Umm, ok, can we get X4, please? I want my Disco back and some other things

[nielsw]

Sure, its Egosoft's choice to go the Netscape route and throw away their entire code base, but look what it did to Netscape...

I'll just run down positives and negatives for the X games I've played...

:: XbtF ::
+ very whimsical and engaging 2D characters in your ship's monitor with voice acting that actually worked in a somewhat hokey but endearing way.
+ starting with a damaged ship you had to get fixed up to even fly reasonably well.
- lacked a lot of features compared to the later series.
- could only fly one ship

:: Xtension ::

+ being billed merely as an 'extension' to XbtF, it really added everything that makes the X series awsome.
+ sinsa - yeah, I know Egosoft don't like it, but it was cool and a useful crutch that made perfect sense to bridge time and space in a space game.
- I started to miss being able to play it together with at least 1 friend.

:: X2 ::

+ Great improvement in graphics.
+ flight mechanics got improved further
+ everything that Xtension added got fleshed out more and improved in all sorts of ways.
- the star systems connected by static gates, an architecture shared with EVE-online starts to feel tedious. Every system is like every other system save for backgrounds and the scatter of stations.
- the biggest negative is, that the voice acting turns from charming to embarrassing and its coupled with horrific 3D character modeling and animation. (at the time, I presumed their Publisher had insisted on its inclusion as a 'must-have' for current generation games) My advice: never include any feature if you can only get it to look worse than other games managed a decade ago.

:: X3 ::

+ More great additions of fun game mechanics
+ deep yet efficient command interface
+ Loads of new ships, shiny space flight, game play has as many flavors as there are ships, which keeps it interesting for a long time.
+ modders keep things fresh and interesting way beyond other games.
- still doomed to tool around alone in a dead, NPC-filled Universe.
- still retarded voice acting - where do they get these people?? At least I didn't see any giant pixel breasts.

:: XRebirth ::

+ Still better space graphics

- Not a single one of the issues I had with X3 and prior X games got fixed:
- no improved layout of space
- no improvement to interstellar flight even though Independence War II had proven Space flight can be done much better than always and forever just hopping through stargates.
- poor first/3rd person mode didn't reach modern times, yet became a mandatory, continual annoyance, running through poorly rendered, repeating hallways to talk to astonishingly sorry looking NPCs with idiotic lines and voice acting.
- even the cockpit companion has annoying voice acting. Should have hired Summer Glau instead of cheaping out on 3rd party talents.
- can't fly a variety of ships? can't go fly a cool ship just captured from a pirate? Nope...
- after all that, not even the smallest level of support to play together with a friend


What it means to me: I'll wait for X4. I want it to have the complex but speedy menu system, many ships to fly, each of which is like a separate candy. If X4 never comes, I guess we part ways after so many years.


I do realize, Egosoft was thinking you're gonna build the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you also thought you'll write all new, much better code, and then, 7 years later, the new shiny code is starting to look kinda muddy and you're realizing you don't always get all you hoped out of a rewrite...

Considering you probably could have released X4, X5 and X6 with less effort and more profit, I still give you props for taking the hard route and go for what you thought was going to allow you to build the ultimate in space games.

Maybe you should do a Kickstarter and do the next X version with more money and more community involvement. There's no reason Chris Roberts should have the whole cake to himself. I just think he shows the advantages of transparent development with gamers involved in the alpha stage.

I always think Bernd Lehahn is very cautious in how he spends money at Egosoft (except for that complete-rewrite decision) but between Chris Roberts who is more likely to overspend and Egosoft, there must be a balance to reach, so that good enough voice actors and writers are hired for the next X game and hopefully first person components are eliminated until they find the funds to do it right.

In Elite, Limit Theory, Star Citizen, you can fly many different ships. The only good game I know, where you (mostly) fly just one ship is 'Nexus - the Jupiter Incident', but that was completely story driven and not really comparable.

[Tahlmorra]

Hey nielsw,

As this is in the Scripts and Modding section, I'm going to assume that you are interested in improvements to X3AP while you wait in hope for X4. If that's the case, I would recommend Litcube's Universe, which, imo, resolves some of the negatives you listed. Specifically, LU adds several entities that really liven up the universe (one corporation that acts/builds like a player and is in direct competition with/actively hostile to the player, and a new xenon threat that slowly works to take over the universe) while at the same time offers a huge amount of optimization that makes the game run faster on a single core than XR runs on multiple cores (just had a 100+ fighter battle with framerete over 30 FPS). That and a whole bunch more described in the Wiki. I honestly consider it to be what X4 should have been.

[phoenix-it]

Well, at least it's not filled with hate...

Chris R. won't get the whole pie because he favors one flavor of space combat sim, that being the "Aircraft Carrier in Space" variant. That's not to say it's invalid, I like that kind, but I also like others. I'm a backer on this one, but the verdict is still out. The fact that they're trying to sort the CryEngine's limits on world space coordinates this far into development is telling. That should have been decided and written in the first 3 months. Retrofitting that is much harder than building it in during the initial engine modifications or design. (See GP Gems.)

Braben won't get the whole pie either. He favors the "spicy realism with universal role ships" flavor. And, I like that one too, particularly its focus on exploration. But again, it's not the only flavor I like. I doubted his commitment when the project was brought to my attention, but I've since eaten my own words on it, cause everything I see says he's done a fine job.

LT is looking nice, a new flavor "everything that can possibly be random seed procedurally generated should be." I like his ideas, but he's really going to need to dumb down the economy to make it work. Having the AI sort through so many possible actions means that, in the end, they will need to be limited by scope. That engine is going to be CPU taxing to say the least. But, if anyone can make it work, he can.

Egosoft has traditionally made the "pseudo-real economic space sim with 4X elements" flavor. Whereas Rebirth appears to be more the "X3 meets Star Raiders" crossbreed. The former is okay and even great at times, the latter just wasn't done well IMO. (Someone needed to try Tie Fighter for ideas.)

Throwing out the code base was a call they made for a reason. The origins of that engine were laid down when engines still used fixed function graphics pipelines. They were probably just tired of trying to retrofit everything. That said, I just wish the focus stayed on PC for the first iteration, things might have turned out a little better.

Only time will tell if we're looking at a renaissance in Space Sims, or its death knell.

[nielsw]

Well, at least it's not filled with hate...

Nah, I like those guys, and I hope they will do ok, even if they don't do a single thing I like from here on out

Chris R. won't get the whole pie because he favors one flavor of space combat sim, that being the "Aircraft Carrier in Space" variant. That's not to say it's invalid, I like that kind, but I also like others. I'm a backer on this one, but the verdict is still out. The fact that they're trying to sort the CryEngine's limits on world space coordinates this far into development is telling. That should have been decided and written in the first 3 months. Retrofitting that is much harder than building it in during the initial engine modifications or design. (See GP Gems.)

Interesting point. I'll have to look that up. [edit: could you clarify the 'GP Gems' reference? I fail to find anything on Google] Don't know how much actual code they had written before they changed their minds on that. I thought they'd mainly been building ships to sell till then, a lot of which needed to be revised a lot too. I do worry if CR knows how tight a budget he has, if he wants to build all that. I wasn't impressed with his decision to rent studio space on Santa Monica's 3rd street promenade, a ridiculously high rent location. A game studio has no need to take up space in what's basically a huge outdoor shopping mall. Just a little east from there, on Colorado street, you can rent huge spaces for much less money. I know cause I lived there for 20 years, and I worked for a game company that had also insisted on renting on the promenade and eventually ran out of funds. Bioware burned through 300 million to make SWToR, which was ambitious, but somewhat less so. (and its a pretty good game I still enjoy)
I never liked cash shops in games and hate EVE's prodding people to buy "plex" for real money to cover the outlandish losses incurred when getting blown up. But the SWtoR cash shop is really well done without affecting game balance. They make it enticing and varied without making you pay to win.

Braben won't get the whole pie either. He favors the "spicy realism with universal role ships" flavor. And, I like that one too, particularly its focus on exploration. But again, it's not the only flavor I like. I doubted his commitment when the project was brought to my attention, but I've since eaten my own words on it, cause everything I see says he's done a fine job.

I read over their dev document on the economy... I wasn't impressed. it was clunky, unenlightened. Just copying mainstream media propaganda on how capitalist economy supposedly works. Totally failed to be a work of art.

This doesn't mean it'll be a bad game and that lack of sophistication might be invisible to players and be a 'who cares' item, like the economy in X has always been kinda hokey. Definitely the one thing EVE got right... pseudo capitalism in a game so deep and time consuming, it takes a true masochist to go on with that without a chance of ever earning any real cash on a full time job ^^

LT is looking nice, a new flavor "everything that can possibly be random seed procedurally generated should be." I like his ideas, but he's really going to need to dumb down the economy to make it work. Having the AI sort through so many possible actions means that, in the end, they will need to be limited by scope. That engine is going to be CPU taxing to say the least. But, if anyone can make it work, he can.

This one is the wild card!
It could turn out a great concept but somehow not work as a game, (in which case it'll still make an awesome screen saver) or it could end up the best space game ever.

Egosoft should do more procedural generation, given they are so small and shy to outsource...

Egosoft has traditionally made the "pseudo-real economic space sim with 4X elements" flavor. Whereas Rebirth appears to be more the "X3 meets Star Raiders" crossbreed. The former is okay and even great at times, the latter just wasn't done well IMO. (Someone needed to try Tie Fighter for ideas.)

Hmm, gonna have to look for Star Raiders on steam!

Throwing out the code base was a call they made for a reason. The origins of that engine were laid down when engines still used fixed function graphics pipelines. They were probably just tired of trying to retrofit everything. That said, I just wish the focus stayed on PC for the first iteration, things might have turned out a little better.

We'll hope they've made their code modular enough now, where retrofitting parts of the code base will be clearly less effort than a complete rebuild.

With luck, they can put "paid" to the new engine and the next title can allocate more funds to that odd content they insist on including.

Only time will tell if we're looking at a renaissance in Space Sims, or its death knell.

I think it'll be like any other area of fashion. It comes back every so many years, then it goes away again, while some hold-outs will still keep at it

I do wish somebody made an "Independence War III" while we're watching all these other oldies brought back in a shiny new gown, I was really fond of a number of things in that game, especially the way space flight was handled and that asteroid field hideout was cool too.

[nielsw]

Hey nielsw,

As this is in the Scripts and Modding section, I'm going to assume that you are interested in improvements to X3AP while you wait in hope for X4. If that's the case, I would recommend Litcube's Universe, which, imo, resolves some of the negatives you listed. Specifically, LU adds several entities that really liven up the universe (one corporation that acts/builds like a player and is in direct competition with/actively hostile to the player, and a new xenon threat that slowly works to take over the universe) while at the same time offers a huge amount of optimization that makes the game run faster on a single core than XR runs on multiple cores (just had a 100+ fighter battle with framerete over 30 FPS). That and a whole bunch more described in the Wiki. I honestly consider it to be what X4 should have been.

Awsome! Wow, they must have gone deep in order to deliver frame rate improvements like that! Every feature you mention sounds like what the doctor ordered ^^

I'll go and download that, thanks for the tip!!

[phoenix-it]

Interesting point. I'll have to look that up. [edit: could you clarify the 'GP Gems' reference? I fail to find anything on Google] Don't know how much actual code they had written before they changed their minds on that. I thought they'd mainly been building ships to sell till then, a lot of which needed to be revised a lot too. I do worry if CR knows how tight a budget he has, if he wants to build all that. I wasn't impressed with his decision to rent studio space on Santa Monica's 3rd street promenade, a ridiculously high rent location. A game studio has no need to take up space in what's basically a huge outdoor shopping mall. Just a little east from there, on Colorado street, you can rent huge spaces for much less money. I know cause I lived there for 20 years, and I worked for a game company that had also insisted on renting on the promenade and eventually ran out of funds. Bioware burned through 300 million to make SWToR, which was ambitious, but somewhat less so. (and its a pretty good game I still enjoy)
I never liked cash shops in games and hate EVE's prodding people to buy "plex" for real money to cover the outlandish losses incurred when getting blown up. But the SWtoR cash shop is really well done without affecting game balance. They make it enticing and varied without making you pay to win.

GP & GG Gems = Game Programming Gems and Game Graphics Gems, a series of books that cover different techniques used in game engine architectures and/or rendering techniques. You don't have to read those though, just google for "space game", "large world coordinate techniques", and "space game floating point imprecision." Basically, the core issue is that as FP numbers grow in scale they lose detail, just like scientific notation. When your unit is one meter at some point, far enough from origin, you lose the MM digit, then the CM digit, etc. They were designed that way to reduce memory usage. 32 bit floats have "stuck" because that's what the math pipelines on video cards are made to calculate in parallel on a large scale. 64 bit takes 4x the power to calculate and essentially hacks the GPU's rendering pipeline in half. All that said, it can be done with various techniques like multiple scene rendering and translating the world position to a local coordinate that is 32 bit, etc.

I like a lot about Eve except one thing, and it's a deal breaker for me: MMO. I don't like any MMO for largely two reasons: It always, always, always breeds a mob rules mentality among the player base. Secondly, it's what happens when Marketing is the driving force behind the game design. Those games are designed almost entirely around a metric that is essentially the rate and or probability of account abandonment. The whole premise of the design is to keep the player subscribing or making micro-transactions for as long as possible without turning the pressure up so far that they run away. Make no mistake, the length of boss fights and how much "trash" you have to fight on the way are entirely tuned by these numbers. In essence, the goal of making and interesting or fun game is secondary on all counts to making a game that evokes habituation in its players. Now, look at single player and lan party games: Make a good one and it sells and you can go on to making another good one. There's no reason to try to make it addictive or to make fights last an hour so players aren't burning through content too fast. There are no "good guys" in the MMO genre, at the end of the day they're all trying to give you the first one free and hook you, just like a drug dealer. In contrast, Team Fortress Classic was a great multiplayer game, and I never saw login issues or mechanics designed to make me play any more than I wanted to. The first "M" in MMO is not multiplayer, it's Marketing.

I read over their dev document on the economy... I wasn't impressed. it was clunky, unenlightened. Just copying mainstream media propaganda on how capitalist economy supposedly works. Totally failed to be a work of art.

This doesn't mean it'll be a bad game and that lack of sophistication might be invisible to players and be a 'who cares' item, like the economy in X has always been kinda hokey. Definitely the one thing EVE got right... pseudo capitalism in a game so deep and time consuming, it takes a true masochist to go on with that without a chance of ever earning any real cash on a full time job

If I buy Elite D. then I'll most likely be on a private server. I'm sure modders can make the economy more interesting if it's not compelling enough.

As for Eve: It over-complicates a great many things to create a largely artificial learning curve. (For the reasons I mentioned previously.) Even a lot of the scientific principals they use in the mechanics of the game are deliberately muddied and made far more complex than they are in real life.

Ever use the scan probes? The principal behind it is called multilateration. And, in real life, pinpoint accuracy is achievable with 3 listening points located at any distance that they can still receive and identify the originating signal. (Assuming you're operating in a vacuum with no ground or atmosphere to reflect signals.)

Ever have to make a "safe spot" by warping back and fourth, dealing with lag and dropping bookmarks? Easily solved with a right-click sub menu:

Navigation -> Warp to Coordinates -> In AU and enter 18.77, 1.839, 26.1

Where you just make up the numbers... Why is it so complicated? They need you to be lazy and get your ship destroyed so you can buy plex. They, and every other MMO developer can die in a fire as far as I am concerned. Wasting my time for the sake of wasting my time so I'll continue to subscribe, or buy baubles, is never going to be okay with me.

This one is the wild card! (LT)
It could turn out a great concept but somehow not work as a game, (in which case it'll still make an awesome screen saver) or it could end up the best space game ever.

Egosoft should do more procedural generation, given they are so small and shy to outsource...

Exactly... LT is a fine example of "an ambitious system" and there's a 1991 Turing Award lecture from a former MIT professor that warns of the caveats of such endeavors. I'll summarize what he said here, "Be careful not to bite off more than you can chew, lest you choke on it." The guy who's making LT is clearly capable, but I fear he's going to need to cut features before long.

As far as Ego doing procedural... And by that I'm going to assume you meant random-seeded. It's something that's hard to do correctly so the game doesn't feel generic and repetitive. Imagine if all of the sectors in X3 were set up that way... You could very well end up with most of the solar power plants in one corner of the galaxy. Things like food would need to be universal, otherwise you have to turn around and distance check all the placements for resources and consumers, do they cross hostile areas, etc. The more conditions you put in the procedure, the longer it's going to take... No one wants to wait a half hour when they start a new game for it to build the universe. And, the way X's economy works, building one sector at a time is not an option.

EDIT: Remember that last LT update... he's having an issue with making asteroid fields visible from a distance? I'd bet a dollar that's related to "how to handle a LoD on a bunch of randomly generated objects." That most likely won't be simple to solve.

Hmm, gonna have to look for Star Raiders on steam!

You're not going to find the one I was referencing... It was an Atari console era game. The game play was simple, kill bad guys, and keep them away from your star bases where you refueled and repaired your ship.

We'll hope they've made their code modular enough now, where retrofitting parts of the code base will be clearly less effort than a complete rebuild.

That is not always the case in game development, or any other kind. There are good reasons to pull the plug, especially in the OO paradigm. Adding modularity bloats and complicates the code base. Think of it like exception handling... where necessary and no more, lest half your branches become "can we eval this?" before actually doing so. Too much modularization has consequences too. (MORE)

[nielsw]

Interesting points all!

Before getting into anything else, I want to clarify how I meant for Egosoft to use procedural generation.

In Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, there was an invisible barrier around the area the game took place in. With a hack, you could disable this barrier and keep riding out and away indefinitely. While the main area of the game was a mix of hand crafted and procedural placing of grass, bushes, rocks, trees, very large boulders etc, the part past the barrier was entirely generated.

Having played many hand crafted fantasy games, there were always occasions of trees floating in the air, roots being partially out of the ground, rocks placed weirdly, mineral outcroppings being underground and other various errors.

In Oblivion, I never found any such errors, they got their generation so well, everything was placed perfectly and naturally.


Now, procedural generation can't supplant hand crafted things, but it can sure extend it in a stunningly nice way.

What difference does it really make if Egosoft places everything by hand or has all space and its objects generated and then adds or moves things as needed for specific story elements.

In any space game that doesn't try to model our milky way or some pizza slice of it (which they should so that we get the area with the giant black hole or wormhole in the center and the empty space devoid of stars at the outer edge), it really doesn't matter how its arranged, except for computational limitations.

So from the center of where their story line takes place, where they do a lot of edits to place the races and working groups of factories, freighter routes and all that, the further out you get into auto-generated space, the less often they place something by hand, but they still do, so there's unique things to find. Even a single cool thing placed in some far out system gives reason for the adjacent systems to exist.

10% more work, 90% more space. And those 10%, you easily saved on just editing your main area, rather than creating all by hand from scratch.


Now, how did Independence War II manage to make space appear so large and not segregate everything by jumps alone...? Surely, they didn't do 64 bit processing...

As for modularity, I know the issues... its about balance and deciding where performance counts more.

[Jack08]

That is not always the case in game development, or any other kind. There are good reasons to pull the plug, especially in the OO paradigm. Adding modularity bloats and complicates the code base. Think of it like exception handling... where necessary and no more, lest half your branches become "can we eval this?" before actually doing so. Too much modularization has consequences too. (MORE)

In the current age of computing thats a pretty poor excuse to write bad code, imo - alot has changed since 1995. You can achieve modularisation without having performance issues, vtables are not going to kill your performance just because you use them, to me - this sounds like premature optimization to a problem that may exist in the future rather then a problem that does definitely exist in the codebase, and well if you do run into it, thats always ways around these problems.

Squeezing 10% additional performance at the cost of maintainability and adaptability doesn't sound right, and is mostly irrelevant if threads are used correctly, especially in a Simulation game like X where threads can show there true power (if used correctly... which i still think they didn't use them to there potential in XR).

Hell, most of X3 is written inside a Virtual Machine, and then you have the MSCI & MD which are both virtual machines inside a virtual machine, i think there are bigger performance issues then cache misses, much bigger

Now, how did Independence War II manage to make space appear so large and not segregate everything by jumps alone...? Surely, they didn't do 64 bit processing...

If not 64bit, then most likely they used a custom coordinate system that involes an (X, Y, Z) position and a (GridX, GridY) position that allows your to change "sector" without actually having a loading screen. Or they may have used coordinates in a similar format, keept the camera at (0,0,0) and moved the world around that origin point.

Both of these would require some specialist collision detection and physics as standard systems wouldn't cope under thoes circumstances.

[phoenix-it]

In the current age of computing thats a pretty poor excuse to write bad code, imo - alot has changed since 1995. You can achieve modularisation without having performance issues, vtables are not going to kill your performance just because you use them, to me - this sounds like premature optimization to a problem that may exist in the future rather then a problem that does definitely exist in the codebase, and well if you do run into it, thats always ways around these problems.

Squeezing 10% additional performance at the cost of maintainability and adaptability doesn't sound right, and is mostly irrelevant if threads are used correctly, especially in a Simulation game like X where threads can show there true power (if used correctly... which i still think they didn't use them correctly in XR).

So computer science from 1995 is no more applicable today than General Relativity, written in 1916, is applicable to physics today? Tell you what, I won't be taking your word for it. Science isn't pop culture, we're not discussing the validity of bell-bottoms or Dr. Martins. EDIT: Yea, that annoys me, that someone convinced people that research has some sort of expiration date... It doesn't, until someone comes along and proves otherwise. And, for Newtonian Physics, that was three centuries.

You're also assuming the performance difference is 10%. Perhaps it was in an example you saw, or some code you wrote yourself... Tell you what, go write some library stuff... No, I don't mean managed code, middle to OS layer and run some analysis and see what a cache miss does for ya there. I won't even bother with the other ramifications of code bloat, but with all the zero days out the development world should finally be grasping the real cost of complexity.

Hell, most of X3 is written inside a Virtual Machine, and then you have the MSCI & MD which are both virtual machines inside a virtual machine, i think there are bigger performance issues then cache misses, much bigger

I've never seen the source. But, I'm reasonably certain you are confusing an integrated script interpreter with parts of the game engine you can't modify, because you'd need the source, as that stuff is compiled to native binary before it was delivered to your machine. The bottom line is that there is a whole lot more going on in the engine than what script writers would ever see, or even need to interact with.

If not 64bit, then most likely they used a custom coordinate system that involes an (X, Y, Z) position and a (GridX, GridY) position that allows your to change "sector" without actually having a loading screen. Or they may have used coordinates in a similar format, keept the camera at (0,0,0) and moved the world around that origin point.

Both of these would require some specialist collision detection and physics as standard systems wouldn't cope under thoes circumstances.

64 bit is fine now, it wasn't at one time, something happened: SSE2.

That appears to be how it was done in Rebirth... Now, lets see if you can tell me why that's probably why autopilot doesn't work in "Unknown Space." Hint: There are no jump gates in Rebirth. Well... there are, but not between each named cell.

Also, setting the player as origin works, but the subject at hand was the retrofitting of the CryEngine for SC. Which one they go with is largely dependent upon how CE was built. That said, using player as origin and moving world also has issues. One of the biggest is... well... things being big. (It works well for a large world coordinates, but not so much for large object representation... like say, a planet at scale. I mean, do we just chop off the bits that aren't in the frustum?)

[Jack08]

So computer science from 1995 is no more applicable today than General Relativity, written in 1916, is applicable to physics today? Tell you what, I won't be taking your word for it. Science isn't pop culture, we're not discussing the validity of bell-bottoms or Dr. Martins. EDIT: Yea, that annoys me, that someone convinced people that research has some sort of expiration date... It doesn't, until someone comes along and proves otherwise. And, for Newtonian Physics, that was three centuries.

You're also assuming the performance difference is 10%. Perhaps it was in an example you saw, or some code you wrote yourself... Tell you what, go write some library stuff... No, I don't mean managed code, middle to OS layer and run some analysis and see what a cache miss does for ya there. I won't even bother with the other ramifications of code bloat, but with all the zero days out the development world should finally be grasping the real cost of complexity.

Were not even talking about the same thing here, by modularity i didn't mean DLL's, libs and other external code factors - i mean a modular design within the same binary, you can have modular design without any major code bloat... Perhaps i said the wrong thing, i ment languages & compilers have changed alot, not computer science. Your absolute instance that if you write modular code, your doomed makes no sense to me.

This dismissive attitude "i wont even bother" means your not even open to any view then your own, so "i wont even bother" talking about my experiences.

I've never seen the source. But, I'm reasonably certain you are confusing an integrated script interpreter with parts of the game engine you can't modify, because you'd need the source, as that stuff is compiled to native binary before it was delivered to your machine. The bottom line is that there is a whole lot more going on in the engine than what script writers would ever see, or even need to interact with.

Im 1000% certain im not confusing anything with anything. The X Engine is a Three Layered engine, it has the Core Engine, written in C++ - then theres a VM called KC which houses the MSCI VM which reads its bytecode from XML files, and the MD interpreter which interprets MD files at runtime.

I know all this because ive modified the game by disassembling the VM's bytecode, im not just some "script writer" as you so condescendingly put it.

That appears to be how it was done in Rebirth... Now, lets see if you can tell me why that's probably why autopilot doesn't work in "Unknown Space."

Actually, in XR i think it would probably have been done a similar or perhaps identical way to X3 - In X3 coordinates are stored as ints, each using a fixed point multiplication of 500 for each unit (giving an accuracy of 1/500'th of a unit), In X3 the max distance you go can from sector center is roughly 4,000km (400,000m) then graphically things start going very wonky with the UI, tho the ships still seems to fly ok. I can only imagine that its running up internally against the integer limit when doing some calculations of render positions. (while i am aware 400k * 500 is nowhere near 2.1 billion, who knows what calculations are actually being done)

Now supposing that it is an integer limit and XR switched from ints to longs, it would still suffer the same problem, but at a much much larger distance, or maybe they used doubles - who knows... unless they tell us all anyone can do is guess based on available evidence, of which ive not done any research due to lack of intrest.

This is all just a theory, i haven't really toyed with XR much as i lost interest in it so i haven't a clue what coordinate system it uses. As to if it even remotely comes cloes to being a reason for your symptom, i dont know. All depends on how far you went really, or perhaps its designed not to work in unknown space as a mechanic? Ive had capital ships come pick me up from deep in unknown space before, so im not sure what your talking about in regards to autopilot problems.

--

Also, in reference to an earlier statement in the thread about Star Citizen, CE, and switching from floats to doubles - they made that commitment long ago, its not like they only just turned around yesterday and said there going to change it because they feel like it...

[nielsw]

If not 64bit, then most likely they used a custom coordinate system that involes an (X, Y, Z) position and a (GridX, GridY) position that allows your to change "sector" without actually having a loading screen. Or they may have used coordinates in a similar format, keept the camera at (0,0,0) and moved the world around that origin point.

Both of these would require some specialist collision detection and physics as standard systems wouldn't cope under thoes circumstances.

Hi Jack, thanks for sharing!

Wondering if you played Independence War II. If you did, It might have been obvious to you where they hid their magic tricks... They did have *some* jump points but outside of that, you could go to something close to light speed (ships had 3 different engines for different speeds) and maybe that's where they managed to eliminate the load screen the way you said.

I wish Star Citizen would not solely rely on jump points from system to system, but some of the same trickery might still be needed, since 64 bit wouldn't suffice for interstellar space...

[Jack08]

If not 64bit, then most likely they used a custom coordinate system that involes an (X, Y, Z) position and a (GridX, GridY) position that allows your to change "sector" without actually having a loading screen. Or they may have used coordinates in a similar format, keept the camera at (0,0,0) and moved the world around that origin point.

Both of these would require some specialist collision detection and physics as standard systems wouldn't cope under thoes circumstances.

Hi Jack, thanks for sharing!

Wondering if you played Independence War II. If you did, It might have been obvious to you where they hid their magic tricks... They did have *some* jump points but outside of that, you could go to something close to light speed (ships had 3 different engines for different speeds) and maybe that's where they managed to eliminate the load screen the way you said.

I wish Star Citizen would not solely rely on jump points from system to system, but some of the same trickery might still be needed, since 64 bit wouldn't suffice for interstellar space...

I didnt play it so i cant really do anything other then guess, but you said that you enter light speed, does that mean everything on your screen vanishes and you see the animation and just a GUI for navigation? if so they could just be using light speed as a loading screen - rather then actually having you move though space they are just plotting where you will end up, and activating that sector.

--

Using doubles, you can create a world which has the max size of between 668 AU to 66845 AU, depending on how many digits of precision needed on the coordinate, if 3 digits of precision are needed, then 6684, if 2 - 66845. The number gets much smaller at 4, which reduces it to 668 AU). It all depends on how accurate you need to place things in the game scene. In a space game 2-3 digits should be enough, unless you start working with major physics which Star Citizen is doing, so they may need 3 or 4... or more.

Any number of precision digits one thing remains the same, thats a huge area! as that number is cubed (X, Y, Z Axies) - Even pluto only orbits at a max distance of ~48 AU. While even 66,845 AU isnt enough to take you to alpha centauri, it should be more then enough to create a simple grid based coordinate system. Even if they dont allow you to fly to another system via FTL, thats a massive area per system to explore, who knows what unknown jump points you could discover, considering they are randomly generated over time.

Didn't they also say they wanted to procedurally generate systems that connect to these jump points too at some point?

[phoenix-it]

Were not even talking about the same thing here, by modularity i didn't mean DLL's, libs and other external code factors - i mean a modular design within the same binary, you can have modular design without any major code bloat... Perhaps i said the wrong thing, i ment languages & compilers have changed alot, not computer science. Your absolute instance that if you write modular code, your doomed makes no sense to me.

This dismissive attitude "i wont even bother" means your not even open to any view then your own, so "i wont even bother" talking about my experiences.

You didn't read what I said in the first place, and sicked the "bad code" attack dog at me.

I never said "don't modularize." What I actually said "don't modularize excessively, just like you would exception handle excessively." That seems to be the going theme today, and thus we have Windows RT tablets with 32GB SSD's being delivered with 16GB left after the OS is installed.

I wasn't being dismissive, I was being tired.

Im 1000% certain im not confusing anything with anything. The X Engine is a Three Layered engine, it has the Core Engine, written in C++ - then theres a VM called KC which houses the MSCI VM which reads its bytecode from XML files, and the MD interpreter which interprets MD files at runtime.

I know all this because ive modified the game by disassembling the VM's bytecode, im not just some "script writer" as you so condescendingly put it.

I know it's a script driven engine, just pointing out that the scripting is only a small part of everything the engine is doing.

My apologies for sounding condescending, I was not trying to sound that way, I was tired, as previously mentioned.

This is all just a theory, i haven't really toyed with XR much as i lost interest in it so i haven't a clue what coordinate system it uses. As to if it even remotely comes cloes to being a reason for your symptom, i dont know. All depends on how far you went really, or perhaps its designed not to work in unknown space as a mechanic? Ive had capital ships come pick me up from deep in unknown space before, so im not sure what your talking about in regards to autopilot problems.

Yes, it is all just theory, I could be completely wrong. That said, based on the behavior I saw they appear to be coordinate space shifting. Laying down blocks or segments of bounded world space that shift as you move from one to another with some sort of global area identifier similar to the solution that described in GPGems 4.

So... If we're talking about multiple "zones" with identical coordinate bounds, that means each one has an identical coordinate area sans the "far position" or segment. If we're in Zone A at 8,-12,2 and the station is in Zone B at 10,0,-15 we can't just draw a line to it because there is a 10,0,-15 in the zone we're currently in, and the station isn't there. That means that somewhere there is most likely a segment map that says, "If in zone A and destination is in zone B point the autopilot towards the side of the zone nearest zone B."

Now go into "unknown space" that appears to be generated on the fly when you cross the boundary from a known, populated segment to an area where one wasn't explicitly laid out by the designers. The autopilot has no segment map to say which side of the zone your in is closest to your destination.

Again, all speculation on my part. What makes me think this is the case is because I noticed something while traveling the "space highways." When your autopilot is active and you move from another zone into your destination zone the marker makes a sudden shift towards the exact location of the station. The same way, if you were in Power Circle at 0,0,0 in X3 and plotted a course to a station in Queen's Space, your marker wouldn't point North, it would point west towards the jump gate, the only difference is Rebirth is stream loaded. But, again, I could be wrong, that's just my guess based on observation.

I've seen that technique used a lot in RPGs with quest markers and whatnot. Skyrim? No, they appear to use the player is origin technique, so if you get a quest marker in Riften to something in Markarth the marker is pointed towards the absolute position of Markarth, rather than the center of the west wall of the current world space.

Also, in reference to an earlier statement in the thread about Star Citizen, CE, and switching from floats to doubles - they made that commitment long ago, its not like they only just turned around yesterday and said there going to change it because they feel like it...

I know they did... and I hope it wasn't just a commitment and they started actual work as fixing the issue requires a lot of code changes in the engine. I hope you're right, I really do, because it's a beast of a problem.

[phoenix-it]

If not 64bit, then most likely they used a custom coordinate system that involes an (X, Y, Z) position and a (GridX, GridY) position that allows your to change "sector" without actually having a loading screen. Or they may have used coordinates in a similar format, keept the camera at (0,0,0) and moved the world around that origin point.

Both of these would require some specialist collision detection and physics as standard systems wouldn't cope under thoes circumstances.

Hi Jack, thanks for sharing!

Wondering if you played Independence War II. If you did, It might have been obvious to you where they hid their magic tricks... They did have *some* jump points but outside of that, you could go to something close to light speed (ships had 3 different engines for different speeds) and maybe that's where they managed to eliminate the load screen the way you said.

I wish Star Citizen would not solely rely on jump points from system to system, but some of the same trickery might still be needed, since 64 bit wouldn't suffice for interstellar space...

Jump points are used to maintain the illusion of distance. You have to do something, the original elite limited the range by how much fuel you could carry. Otherwise players will just gravitate to the trade making the biggest money and "milk run" it and not go anywhere else.

What Jack said about universe scale is true... last time I checked, and int512 isn't enough to render our galaxy at scale, with millimeter precision.

Personally, I like the multiple camera technique for large worlds.

[Morkonan]

Just a general comment:

All of this programming stuff is interesting. I really mean that. But, what matters in the final product has absolutely nothing to do with how a game is programmed - It has to do with the experience of the game by the player.

Jump Gates, seamless transitions, load screens, large worlds... none of the stuff "behind the curtain" matters if such things make the game interesting and enjoyable.

Let's take instanced space, like that separated by jump gates. There is nothing at all wrong with that. Nothing! As a matter of fact, Jump Gates add a tactical element to the system! How could you "experience" the thrill of ambushing a flight of pirates in such a way without the convention of Jump Gates? How could you experience the thrill and hard-won satisfaction of closing off a gate from a Xenon sector? What about the dread of seeing an entire Xenon migration flood through a gate in a sector that was serving as your home-base? The joy of parking your TL in front of a Jump Gate and listening to the screams of Boron M5 pilots as they paint the sides of your ship as soon as they come through? PRICELESS!

People sometimes discount the value of "Game Elements" when they're extolling upon the virtues of "simulation." Real Life is not fun. It's hard. You have to wipe your butt after you poo! What's fun about that? Should it be simulated in a game? (Don't answer that...)

I do not want a "real life simulation of outer space stuffs." Why? Because, real space doesn't have all the fun stuff that a good game has in it. In real space, I will die in my cockpit before I could reach another solar system. In a game, I will have fun reaching a solar system, unless I'm attacked by giant space monsters or pilot my ship through a Jump Gate and end up decorating some jerk's TL....

It's all about the experience. That's why I don't care one little bit whether or not some developer is trying to make their game "THE MOST REALISTIC EVAR!" That is not an incentive for me to buy a game. I want game elements that are fun, interesting, and that afford me many opportunities for enriching my play experience. If those are actually just conventional "hacks" that are in the game due to hardware or coding restraints, I don't care! If it's fun, it's fun.

[Jack08]

While true Morkonan, i personally would find an equal level of enjoyment in the vastness of space, being able to use long range scanners to locate energy signatures, and plan ambushes in the absolute middle of nowhere where no one is expecting it - thats where the seamless space without jump points concept comes in.

Coming to a gate you kinda expect to get attacked, but - in the middle of nowhere? kinda gets a little spooky out there...

Just as a note: this thread did originate in the Scripts and Modding forum (it got moved), hence the technical perspective of it.

[...] Should it be simulated in a game? (Don't answer that...)

I dont know... it was going to end up in DayZ at one point... LOL

[phoenix-it]

Just a general comment:

All of this programming stuff is interesting. I really mean that. But, what matters in the final product has absolutely nothing to do with how a game is programmed - It has to do with the experience of the game by the player.

Jump Gates, seamless transitions, load screens, large worlds... none of the stuff "behind the curtain" matters if such things make the game interesting and enjoyable.

Let's take instanced space, like that separated by jump gates. There is nothing at all wrong with that. Nothing! As a matter of fact, Jump Gates add a tactical element to the system! How could you "experience" the thrill of ambushing a flight of pirates in such a way without the convention of Jump Gates? How could you experience the thrill and hard-won satisfaction of closing off a gate from a Xenon sector? What about the dread of seeing an entire Xenon migration flood through a gate in a sector that was serving as your home-base? The joy of parking your TL in front of a Jump Gate and listening to the screams of Boron M5 pilots as they paint the sides of your ship as soon as they come through? PRICELESS!

People sometimes discount the value of "Game Elements" when they're extolling upon the virtues of "simulation." Real Life is not fun. It's hard. You have to wipe your butt after you poo! What's fun about that? Should it be simulated in a game? (Don't answer that...)

I do not want a "real life simulation of outer space stuffs." Why? Because, real space doesn't have all the fun stuff that a good game has in it. In real space, I will die in my cockpit before I could reach another solar system. In a game, I will have fun reaching a solar system, unless I'm attacked by giant space monsters or pilot my ship through a Jump Gate and end up decorating some jerk's TL....

It's all about the experience. That's why I don't care one little bit whether or not some developer is trying to make their game "THE MOST REALISTIC EVAR!" That is not an incentive for me to buy a game. I want game elements that are fun, interesting, and that afford me many opportunities for enriching my play experience. If those are actually just conventional "hacks" that are in the game due to hardware or coding restraints, I don't care! If it's fun, it's fun.

You'll get no argument from me here. I think game play is sorely overlooked. I've always had a love-hate relationship with both X and Freelancer. Freelancer has no real balance because each new race you meet is significantly stronger than the previous one, in terms of ship capability. What that translates to is I can't fly ship Y because ship Z is in the same class and massively stronger. X3 is just plagued with all kinds of strange notions of what constitutes game balance and some of it has me literally scratching my head asking myself, "why would anyone ever do that?" For instance, why is there no hotkey to target incoming missiles?

While there is no trading element, and the capitol ships were a little weak vs fighters, probably due to lore... (It was just far too easy to take out a Star Destroyer with an A-Wing, etc.) X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and it's predecessors had both great game play and game balance. Every ship was worth flying, even the crusty Tie Bomber. But, I will concur the Tie Defender was more than a little OP.

Some things that are hard in RL are fun too. I fly model helicopters, and no I don't mean the toys from walmart... the ones were mistakes are at minimum upwards of $100 to recover from, usually more. They have sims now, which make it easier, but when I first started the first hover was a real triumph.

Knowing what I do about those, I can say without doubt that realistic flight mechanics would suck for dogfighting in space, period. Just imagine the game asteroids in 3 dimensions, where you have to 180 the ship every time you slow down, well unless you have "engines" on the front that are just as big and powerful as the ones on the back. Oh, and there's no "wrapping" from one side of the board to another. The whole experience of dog fighting would be a series of short lived head to head passes with long periods of being out of range.

[Avis]

.

I didnt play it so i cant really do anything other then guess, but you said that you enter light speed, does that mean everything on your screen vanishes and you see the animation and just a GUI for navigation? if so they could just be using light speed as a loading screen - rather then actually having you move though space they are just plotting where you will end up, and activating that sector...

I-War 2's LDS drive wasn't a loading screen as such, the ship was fully controllable and interactive travelling at ridiculously high speed not with a fixed entry and exit point, you could enter, exit and travel anywhere at any time. it added a whole other dimension to space battles where ships could have their LDS drive knocked out dropping them back into normal space to be engaged/captured etc.

[Morkonan]

While true Morkonan, i personally would find an equal level of enjoyment in the vastness of space, being able to use long range scanners to locate energy signatures, and plan ambushes in the absolute middle of nowhere where no one is expecting it - thats where the seamless space without jump points concept comes in.

Coming to a gate you kinda expect to get attacked, but - in the middle of nowhere? kinda gets a little spooky out there...

But, there's also no place to hide.

Depending upon how advanced your tech level is, and it would be pretty advanced if you're intersystem travel, you could detect another ship "hiding" somewhere, waiting to ambush you, in deep space. Well, within reasonable limits, anyway. (There are all sorts of particulars to cover, but in essence, it's just not possible to not emit/reflect/absorb some sort of detectable radiation.)

I get where you're coming from, but how likely is it that you will ambush someone in deep space? Is there a trade-route or something that they're traveling on? And, if they just happen to change it a little bit by several AUs, what'ya gonna do?

There are certain elements like that I will acknowledge can be interesting. There could be certain mechanics that would make that interesting. (ie: Spies. IIRC, the old "Buck Rogers" game did something like that, allowing you to ambush, or be ambushed, due to intel leaks or some such. I still have that game, somewhere.) But, citing your example, it's certainly not going to be as varied a mechanic and tactical tool as a simple Jump Gate provides. In essence, you're basically saying in your example that the presence of "nothing" affords you a gameplay perk. In some instances, I suppose that could be true. But, only in limited ones. "Nothing" is not often beneficial.

Just as a note: this thread did originate in the Scripts and Modding forum (it got moved), hence the technical perspective of it.

Aye, I saw that. But, nonetheless, I still liked the byplay. Watching geek-fights is entertaining... (I'm a geek, but not a code-monkey.)

I dont know... it was going to end up in DayZ at one point... LOL

I am not surprised. So, how much does "An exquisite roll of double-soft, scented, toilet paper" go for, online? As much as a "Funny Hat?" Will there be an entire online economy based on... toilet-paper simulations?

Probably so.

...For instance, why is there no hotkey to target incoming missiles?

I thought there was one...? Maybe a common work-around that I forgot? Been awhile since I played X3, to be honest. Still love the game, though.

While there is no trading element, and the capitol ships were a little weak vs fighters, probably due to lore... (It was just far too easy to take out a Star Destroyer with an A-Wing, etc.) X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and it's predecessors had both great game play and game balance. Every ship was worth flying, even the crusty Tie Bomber. But, I will concur the Tie Defender was more than a little OP.

An awesome game, one of the greats! I wish it would come back... But, with missions a little bit less demanding. Accomplish ALL objectives AND kill everything? Some of those were very tough.

Some things that are hard in RL are fun too. I fly model helicopters, and no I don't mean the toys from walmart... the ones were mistakes are at minimum upwards of $100 to recover from, usually more. They have sims now, which make it easier, but when I first started the first hover was a real triumph.

Flying model helicopters is acknowledged as one of the more difficult things to do well. I salute you! I used to subscribe to RC mag when I was a kid. Never had a real RC aircraft, though. Or, a real RC anything... I just liked to read about 'em and fell in love with RC copters. At least, in the mags. (I also loved reading up on RC warships! Woot, BB gun armed battleships!)

...The whole experience of dog fighting would be a series of short lived head to head passes with long periods of being out of range.

Of course, you'd paint the inside of your cockpit with your mutilated remains after making just one high-g maneuver... But, that sort of takes the fun out of a "realistic" game, doesn't it. Would be easy to code, though, since you'd never need any more missions to code than one.

<Launch>

<Splat>

Loading, please wait....

[Oldman]

...Some things that are hard in RL are fun too. I fly model helicopters, and no I don't mean the toys from walmart... the ones were mistakes are at minimum upwards of $100 to recover from, usually more. They have sims now, which make it easier, but when I first started the first hover was a real triumph.
...

I fly model R/C boats (sedate electric powered)...it can get exciting when you have a few rampant ducks paddling about, did you know a Swan can totally cripple a 4ft model 'research vessel'?...no, nor did I, I'm going to convert it into an armed trawler at some point, I think

Just browsing the forum btw.....carry on....

Oldman