miracle. So you get actual analog strafe axis and such. Other than that though the x56 is a piece of poo poo; really bad build quality issues.
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Apr 29, 2020 21:22
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OwlFancier posted:I've never honestly been able to stick with any X game on a joystick because you spend so much time in menus that it seems not worth it. I don't know what the problem is, even on a laptop without an external keyboard I just put the throttle on the left and the stick on the right. When I land, I take my hands and put them on the keys. Then I finish the lovely part of the game egosoft dumped on me to add an extra 10 minutes to every playing hour, then climb back into the ship and fly away not needing to touch the keyboard again until the next time the game turns into a lovely fps. It's a space sim, and it actually doesn't have the worst axis binding setup ever; so if you're not using even a cheap joystick, you're losing out on a lot of the fun.
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Apr 29, 2020 21:31
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Quick question...for those "build a station" missions, do you get to keep the station at the end, or does it get transferred to whoever issued the request?
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Apr 30, 2020 02:16
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Major Isoor posted:Quick question...for those "build a station" missions, do you get to keep the station at the end, or does it get transferred to whoever issued the request? It gets transferred. In an earlier version you got to keep the station, which made those missions ridiculously lucrative instead of just very lucrative.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:22
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popewiles posted:It gets transferred. Yeah, that's fair enough. In a way it's a bit of a relief, since I don't really want to have to bother managing the station later on, or having these low-value stations clutter up my factory list! (First-space problems, eh? )Thanks for the clarification. It's extra good for me too, since I'm using my own resources for building my first requested station. 
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Apr 30, 2020 02:38
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PoopinClumpin posted:Hey Debdrup, yeah the menus aren't very HOTAS friendly because of so many up/down/left/right options. Although this X game is better about it than the previous ones. I suggest either mapping the menu controls to an easily reachable (from your L or R hand) part of the keyboard, like the +10 key portion usually assigned to looking outside. Or grabbing one of the +10key USB pads for about 15 bux to put right next to where your hands are. I noticed your post before talking about using the X52 and I loved that system, but the X56 has 2 extra analog axis for thumbsticks and the game actually supports them, it's a miracle. So you get actual analog strafe axis and such. Other than that though the x56 is a piece of poo poo; really bad build quality issues. Man, analogue strafe sounds awesome. Good thing I can't afford it anyway, since the build quality issues is the big thing, I've been hearing about it too. I've intentionally bought a 60% keyboard (though it's overloaded in such a way that it maps to the usual 105 keys) - but the advantage of this is that there's room for the keyboard between the HOTAS and the mouse can rest next to that, so it happens to work out pretty well in the end. Plus, the mouse is a G703 with one of those induction mats so it does wireless charging meaning I don't need to have the mouse on the mousepad all the time, but can place it in front of the keyboard where it makes more sense to use. I have been considering whether using a big touchpad, like the one that my Wacom tablet can become, would work out better too.
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Apr 30, 2020 04:21
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Major Isoor posted:It's extra good for me too, since I'm using my own resources for building my first requested station. Unless you are using quantities the market can't provide, it's more efficient to sell those resources high and buy build resources at a low price from factories struggling to sell.  e: ^^^ 
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Apr 30, 2020 07:33
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Antigravitas posted:Unless you are using quantities the market can't provide, it's more efficient to sell those resources high and buy build resources at a low price from factories struggling to sell. hahaha yeeeaaah, I know I should be doing that too I just can't be bothered! None of those little "mom 'n' pop" factories seem to stock enough goods to be worthwhile, so it becomes too much micromanagement picking up from multiple places, rather than doing one big lump-sum transfer
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Apr 30, 2020 13:34
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I'm finaly about to make it and a loving Xenon I come in the system where i'm making my first Wharf... Of course he head straight for the building site, passing trough my 20x hull factory complex. And the Argon and HOP who have been fighting forever in this sector don't lift a finger  Let's see what I can do with 3 Cobra, a Behemoth and hopefuly my Nemesis if it can make it in time from the other side of the universe. (by the way the cobra are awesome salvaging  ships, they can take a decent crew + 20 marines and are pretty fast)
Krogort fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 13:53
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Krogort posted:(by the way the cobra are awesome salvaging Speaking of which, what are peoples' preferred capital- boarding ships? Since I assume I'd need at least 30-40 marines to comfortably seize a capital ship from SCA or HOP. Right now I can put 150 or so marines on my L-sized Icarararararatua freighter, but since it's painfully slow, it's not particularly practical. Would a carrier or aux ship have a decent marine capacity, without being incredibly slow? Or am I gonna have to settle with using a couple of Minotaur Raiders?
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Apr 30, 2020 14:31
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Carriers have good crew capacity, though they are also slow. Really though to board you generally want to do surgery on the ship with a corvette or something to take out the engines and turrets and then just drop a pile of marines on it so speed isn't super necessary.
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Apr 30, 2020 14:35
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how newbie friendly is this game? It seems like everything im looking for. I love space poo poo and building up, and ive been playing void destroyer 2 but want something with more meat. Is the game fine non-modded for a first playthrough?
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Apr 30, 2020 17:57
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The game has a pretty steep learning curve all things considered, but that's what we're here for.  As far as mods are concerned, I suggest going in vanilla and figuring out from experience what you do or don't want to change. I wouldn't consider any mods out there to be essential no-brainers, but there is a lot you can do to improve the game to your personal taste once you've come to grips with things. Edit: Though I should add that X4 is much better about tutorials and helping you understand what goals to set for yourself early on than prior entries are. The learning curve is more about coming to grips with the many little nuances that crop up as you dig deeper into different parts of the game. timn fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 18:24
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It's ... not actively hostile to newbies with the new tutorials, I guess? X4 is still a lovingly crafted giant piece of jank that's all about space poo poo and building up. I haven't played Void Destroyer 2 but it looks even jankier -- a feat I wasn't sure was possible -- so this should work out for you.
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Apr 30, 2020 18:46
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I built a small defense station in Fires of Defeat, directly in front of the gate. Turns out a few defense disks is a little bit overkill. That's 96 large plasma turrets, 40 medium pulse turrets, and 22 medium beam. Small ships live long enough for fighters to reach them, but capitals just melt within seconds. The dock is right next to one cluster of weapons and it's amazing watching things die.
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Apr 30, 2020 18:47
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