Xenon Hardware: Ships

[Crimsonraziel]

In the first live stream it has been mentioned that maybe it won't be possible to fly xenon ships yourself. In this case I suppose it would be because of immersion and xenon ship cockpits. If so, besides xenon ships being unobtainable, there might be a third option. You could capture their ships but only be able to use them like in X:R. A cargo bay or something like that should be less immersion breaking than cockpits. On the other hand, as long as there is any room on these ships you could always say you install some kind of VR console and control the ship yourself. What do you think about this topic?

[Axeface]

The lore is a bit foggy, some say that they have cockpits and corridors in their ships because they are hardwired to do so. Others say not. Egosoft can you confirm? I for one am not sure how I feel about this, Xenon ships are very cool looking, but I dont know if I think they should be available. If they are there should be things you have to do first to capture them though, maybe a lot of AI research or to have specific upgrades installed to control the ships.
The method to capture them could be different too, instead of a boarding process, could it instead be a long drawn-out hacking mini-game? (a feature i'de like to see expanded and improved over the rebirth one).

[RAVEN.myst]

I will give the same qualified 'yes' as to the Xenon station question: if, and only if, they are really challenging and interesting to acquire. Also, I like the idea of them being only usable as "drones" ie. issue orders to them, but not fly them personally - nice option, there, and not only makes sense but would also serve to distinguish them, rather than being nothing more than ships of yet another faction.

[mr.WHO]

Just like in the other topic: I think that they might be locked gameplay by Egosoft, but they should technically allow it in code so that moders should use it when eneeded (e.g. Xenon gameplay).

[MegaJohnny]

I'd like to have them, just for how exotic they are, but I won't complain if I can't.

I suspect making them player flyable isn't as simple as in previous games, as the cockpit is an actual thing now, and you have to consider how the player will disembark after landing. So they have to give it more thought than just deciding where the camera should be.

[linolafett]

I suspect making them player flyable isn't as simple as in previous games, as the cockpit is an actual thing now, and you have to consider how the player will disembark after landing. So they have to give it more thought than just deciding where the camera should be.

Spot on. Thats why we currently can not have flying xenon ships.
Its not a technical limitiation, but an art time limitation. Maybe also a little bit of lore, to explain why it shouldnt be possible (xenon dont have cockpits etc).

[Rei Ayanami]

Well, it depends on what Egosoft wants to do lore-wise :

In X-T and X2 Xenon ships had their own cockpits. I think it was explained waaaay back then that in-lore xenon ships, which were terraformers, still had to abide by certain rules when constructing their ships, which included a hardcoded neccessity to also concide cockpits for humans.

If i remember correctly, in the novels written by Helke Kautz at one time one of the protagonists went on

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a Xenon terraformer CPU ship called #efaa in order to communicate with it, and it had all kinds of life-support and computer screens and keyboards for humans.

So from these two points it would, lore-wise, be possible for humans to fly Xenon ships and it would, considering these aspects, not really break immersion.

On the other hand, Egosoft might decide that Xenons have evolved so much since the time of X-T and X2 that they were able to scan through their own code and threw everything out that is unneccessary or resembles a security risk, like the possibility of being occupied by humans.
The Xenon capital ships from X:Rebirth for example are so different in design that they might not even have a cockpit or any larger space at all where a life form coud fit inside, because every single spot is full of hardware.


If Xenon ships were capturable, i think it'd be interesting to make it, compared to other ships, really hard to even get them or you'd need to do some special action (hacking instead of boarding?).

Heck, maybe they could be made so they are really good stat-wise (better than most ships on average), but either
1) every once in a while captured Xenon ships have a small chance to spontaneously do a "reboot" and switch back to the Xenon faction. Or
2) During battle Xenon-faction Xenon ships have a chance to send communication waves to alll nearby captured Xenon ships and take them back to their own faction. So if you have captured Xenon vessels and they work for your own faction, you should make sure they don't come near any enemy Xenon ships or they might be converted back to the Xenon-faction.

So it's a high risk/high-reward thing... you want to have stylish xenon ships in your fleet? fine, but don't complain when they turn against you.



Either way, even if Egosoft doesn't make Xenon ships flyable, i think they shouldn't hardcode it so modders can make Xenons flyable if they so desire.

[Lc4Hunter]

I suspect making them player flyable isn't as simple as in previous games, as the cockpit is an actual thing now, and you have to consider how the player will disembark after landing. So they have to give it more thought than just deciding where the camera should be.

Spot on. Thats why we currently can not have flying xenon ships.
Its not a technical limitiation, but an art time limitation. Maybe also a little bit of lore, to explain why it shouldnt be possible (xenon dont have cockpits etc).

Thanks lino for your reply!
A good idea (for me at least) would be to disable the xenon ships with some kind of EM-weapon and to reverse engineer the ships and build a modiefied version (with cockpit) of them.
Because of the rebuild of the ship its stats could be a bit weaker then from the original ship. So this ship would be some kind of xenon-human hybrid.
I think this could be a great feature...

[Morkonan]

For thematic reasons, I don't think Xenon ships should be useable by the player. I'd rather keep them mysterious and powerful. I think that they could be able to be captured, but only then able to be scrapped, since the A.I. controlling them is either destroyed or suicides, frying everything in the ship.

The human cockpit explanation makes sense and adds a nice bit of flavor. So, perhaps, a story mission could come from that and one or two special, mission related, Xenon ships could actually be captured and made flyable. That would be something I'd like to see. But, I wouldn't want to see any Xenon ships available for general use by the player outside of a couple in story-missions.

[ezra-r]

It would be nice if you had to contain and hack them in a difficult way to be able to get capture any.

[Axeface]

I suspect making them player flyable isn't as simple as in previous games, as the cockpit is an actual thing now, and you have to consider how the player will disembark after landing. So they have to give it more thought than just deciding where the camera should be.

Spot on. Thats why we currently can not have flying xenon ships.
Its not a technical limitiation, but an art time limitation. Maybe also a little bit of lore, to explain why it shouldnt be possible (xenon dont have cockpits etc).

Is this confirmation that the 'hardwired to have cockpit and corridors' is incorrect, or are you saying that in X4 it might be explained that way (but not the case in previous games).

[Crimsonraziel]

I suspect making them player flyable isn't as simple as in previous games, as the cockpit is an actual thing now, and you have to consider how the player will disembark after landing. So they have to give it more thought than just deciding where the camera should be.

Spot on. Thats why we currently can not have flying xenon ships.
Its not a technical limitiation, but an art time limitation. Maybe also a little bit of lore, to explain why it shouldnt be possible (xenon dont have cockpits etc).

Does this only mean we just can't fly them ourselves or we can't own them at all?

No Borons and no Xenon for me would make me sad.

[spacecoyote99]

It'd probably require some reworking of the ship code to include non-boardable ships (which then effectively could not have an NPC pilot, as all other ships do.)

Also boarding by sending marines over would not work. It would have to be some sort of hacking of the Xenon AI instead.

So for that reason I voted no. It's a cool idea to have Xenon "drone" ships, but for me it's not important enough that I want Ego to spend a lot of time on it instead of on core features.

[RAVEN.myst]

No Borons and no Xenon for me would make me sad.

Indeed. Hmmm, how about... Cyborons? The Xenon dig up Bala Gi's corpse and assimirrect it in an attempt to benefit from that luminary's ship design insights...

[Kitty]

No Borons and no Xenon for me would make me sad.

Indeed. Hmmm, how about... Cyborons? The Xenon dig up Bala Gi's corpse and assimirrect it in an attempt to benefit from that luminary's ship design insights...

The Ancients could find this funnier than the Kha'ak genocid. I wonder if the gates shutdown is linked to this, by the way. Ancients are not known to be fond of genocids.

I always wondered why Xenon built ships that were adapted to human, boron, split, paranid AND teladi's asses. I can admit that Xenons can have pilots. After all, they also probably have soldiers (you know, walking drones). They don't need these to look like bipeds. They can have various size and formats, as long as the power plug is standardized. Thus, their ships should have corridors, and these corridors should be big enough for Paranids to dwell in, but I would not bet for seats in the cockpit.

Well, the main issue still is: do you trust an abandoned Xenon ship to be free of Xenon viruses ? Aren't they all Trojans ?

[Crimsonraziel]

No Borons and no Xenon for me would make me sad.

Indeed. Hmmm, how about... Cyborons? The Xenon dig up Bala Gi's corpse and assimirrect it in an attempt to benefit from that luminary's ship design insights...

I'm sure Bala Gi would approve this.

Well, the main issue still is: do you trust an abandoned Xenon ship to be free of Xenon viruses ? Aren't they all Trojans ?

Trust? Rudilis Yayasisos Foologos VI sold me a copy of Kaspersky 3002.

[RAVEN.myst]

Well, the main issue still is: do you trust an abandoned Xenon ship to be free of Xenon viruses ? Aren't they all Trojans ?

Beware of Xenons bearing gifts.
(Hmmm... giant-horse-shaped Xenon carriers?)

[PowerPC603]

Didn't ships also come with installable modules?
You can customize them to a certain extent anyways.

They could make it so that they don't have a cockpit initially (because the Xenon have no use for a pilot seat, console to push buttons and such), but you could install a cockpit module on these ships, which do allow you to pilot them yourself after you install such a cockpit.

This cockpit module could be expensive to buy, or even better: it may require hard-to-get resources to produce them before they can be installed.
You would need your own shipyard to be able to produce cockpit modules for captured Xenon ships.

You could need some Xenon parts, which you farm from other Xenon ships (they leave some loot behind when destroyed anyways).
One of those resources could be some blueprint, which enables you to produce the cockpits.

The blueprints may have been stored in their computer-memory from before the time they became sentient, because previously, humans needed those cockpits to be able to fly them.
Since the Xenon don't need cockpits, they got rid of the cockpits on newly produced ships and they tried to delete the cockpit blueprints from their memory, but the process has failed because of the entire computer overhaul during the process of becoming sentient, producing fragmented blueprint pieces, which were never deleted afterwards.

You could need several different blueprint pieces to construct one complete blueprint (thus actually restoring the original cockpit design) and they could also make it usable only once, to make it even harder to own flyable Xenon ships.

Once consumed, the blueprint may be gone and you need to find new blueprint pieces to construct a new complete blueprint.


This way, Xenon ships are not player-flyable at first, but with some effort, they can be made flyable by the player once he has his own shipyard.




This gives another useful usage to crafting your own stuff.
And a reason to own your own shipyard station and to kill Xenons (to gather the required resources to be able to produce cockpits for captured ships.

[A5PECT]

Didn't ships also come with installable modules?

IIRC, they said we can customize modules that are on a ship. We can't customize a module that isn't there in the first place.

Also, there won't be customizable cockpits a la XR.

Q: Will there be cockpits customizations?
A: No. One cockpit per ship.

I suppose the technically correct answer is "All ships will have one or fewer cockpits."

[Nanook]

... Maybe also a little bit of lore, to explain why it shouldnt be possible (xenon dont have cockpits etc).

And maybe not. Xenon ships have had cockpits from as far back as X-Tension, where they were red-hued (that was cool, btw). Changing the lore, are you?