X4 working with modder community....

[Danny200]

Hey egosoft... ever thought about asking assistants from the modding community to help create your game? Some say you are only a small company but there are some extremely impressive mods (I call them mods maybe you call them plugins? I'm not sure) like x3rm and litcubes universe... I mean the community find these 2 alone impressive... just think how great x4 could be if you all work together...

You could hire them maybe? If cash is a problem ask them to work for free and you can give them like a reccomendation (like of they went for a job) or maybe give them exclusive in game stuff and their name in the credits....

I'm just saying you don't need to stress yourself out the community can help you create your game even more amazing.... all you have to do is ask.... I'm sure they would love to help... modders and game creators working together... it would be amazing....

[Alan Phipps]

That is kind of how the X games evolved through the X3 series to X3AP. There really need to be stable and well-understood game engine and core mechanics before most modders get fully involved though.

[ajax34i]

1. They never thought about that. It's not like it's the first idea that comes up when faced with talented players. You, sir, are a genius!

2. Thanks for volunteering the services of other people in the community. It's so gracious of you.

[jack775544]

That has already happened in the past for the X series.

MK3 traders were originally an X2 mod that were included in the base game for X3.

X3TC had many contributions from the Xtended mod team for X3R.

X3AP included some modified versions of popular X3TC mods in the initial release.

The X3AP 3.0 patch was largely done by modders and other community members. For histories sake, that patch was originally going to be just a standalone mod but after some correspondence from Egosoft we were actually able to get it into the official game release.


There are probably many more examples that I am missing but interactions between the modding community and Egosoft have happened many times in the past.

[euclid]

1. They never thought about that. It's not like it's the first idea that comes up when faced with talented players. You, sir, are a genius!

2. Thanks for volunteering the services of other people in the community. It's so gracious of you.

Lol !!

Good one!

@Danny200: If you browse the X-Game series then you'll soon find out that it is all about the support of modding. The X-team provides a solid basis and tools and the community provides mods to pick from whatever rocks your boat.

Cheers Euclid

[Requiemfang]

Yeah if you look at X3AP you see that the developers added M2+ ships and several others. Those ships were in fact from the X-tended mod for X3TC. Personally though from playing extensively with mods I noticed a very strange shift by the mod developers to skewer the balance of the races up quite a bit.

Example a lot of rebalance mods or total conversion mods made the Boron ships complete jokes by taking away heavy firepower in the form of PPC's and leaving them with pea-shooter weapons and the ion based weapons which did very little damage. All the other races in the mods had some hard hitting weapons yet the boron ships even though they had good stats hull and shield wise would get trashed due to them not having the firepower to take on other races ships.

The egosoft developers I understand never gimped races like that rather they had each race have a certain flavor and aspect of their ships that offset some of the inherent weaknesses like Split ships being hard hitting fast ships but with weak hull designs. Or the Paranid with their super advanced weaponry.

[Killjaeden]

If cash is a problem ask them to work for free and you can give them like a reccomendation (like of they went for a job)

How about no?

Thanks for volunteering the services of other people in the community. It's so gracious of you.

Indeed.

Example a lot of rebalance mods or total conversion mods made the Boron ships complete jokes by taking away heavy firepower in the form of PPC's

Thats a poor generalisation... its also why "a rebalance" does not work for everyone, because everyone has different opinions. Its also why rebalance mods are often like sand on the beach (for X not so much, but for other games definitely).

X3AP included some modified versions of popular X3TC mods in the initial release

It was just a tiny subset of ships.

[Tomonor]

Personally though from playing extensively with mods I noticed a very strange shift by the mod developers to skewer the balance of the races up quite a bit.

Example a lot of rebalance mods or total conversion mods made the Boron ships complete jokes by taking away heavy firepower in the form of PPC's and leaving them with pea-shooter weapons and the ion based weapons which did very little damage. All the other races in the mods had some hard hitting weapons yet the boron ships even though they had good stats hull and shield wise would get trashed due to them not having the firepower to take on other races ships.

The egosoft developers I understand never gimped races like that rather they had each race have a certain flavor and aspect of their ships that offset some of the inherent weaknesses like Split ships being hard hitting fast ships but with weak hull designs. Or the Paranid with their super advanced weaponry.

Yeah, there is a basic understanding and idea of the game's balance by each individual player. We all know how the different races variate their arsenals, depending on the game of course. And it's completely up to the modders for how to change these values. I liked XRM's approach, as it tried to stay true to the X lore while bringing a sort of "realism", even if it was radical, bringing in some new difficulties.

Understandably, Egosoft doesn't want players to be disappointed in their products, thus they don't bring the balancing too far off from the middle ground, so there are only minimal differences, even for the X3 ship variants (normal - sentinel - vanguard - raider). And that's exactly what made balancing near impossible to be spectacular. They had up to 4 ship variants at least, PLUS there were a lot of new ships introduced in vanilla gameplay. Boost that up with the extra hundreds of ships the mods added, and there's the reason why XRM's balancing was the way it was.

Gladly (and it's odd to say this), Egosoft is going back to its X2-ish roots, and only introduces a few ships for each race in each category, so they can balance it properly. Quality over quantity in this case, and it will be up to the DLCs and modders to introduce variety. But the core gameplay has to be laid on a strong foundation (ironically, like the title).

[Killjaeden]

Gladly (and it's odd to say this), Egosoft is going back to its X2-ish roots, and only introduces a few ships for each race in each category, so they can balance it properly. Quality over quantity in this case

On the surface it may seem so, but as they revealed that ships are now modifiable via components that doesnt result in less variation - at least on the stat side. It's only less variation in visual look, because the hull always stays the same.

[Eriodas]

There is also the question about including custom ship models into the game.

In XR mods i only saw ships that seems to be made from pieces of other ships already ingame, not a single custom model or textures.

I loved the mods that included lots of totally new ships in X3AP, the design of some ones were gorgeous also (sometimes better than the ones in game), especially the terran ones.