Jumpdrives got me into X3, highways just dropped me off XR, and we're legion

[Mick Maidens]

Yes that map is confusing and only eight sectors. And I have to admit moving entire fleets is not really my thing. I do have a fleet but it sits idly in a sector. The best thing about the X series was it was different things to different players. That is the sand box idea. Now they seem to be making it appeal to a much smaller audience. If i want to play an RTS I would play CoH not X4. The guy who suggested that the most popular mod was for Strat forgets that those players that use mods are a small subset of all users and those who use Strat mods are a subset of mod users. X4 needs to appeal to a wide majority not a small minority.

[AdrianB1]

Guys, I have an idea for jump drives. Not ideal, but hear me out and tell what you think.

One of the biggest negative part of jump drives was described as instantly jumping a fleet anywhere and destroying key installations or the entire sector. The biggest positive is allowing the player to move between distant sectors without spending hours of real time just for that.

Well, let's keep the jump drives, but very limited to what they can do. For example, make the energy consumption so big, a capital ship cannot jump more than a sector or two with the full weapons complement. Let's say that jumping 5 sectors with a capital ship require the entire capacity of the ship in energy cells, so if you really want to jump the fleet, it will be useless as it is disarmed. What good this does?
- player can scout freely in some fast ship and jump as needed as long as he does not engage in fights. Scouting and fighting in the same time is not a good idea, you either fly a Blackbird or a F15 with loads of stuff, not both in the same time. So let the player use an unarmed ship with long jump range or a fast and very expensive ship (Kestrel?) to roam around the map
- moving capital ships from the shipyard to the place where they will be equipped is fast, moving in to battle is not
- transports doing trade can jump to the destination instantly, buy the goods at the price that is valid now (not in 15 min that would take to travel) and return the slow way, like NPC do
- the player can position ships for personal use, fully equipped, in key parts of the map and jump there to man it

Offtopic, someone came with an idea to build some corporations. I think that can be a great idea if the player is also competing, like you are a corporation and you have a position in Fortune 500 - it adds more purpose to the game.

Some more ideas in the same direction:
- put limits on capital ships that can be in one race sector at a time to something like 1, otherwise the race will become hostile. Yes, you are a friend, but you don't bring your 10 M2's in our core sector
- protect the race sectors against attacks on other corporation ships - make the races hostile against the player if you attack ships there and impose huge fines, like 3x-5x the value of the attacked ship, to redeem yourself. Make that an economic war, not a gun war

[Général Grievous]

Yes that map is confusing and only eight sectors. And I have to admit moving entire fleets is not really my thing. I do have a fleet but it sits idly in a sector. The best thing about the X series was it was different things to different players. That is the sand box idea. Now they seem to be making it appeal to a much smaller audience. If i want to play an RTS I would play CoH not X4. The guy who suggested that the most popular mod was for Strat forgets that those players that use mods are a small subset of all users and those who use Strat mods are a subset of mod users. X4 needs to appeal to a wide majority not a small minority.

The best way for a stellar map to be represented is to represent it like it should be:
- 1st level: A view of the galaxy, with systems joined by each other with lines. Travel made by jumpgates.

- 2nd level: A solar system with a star in the center and planets around it. each planet or stellar body, is a sector. Travel by large ships "booster" ou blue highways.
This representation in X Rebirth is a mess.

- 3rd level: A stellar body (planet, asteroids, etc...). Composed of different "zones" or "area" if you want.
This representation in X Rebirth is a mess too.

I do not undesrtand why Ego always tried to make it different. Now in rebirth it is soo messy. I think they should go back to the basics.

[Tomonor]

I do not undesrtand why Ego always tried to make it different. Now in rebirth it is soo messy. I think they should go back to the basics.

Mostly because they want to make it more complicated to navigate. It was the simplicity of the older X games that made it less challenging to navigate by design: North gate, South gate, West gate, East gate. Problem is, there are no such directions in space, which indeed made the games less authentic if you think about it. It also limited each sector to 4 jumpgates maximum, with the exception of the Hub in TC, ultimately resulting in "box" star systems.

Other reason might be related to the lore. The jumpgates in the X universe don't necessarily connect systems in a straight line, hell, they might even skip out many-many star systems along with their very own gates. That's how I interpret the X universe, a maze that's interconnected and if you think you have reached the end of the universe, you are suddenly back where you started from.

In the case of Rebirth, the idea was good, but the practical implementation along with the map's GUI made it so confusing that it had put down many veteran players from playing, including me, shamely. And I don't even want to mention that not only star systems and sectors, but even zones and other points of interests had fantasy names given to them.

That's why the new hexagonal universe (with the RTS-type GUI) seems a lot better to me. It leaves both Egosoft and the players with a lot of room for expansion while keeping the simplicity of the now complicated universe.

[gbjbaanb]

Guys, I have an idea for jump drives. Not ideal, but hear me out and tell what you think.

One of the biggest negative part of jump drives was described as instantly jumping a fleet anywhere and destroying key installations or the entire sector. The biggest positive is allowing the player to move between distant sectors without spending hours of real time just for that.

Well, let's keep the jump drives, but very limited to what they can do. For example, make the energy consumption so big, a capital ship cannot jump more than a sector or two with the full weapons complement. Let's say that jumping 5 sectors with a capital ship require the entire capacity of the ship in energy cells, so if you really want to jump the fleet, it will be useless as it is disarmed. What good this does?
- player can scout freely in some fast ship and jump as needed as long as he does not engage in fights. Scouting and fighting in the same time is not a good idea, you either fly a Blackbird or a F15 with loads of stuff, not both in the same time. So let the player use an unarmed ship with long jump range or a fast and very expensive ship (Kestrel?) to roam around the map
- moving capital ships from the shipyard to the place where they will be equipped is fast, moving in to battle is not
- transports doing trade can jump to the destination instantly, buy the goods at the price that is valid now (not in 15 min that would take to travel) and return the slow way, like NPC do
- the player can position ships for personal use, fully equipped, in key parts of the map and jump there to man it

Offtopic, someone came with an idea to build some corporations. I think that can be a great idea if the player is also competing, like you are a corporation and you have a position in Fortune 500 - it adds more purpose to the game.

Some more ideas in the same direction:
- put limits on capital ships that can be in one race sector at a time to something like 1, otherwise the race will become hostile. Yes, you are a friend, but you don't bring your 10 M2's in our core sector
- protect the race sectors against attacks on other corporation ships - make the races hostile against the player if you attack ships there and impose huge fines, like 3x-5x the value of the attacked ship, to redeem yourself. Make that an economic war, not a gun war

Sounds a lot like what's been proposed already - in that jump cost rises with mass. So a trade ship full of dirt costs too much to jump profitably, and jumping capital warships costs a lot that you won't want to do it much.

For small ships, the idea is to remove jump drives from them entirely (ie drive it too big to fit).

So you end up with the slow trade, the fast player ships (eg corvettes and frigates) and slow but potentially jump=capable capital warships. This doesn't sound so bad to me TBH, fixed most issues people have with jump while keeping this fast and fun for the player.

But even then, in X3, I had a lot of fun (as I assume many other players who spent thousands of hours in it) and it had jump drives. So the old X3 jump obviously isn't a problem.

[Pesanur]

Guys, I have an idea for jump drives. Not ideal, but hear me out and tell what you think.

One of the biggest negative part of jump drives was described as instantly jumping a fleet anywhere and destroying key installations or the entire sector. The biggest positive is allowing the player to move between distant sectors without spending hours of real time just for that.

Well, let's keep the jump drives, but very limited to what they can do. For example, make the energy consumption so big, a capital ship cannot jump more than a sector or two with the full weapons complement. Let's say that jumping 5 sectors with a capital ship require the entire capacity of the ship in energy cells, so if you really want to jump the fleet, it will be useless as it is disarmed. What good this does?
- player can scout freely in some fast ship and jump as needed as long as he does not engage in fights. Scouting and fighting in the same time is not a good idea, you either fly a Blackbird or a F15 with loads of stuff, not both in the same time. So let the player use an unarmed ship with long jump range or a fast and very expensive ship (Kestrel?) to roam around the map
- moving capital ships from the shipyard to the place where they will be equipped is fast, moving in to battle is not
- transports doing trade can jump to the destination instantly, buy the goods at the price that is valid now (not in 15 min that would take to travel) and return the slow way, like NPC do
- the player can position ships for personal use, fully equipped, in key parts of the map and jump there to man it

Offtopic, someone came with an idea to build some corporations. I think that can be a great idea if the player is also competing, like you are a corporation and you have a position in Fortune 500 - it adds more purpose to the game.

Some more ideas in the same direction:
- put limits on capital ships that can be in one race sector at a time to something like 1, otherwise the race will become hostile. Yes, you are a friend, but you don't bring your 10 M2's in our core sector
- protect the race sectors against attacks on other corporation ships - make the races hostile against the player if you attack ships there and impose huge fines, like 3x-5x the value of the attacked ship, to redeem yourself. Make that an economic war, not a gun war

I think that the Stellaris model fit with your proposal, the jump drive requires that huge amount of energy, that the use of it, overheat the ship generators, and until they cold down, the ship engines, weapons, and shields, runs only at half of their capabilities. And of course, the jump drive cannot be used again until the cold down time ends.

This make the jump drive ideal for escape from a dangerous situation, or to reach fast another system, but not to launch a fleet to the combat.

[Honved]

But even then, in X3, I had a lot of fun (as I assume many other players who spent thousands of hours in it) and it had jump drives. So the old X3 jump obviously isn't a problem.

Well to be honest, it WAS a problem. It put a sharp dividing line between missions WITH and WITHOUT that capability. If you didn't have the jumpdrive, most missions were impossible, or close to it. If you had jump capability, they were too often trivial. There was no simple and believable way to write missions which allowed for both possibilities: having or not having a jump drive.

It could be worked around by having missions available for ships with jump drives, and other missions for ships without one, but it would seem silly for them to hire ships without a jump drive when a ship with it could do the mission far faster. The ship owner would then have to be desperately poor or close to insane to NOT spend the credits for a jump drive in order to get the higher paying rapid delivery missions.

Then you have race fleets. If you can jump anywhere, why not jump your entire space navy into the opposing race's capital sector and lay waste to all of the stations and planets? If you or they split your forces to defend anything, the opponent could instantly concentrate all of their stuff to defeat it piecemeal; if you concentrate your forces, the opponent could do the same and there would be one epic battle on "day one" of the campaign and then "game over" for one of the factions. Taking away instantaneous jump capability means that you need to split up your forces to defend each of your assets with locally available forces, while the opponent can't take advantage f that to instantly concentrate superior forces on each sector, one at a time. If he pulls too many of his forces away to attack one sector, the opponent can potentially raid several of his in return before he can respond. The mutual dispersion of forces maintains a fairly even balance.

Jump drives can still be included, BUT they need to be considerably more restricted than in X3. That either means serious range limitations (one sector maximum for MOST ships), massive E-Cell useage chewing up most of the available cargo capacity and making it impractical without some serious financial incentive and E-cell resupplies prepared in advance, or other concerns (like the jump drive imposing "ripples" in hyperspace which need to die down for some amount of time before ANYONE can jump to or from that sector again).

In essence, it needs to be seriously nerfed without removing it completely.

[spankahontis]

I'm not a fan of highways, but I dislike galaxy-spanning jump drives much more. I feel the jump drive just makes trade too simple and it means that there is not really any border anywhere, or a front in the case of a conflict. I am really looking forward to having something designed from the ground up with no jump drives. Not so much to highways, though on the other hand, I was fine with them in Freelancer. I think I just disliked the awkwardness of using them in Rebirth and that they were aesthetically out of place.

Personally I'd prefer being able to explore an area of Space undiscovered and be able to build my own highway to that place for trade ships too small to fit a jumpdrive to reach my space to trade.

I just don't understand that part to which you are not allowed to build your own?

Be great to discover your own Sector and establish a civilisation there.
It would be your territory, your rules.

[gbjbaanb]

But even then, in X3, I had a lot of fun (as I assume many other players who spent thousands of hours in it) and it had jump drives. So the old X3 jump obviously isn't a problem.

Well to be honest, it WAS a problem. It put a sharp dividing line between missions WITH and WITHOUT that capability. If you didn't have the jumpdrive, most missions were impossible, or close to it. If you had jump capability, they were too often trivial. There was no simple and believable way to write missions which allowed for both possibilities: having or not having a jump drive.

The mission system was nonsense in X3, many missions were impossible even with a jumpdrive, because the time to fulfil them was stupidly small. I used ot ignore the "bring me 10,000 ecells in 2 minutes" from a station 3 minutes travel from the nearest gate! That's easily solved - make all mission times last a lot longer, then you could do them by normal travel (or jump if you had one, for quicker and easier for the player play).

[Cryonist]

But even then, in X3, I had a lot of fun (as I assume many other players who spent thousands of hours in it) and it had jump drives. So the old X3 jump obviously isn't a problem.

Well to be honest, it WAS a problem. It put a sharp dividing line between missions WITH and WITHOUT that capability.

This is a recurring statement and the basis for a lot of suggestions including the rest of your post but I would argue this is not a fact at all. It's just a opinion that some apparently seems to have accepted as fact, wrongly so it's just lazy thinking. Let's look at your argument a bit more in-depth.

There is a time limit on a few missions but how big of the game does this actually represent to a player? Having over a thousand hours in X3 myself it rarely had a impact on my play. Then you can consider if the time limit actually matters in difficulty for a mission? I remember this is rarely the case. It did make sure I read the mission carefully for those rare instances there actually was a challenge but this was almost never. I can complete almost all missions in X3 with a reasonable ship in almost any circumstance as long as I do 1 mission each time. After all those rare missions that had such a short timer I would just skip and pickup the next mission, how does this add difficulty?
If you consider it's actually just a relatively minor part of the complete gameplay of X3 and it didn't have any meaningful impact on difficulty it becomes even harder to argue huge impact changes for this relatively minor issue.

In my view the time limit is a arbitrary limit to not stack up missions forever and just complete them whenever you happen to be in the system and to perhaps make you consider reading the missions before accepting it. Also it makes sense you can't keep a taxi person happy in your cargo bay the entire game without consequence. It also adds a dimension of strategy where some missions could be combined within their time limit for better profit per effort. This are additions of meaningful gameplay which you are confusing with difficulty. This addition is not lost when you add the jumpdrive either.

If we are done confusing travel time with difficulty we can talk about utility of the jumpdrive. The jumpdrive enhanced the player experience greatly, both in managing their assets and their own ship. I remember the tedium getting my first jump drive in a new game, travelling 20+ systems to get where I needed to be on autopilot and seta was not fun gameplay and I was glad to do this only once per game. I can interact with the entire universe instead of just the area I can see in my immediate vicinity which makes the universe feel MUCH BIGGER and not smaller as some people stubbornly think. The X universe feels much smaller without a jumpdrive because it takes away my possibility to interact with 90% of the universe. I can only interact with what's close by and whats far away might as well not exist. I can change locations by travelling far but this just changes which 10 percent and keeps 90% out of reach. This might be a hard argument to grasp for some, but it hugely adds to my flexibility of participating in the x-universe and therefore have more fun.

And the best argument I can make is that I enjoyed many hours in X3 with the Jumpdrivie and have never thought to consider it as a problem instead of a solution to many problems that would exist without it.

I do not undesrtand why Ego always tried to make it different. Now in rebirth it is soo messy. I think they should go back to the basics.

Mostly because they want to make it more complicated to navigate. It was the simplicity of the older X games that made it less challenging to navigate by design: North gate, South gate, West gate, East gate. Problem is, there are no such directions in space, which indeed made the games less authentic if you think about it. It also limited each sector to 4 jumpgates maximum, with the exception of the Hub in TC, ultimately resulting in "box" star systems.

This is a bit of a interesting argument when reading it. A direction is whatever collective humanity decides it is. We all decided North pole is North on earth and therefore it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with defining gates by their relative direction to each other as long as everybody does it the same way. It also doesn't limit anything to 4, ever hear of NE direction? That already doubles the amount of possibilities and there's much more ways of doing so. The only reason it's limited to 4 is because Egosoft decided 4 per system was enough for their game and nothing else.

The huge diffference of the old X3 map system with Rebirth is that it made sense. The map did not depict the real universe in any manner, nor does it need to. A system shown to be north of another system might actually be on the other side of the universe in whatever direction but that doesn't matter. All that matters is how the gates eventually connect them and depicting this clearly and X3 did this without flaw. Egosoft should take 2 steps back, look at what they did right with X3 and then throw away the Rebirth garbage. I hope they do.

[Walton Simons]

Fully agree with those that wants the jumpdrive. It was extremely and sadistically(did I mentioned sadistically? yeah goddamn sadistic) boring to gather all the crap for the jumpdrive in XR which for me it's something necessary.

Sometimes I don't have the time luxury to just travel systems and need to use the jumpdrive to get A to B.
Piggy back on one of my capitals it's also not much faster together with their AI boosting& pathfinding.

It's better to have it in X4 than to please only one crowd of people. Simply don't use it if you don't want to but let others having the option.

I actually use both options in XR, when I have no time I use it, when I can play for a few hours I actually enjoy traveling system by system. Or just parking the Skunk into one of my Leptons and rp-ing I'm on a freight run and just enjoying the sights.

[Falcrack]

I think that the jumpdrive should be in, and gates should be much more rare. So you could use a jumpdrive to quickly jump to the entrance of a solar system, but you would still have a long ways still to travel because of the large size of the solar systems. The game universe should consist of fewer solar systems, but more sectors in each solar system.

If a race owned an entire solar system, and wanted to keep out intruders, it could guard the jump gate(s). Gates for a system would be clustered together, for fewer point to defend.

So to summarize how I would want it to work:

* Jumpdrives to quickly jump to gate entrances
* Highways to very quickly travel between well established points in a system
* Boost drives to quickly (though not as quickly as highways) get from one point to another, more out-of-the-way points

[SirNukes]

Personally, I think they should just implement proper fast travel. It would be like turning on autopilot with Seta, except would swap out to a map screen and model the player's region with the reduced precision used for distant regions.

X3 could already run at >30x speed when Seta was uncapped if parked in a quiet sector. A proper multithreaded simulation, dropping detailed player sector simulation, maybe dropping general precision (X3 was once per minute when OOS, but could go lower with good combat abstraction), and writing scripts with reduced precision in mind, and I could see the game reaching over a 1000x speedup in fast travel mode. Then you don't need to worry about setting breaking jump drives to compress an hour long trip into 4 seconds.

[DavidGW]

Some good arguments on both sides of the issue here!

I'm happy to wait to see how X4 plays before deciding if I'm disappointed there's no jump drive. The ~2 km/s travel drive looks fun.

I like the XR map, I know it's hard to read and find things, but it feels more realistic. Some better map navigation and some search ability (unless it's already there? Can't remember!) would be great. I'm looking forward to seeing how the X4 map works in the complete game.

One extra pro-jumpdrive point I'd like to add (if it hasn't already been mentioned) is that there could always be time critical trade missions added which specifically outlaw the use of a jump drive, such as transporting "unstable isotopes" or "fragile medical supplies". Otherwise, I don't see the problem with making all normal trade missions quite lax with the time allowed. I think the only real use for the time limit is to stop missions being completed well after the critical shortage or surplus had spawned them, and stocks have already naturally returned to normal.

Personally, I would not be surprised if the jump drive gets added in an update, like the XR Skunk's JD. I can't imagine that porting jump drive mechanics from XR to X4 would be overly difficult. I could be wrong though.

[Graaf]

Mostly because they want to make it more complicated to navigate. It was the simplicity of the older X games that made it less challenging to navigate by design: North gate, South gate, West gate, East gate. Problem is, there are no such directions in space, which indeed made the games less authentic if you think about it. It also limited each sector to 4 jumpgates maximum, with the exception of the Hub in TC, ultimately resulting in "box" star systems.

If they where true boxes, we would have had up/down gates too. After all, a cube has 6 sides.

Well to be honest, it WAS a problem. It put a sharp dividing line between missions WITH and WITHOUT that capability. If you didn't have the jumpdrive, most missions were impossible, or close to it. If you had jump capability, they were too often trivial. There was no simple and believable way to write missions which allowed for both possibilities: having or not having a jump drive.

If missions are close to impossible without the jumpdrive, it means the are possible. And tbh most were easily done without a jumpdrive. It's just the harder missions that are impossible without them. Not to mention some missions actually designed to use the jumpdrive like a Tour of a Lifetime or personnel transports with 7 different pickup and drop-off locations.

The mission system was nonsense in X3, many missions were impossible even with a jumpdrive, because the time to fulfil them was stupidly small. I used ot ignore the "bring me 10,000 ecells in 2 minutes" from a station 3 minutes travel from the nearest gate! That's easily solved - make all mission times last a lot longer, then you could do them by normal travel (or jump if you had one, for quicker and easier for the player play).

Even with a longer mission time I would prefer to not take these missions.

... from a station 3 minutes travel from the nearest gate!

And in transporter terms, using a stock Mercury with full engine tunings, that is "just" 18km without a Docking Computer. And you can haul at most 4000 E-cells/trip (provided you have no shields/weapons).

If a race owned an entire solar system, and wanted to keep out intruders, it could guard the jump gate(s). Gates for a system would be clustered together, for fewer point to defend.

You mean, like the old X3 setup, maybe even closer together?

[AdrianB1]

The best way for a stellar map to be represented is to represent it like it should be:
- 1st level: A view of the galaxy, with systems joined by each other with lines. Travel made by jumpgates.

- 2nd level: A solar system with a star in the center and planets around it. each planet or stellar body, is a sector. Travel by large ships "booster" ou blue highways.
This representation in X Rebirth is a mess.

- 3rd level: A stellar body (planet, asteroids, etc...). Composed of different "zones" or "area" if you want.

Good idea. I would use accelerators (like in Terran space in X3:AP) for intra-system travel instead of highways. Maybe small ones for 3rd level, but except for Aldrin I don't see the need. Aldrin was a bad exception in any way possible, it was killing performance and a bit unrealistic as the huge mass creates gravitational forces that were totally ignored (hard to model).

About the gate and accelerator placement: the X3 layout of having the gates at the edges of the sector was helping, otherwise there is a strong impression of emptyness for the space beyond the gates. Yes, space is big and empty, but empty sectors seem to be lifeless, reduces immersion. So, my proposal:
- gates in the middle relatively close to each other in one plane (ex: N-S-E-W). It will allow fast travel across the universe and limit system to system traffic to the gate zone. No stations in that area!!!
- accelerators at the edges of the sector, same or a bit farther away than X3 gates, in the same plane or perpendicular to the gates
- also make the sectors more 3D in layout, they were mostly in the gate plane and up-down were rarely utilized, even if in space all directions have equal value
- as modern computers have much better performance, moderately more populated sectors - both stations and ships - without making them crowded; nobody has a good reason to go crowded in space, it's so much emptyness there. Maybe 15 to 25 stations per sector in core sectors and 10-15 in others? Meaningful stations, not random ones created by build missions that broke the universe in time

[AdrianB1]

Sounds a lot like what's been proposed already - in that jump cost rises with mass. So a trade ship full of dirt costs too much to jump profitably, and jumping capital warships costs a lot that you won't want to do it much.

It is not about the financial cost of jumping a capital ship, it is about limiting it. The limitation should be the cargo capacity - you have space either for weapons or for cells, not both. This allows to redeploy a fleet without navigating sector by sector, but you need to plan your rearming carefully. Btw, weapon refitting should take a few minutes or should be done only in docks (shipyards/space dock/player HQ), no instant switching.

[DavidGW]

Personally, I think highways should not be scrapped, just improved. They help bridge systems with quick, cinematic travel, while still allowing the player to drop out at any point along the highway. I don't think that should be given up.

If it were up to me, I'd make highways all straight, and have all transiting ships travel at the same speed through them. Transit speed through a highway would also be much faster, while still keeping the ability to drop out at any time through strafing and touching the side.

That would mean no more mini game, and less time spent in the highway, while still keeping the main reasons for their use.

Also, they should be much prettier I'd use some of that lovely refractive index effect and maybe a volumetric glow.


Superhighways same thing, straight, faster, consistent speed, no mini game. Can't break out of them.

[A5PECT]

X Rebirth changed highway travel from the 3x3 grid with "drafting" to full control over strafing and speed a long time ago. The devs have stated that in X4 highways are more linear with very gradual curves, and less prominent throughout the universe map thanks to boosting, travel drives, and SETA. Watch the X4 footage shown so far and note that none of the highways shown have extreme curves or loops in them.

I do agree on all of your points about keeping them in the game and improving and refining them.

[DavidGW]

X Rebirth changed highway travel from the 3x3 grid with "drafting" to full control over strafing and speed a long time ago.

I know, it's better now, but you still have to dodge big and really slow freighters plus other clustered small ships. I still think it's clearly a mini game, just a different type to the original one. I still find it annoying trying to avoid other ships, especially when you think you're going to miss them but you hit anyway, and end up spinning out, or start bouncing between ships and the tube wall.

The devs have stated that in X4 highways are more linear with very gradual curves, and less prominent throughout the universe map thanks to boosting, travel drives, and SETA. Watch the X4 footage shown so far and note that none of the highways shown have extreme curves or loops in them.

Yeah, I'm having another look at the 3rd X4 stream now, where we can see a highway. It does have a refractive effect, which is nice. I still hate the tube graphic though, and I think it would be much better if it was much more subtle.

Also, we don't yet know how fast ships are going to move through the highway, or what the gameplay inside will be like.

I think my main point is that highways and superhighways would be improved if they were more like an animated, cinematic and quick trans-orbital accelerator kind of deal, rather than the slow and attention intensive travel mode they are in XR.