[WIP] Dawn of Rebirth

[Riccardoman]

That's extremely sad to read

[Qerewen]

This would be very welcome additions to the game.

i for one fell in love with the Eterscel fighters and i was so overjoyed when a modder allowed me to change the skunk for one of those.

tbh if egosoft themselves would port them with a sort of discovey plot line for the ships id pay for such a DLC.

[Reaperxvii]

Thats odd logic from egosoft, who care's if people mod in ships from x-rebirth into x4, theres not money being made by the mod author, its also not our fault the x4 ship models are extremely bland.

[Reaperxvii]

This would be very welcome additions to the game.

i for one fell in love with the Eterscel fighters and i was so overjoyed when a modder allowed me to change the skunk for one of those.

tbh if egosoft themselves would port them with a sort of discovey plot line for the ships id pay for such a DLC.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did a discovery, Heretics end is in x4 and also in rebirth. Which might actually be why they're saying its "frowned upon" because they plan on doing the same thing.

[Qerewen]

This would be very welcome additions to the game.

i for one fell in love with the Eterscel fighters and i was so overjoyed when a modder allowed me to change the skunk for one of those.

tbh if egosoft themselves would port them with a sort of discovey plot line for the ships id pay for such a DLC.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did a discovery, Heretics end is in x4 and also in rebirth. Which might actually be why they're saying its "frowned upon" because they plan on doing the same thing.

*goes into toddler mode*
but i wan my eterscel naows!

one day when im not working 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week i might have time and energy to do it.

[Misunderstood Wookie]

Official Egosoft statement on porting XR assets, FYI.

Called it

[Reaperxvii]

I intend to convert several ships of X Rebirth (L/ XL) to X4. So I create a topic here to share how the things are going.

So far, I worked on something relativey small like the Onir Mineral and got pretty much everything working :



Problems remaining so far :
- Minor cockpit glitch

- The docking process to the Shipyard: I did not find yet where to specify the "Docking point" for ship so the docking bay goes in the middle of the ship (I believe I should be able to solve this soon).

- Equipping the ship in the shipyard: for some reason, I can equip the ship entirely but when I want to add the modification in the buying list, the ship canvas goes black (as if it was accepted), but nothing is actually added to the buying list, so I cannot confirm the order. Curiously, the only way to validate the modifications is to modify the Large shield on the top of the ship. => for this point, I'm open to ideas is someone has already faced this problem...( I don't have this behavior for X4 ships)

How difficult was it to port the ship over? I know how to basically create new ships in rebirth and edit turret hardpoints and such. I'm wanting to import the scaldis to begin with then work my way up to argon ships.

[Tadas]

Thats odd logic from egosoft, who care's if people mod in ships from x-rebirth into x4, theres not money being made by the mod author, its also not our fault the x4 ship models are extremely bland.

It is a business decision, having all x rebirth ships in x4 would make x rebirth less attractive purchase.

[Alewx]

Thats odd logic from egosoft, who care's if people mod in ships from x-rebirth into x4, theres not money being made by the mod author, its also not our fault the x4 ship models are extremely bland.

It is a business decision, having all x rebirth ships in x4 would make x rebirth less attractive purchase.

When was Abortion ever an attractive purchase?
I think more the decision is made that way because then it would give a complete direct compare about the difference in quality and show that the X4 is far behind Abortion, art wise.

[Tadas]

I bought it and enjoyed it, it is pretty good game now.

[Max Bain]

What about a short description how you can import XR ships into X4? It would help others a lot I think and we would see way faster progress in discovering more good looking ships in X4

[BigBANGtheory]

tbh just the XL class would be fine, the Arawn & Taranis probably being the best examples.

[Ojump]

Guys, Please try to not talk here about good/bad choice it is for Egosoft to agree or not about the use of XR Assets as it is not the goal of this topic ( There is another topic for that here )

Finally, for the ones asking, I will try to make a tutorial on how to make a ship when I will be entirely familiar with the process and when I have some time (If someone does not make it before me ^^ ).

I intend to convert several ships of X Rebirth (L/ XL) to X4. So I create a topic here to share how the things are going.

So far, I worked on something relativey small like the Onir Mineral and got pretty much everything working :



Problems remaining so far :
- Minor cockpit glitch

- The docking process to the Shipyard: I did not find yet where to specify the "Docking point" for ship so the docking bay goes in the middle of the ship (I believe I should be able to solve this soon).

- Equipping the ship in the shipyard: for some reason, I can equip the ship entirely but when I want to add the modification in the buying list, the ship canvas goes black (as if it was accepted), but nothing is actually added to the buying list, so I cannot confirm the order. Curiously, the only way to validate the modifications is to modify the Large shield on the top of the ship. => for this point, I'm open to ideas is someone has already faced this problem...( I don't have this behavior for X4 ships)

How difficult was it to port the ship over? I know how to basically create new ships in rebirth and edit turret hard points and such. I'm wanting to import the scaldis to begin with then work my way up to argon ships.

Hi, porting the ships is not very difficult:

It is pretty much the same as it was in XR, as you made some ships in rebirth I believe, i'm pretty sure it will be fast for you to start . A few comments on my current experience on the topic:
- A few xml flags need to be changed compared to XR descriptor files
- Modify the Hard points => coordinates are basically correct. But most of the rotations of the components must be redone.
- The Waypoints for docking also need to be redone
- Only the main components are specified in the macro files of the ships (like landing pads, cockpits, etc...). All the components that can be bought/changed in shipyards are not explicitly defined, just the hard points are specified in the files now.
- some part of the 3D Mesh must be modified to get a more "professional" result ( ie. avoid graphical glitches when you merge a component in the hull, like landing pads).

[x3fan5322]

Thanks for your work, looking forward to this mod, hope this paves the way for even more ships in the future!

[Max Bain]

What about the textures? I cant find them in the extracted folders.

[mr.WHO]

From practical point of view this is rather stupid statement from Egosoft:
"can port some ships from XR, but not all"

Quantify "not all" - like 40% of ships? 90% ships? All minus one ship?

Basically you can bypass it by making "pack mods" like "Albion pack", "Omicron Lyrae pack", "Canteran pack" - as each pack is separate mod that doesn't contain "all ships" it's ok.


They should simply say - if you own XR we are fine with it.

[Riccardoman]

From practical point of view this is rather stupid statement from Egosoft:
"can port some ships from XR, but not all"

Quantify "not all" - like 40% of ships? 90% ships? All minus one ship?

Basically you can bypass it by making "pack mods" like "Albion pack", "Omicron Lyrae pack", "Canteran pack" - as each pack is separate mod that doesn't contain "all ships" it's ok.


They should simply say - if you own XR we are fine with it.

Totally agree

There could be two reasons:
1- they want us to purchase x rebirth at full price to experience its universe, a smart marketing strategy (although not that smart considering that it would be difficult to sell an older game that got an overall negative impression) but a huge middle finger at the community
2- they are planning a future "rebirth" DLC and they are afraid that when it will be released the community wouldn't be interested because the modders already did the porting for free

I sincerely hope for the second

[Kadatherion]

Yeah, it's a bit of a paradox because under normal conditions it would be just natural to only port a few ships from an older game into the newest one, it's what happened before, for instance in X2 ships for X3: mods only ported a few cap or iconic ships because the quality of the models in X3 was superior - of course - so it was a given to only port a bunch of ships for the novelty of it. Porting the whole roster would just decrease the overall quality of the game, and the problem can't really emerge at all.
However X4 is a step backwards from XR when it comes to every ship model quality, which is absurd by common standards, so one would be tempted to port most - if not all - ships from Rebirth. Which is something that - per se, quality issues aside - the devs can't easily allow, as it's probably the main appeal of a game that is still for sale. I myself don't know how I would reply if I were in their shoes, appealing to common sense seems the best/only solution, but common sense is much less common and much more subjective than the idiomatic expression implies.

For instance, I'd suggest something like this: concentrate on cap ships, from M6/M7 size and bigger (and maybe don't overdo it either, as we can't have much difference in role/loadouts anyway for now, so not too much point into having dozens of ships that in the end play and fly the exact same), and leave fighters and mid-small freighters out, as the biggest issues in quality (and variety) we have now in X4 is about them. Fighters are "ok" at best, but although they might suffer too from a conceptual design standpoint, they aren't affected by the additional issues in design caused by the dock modules.

[mr.WHO]

2- they are planning a future "rebirth" DLC and they are afraid that when it will be released the community wouldn't be interested because the modders already did the porting for free

I sincerely hope for the second

Unfortunately Egosoft devs already said that adapting XR ships to X4 was too much of a bother for them (that's why they went with new designs for X4) like space for landing pads, bridge etc.
Therefore XR DLC is highly unlikely for first two announced DLC. The most propable is Boron and Split DLC, but I hope it will be Boron&Split for one and Terran for second.

[Riccardoman]

Yeah I've heard about that, but I'm optimistic that X4 life cycle would be as long as X3, and it would make sense

They built a solid "foundation" to improve upon, like X3, so they will stick with this chapter for a long time

I can see "X4 whatever conflict" to be sold as a separate game like terran conflict was

So what I'm saying is that at this point, if Egosoft cares about the franchise (which I think they do) they will stick hard to the number as they did with X3, adding a lot of content along the way
So an XR expansion was never confirmed neither denied, they have too much pre-build high quality materials to not at least consider this option