Post
by Scoob » Wed, 18. Apr 18, 14:06
Rebirth was, unfortunately, a bit of a disaster at launch - it really didn't work properly and felt very very empty feature-wise. I was encouraged by the move to a new engine (proper multi-threading support, x64 - eventually) and I did like the capital ship designs with multiple hardpoints etc. However, ES never delivered on the promised customisation options. We never got a "fit this type of turret or that type of turret" No, we got "fit a turret or do not" that's not really customisation.
However, ES did give us DLC and a load more ships, so while customisation was out, there was more variety. Modders of course gave us a lot more stuff, both ships and features such as Player Owned Shipyards - which should have been a vanilla option I feel.
One of the things that does concern me though is this new Engine. Sure it multi-threads now and, from my own observations the CPU load is fairly balanced over all threads. This is good. However, sadly, the engine does appear fundamentally broken when it's pushed. What do I mean by this? Well, there are some ambitious mods out there that add more ships, more ships in-game at any point, additional Zones, Sectors and Systems as well as other features. With these new features being added by modding, I'd expect to see resource usage increase as the Engine is pushed harder. The problem is, every single game I've played (even vanilla, to a lesser degree) has seen performance utterly tank over time. This is NOT CPU/GPU resource limit, rather an engine problem where it simply cannot utilise the resources available to it.
Basically, over time performance tanks but so does resource utilisation. This is disturbing as it shows that the engine simply cannot scale when more is asked of it, despite it being multi-threaded and there being ample system resources. It's this fundamental engine limitation that really worries me. When I consider how far modders pushed the old Engine in X3 AP & TC for example, that old engine was being pushed much harder, yet it was largely single threaded, with only the DX workload getting it's own thread.
Now, I'm looking forward to X4, a lot, but my on-going concern is how is adding a huge portion of the older X games feature set - so, lots of flyable ships etc. - going to impact this engine, especially over the long, potentially modded, play-throughs many of us will likely have?
I'm reassured how Bernd has owned the mistakes made with Rebirth, plus he and the team are genuine fans of the genre and want to do the best job possible. I've not doubt there. However, I do think it's critical that they take advantage of the community for extended closed beta testing prior to release, to hopefully iron out as many launch-day wrinkles as possible, and to also gauge performance on as great a variety of hardware as possible.
Note: I'm aware ES have continued to update Rebirth as well as older titles, this is great and shows their commitment to their games. That said though, none of the updates appear to have fixed the Engine starting to choke late-game. If my CPU was being pushed in a mature game, I'd accept that as a signal to upgrade. That's fair, However, invariably my resource utilisation is far lower come my late-game stage accompanied by stutter, low-fps and unresponsive controls.
My hope is that ES can nail the resource utilisation with this Engine, giving it both longevity and scalability as more cores/threads become the norm, as well as giving modders the capability to push things even further.
Anyway, I rambled a bit as usual. I'm looking forward to the next update / live stream from ES and I've LOVE IT if the devs took some time to talk about performance. I know it's very early days and traditionally optimisation / performance tweaks would be more a priority once the game is feature-complete. However, considering these games are never feature-complete when you consider future updates, DLC and of course the modding community. Well, keeping an eye on performance from the start - especially as this is an established engine - is important. The engines odd issue with actually using the resources it has available makes this more critical. If my fancy 8 Core CPU is performing no better than my old, reliable 4 Core CPU from seven years ago - no GPU bottleneck FYI - then something isn't quite right.
Final thought: Modding, at least for me, has been such a huge part of the X Game experience that ensuring that the game still runs well - fully utilising available resources - is very important to me.
Scoob.
From the videos I've seen so far from Ego, I'm excited for sure! The ship docking looks fantastic, the strategic UI looks fantastic, station building looks fantastic. Definitely a lot of steps in the right direction, in my view.
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