xbtf suggestions and bugs

General discussions about the games by Egosoft including X-BTF, XT, X², X³: Reunion, X³: Terran Conflict and X³: Albion Prelude.

Moderator: Moderators for English X Forum

Post Reply
Cursed Ghost
Posts: 637
Joined: Sat, 2. Oct 04, 22:44
x3tc

xbtf suggestions and bugs

Post by Cursed Ghost » Tue, 9. Nov 21, 22:27

I know that X Beyond the Frontier is an old game now and that it is unlikely for it to get any further updates however should you decide to do any further patches for X Beyond the Frontier I have a few suggestions.

Transferring credits
In X Beyond the Frontier when you are transferring credits to or from your bank account to or from a factory bank account the amount that is transferred seem to be relative to what you actually have in the account so for example say I have 1,000,000 credits in my account when I try to transfer credits to one of my stations the smallest amount the game will allow me to transfer is 50,000 credits this is in spite of the fact that a station like a wheat farm doesn’t actually need that amount to operate 10,000 to 20,000 is quite sufficient now in later games this isn’t a problem because you can specify exactly the amount you want to transfer in X Beyond the Frontier you can’t therefore I’d like to see this fixed and I’d like to see the credits transfer system work the way it does in later games where I can specify exactly the amount I want to transfer by simply tapping in the amount on the number pad and then hitting enter.

Transferring credits remotely
In later games you where able to transfer credits to and from your factories remotely, however this enhancement was never back ported to X Beyond the Frontier for what ever reason so I’d like to see this enhancement added, as it would save so much unnecessary running back and forth

SETA
In X Beyond the Frontier when you activate SETA it sets your engines to full power, which is incredibly annoying and there are any number of occasions I have wished I could simply SETA in place like you can in later games therefore I’d like to see this adjusted so that SETA no longer meddles with your engine power upon activation.

Match speed with target
In later games you could tap X to match speed with your target, and this is an ability that I really miss so I’d like to see this enhancement added perhaps this is something that could be added to the Motion Analysis Relay System, it would also be helpful if to the Motion Analysis Relay System would work on more than just ships like it does in later games.

Recoil
In X Beyond the Frontier when you fire your guns the recoil knocks off your aim which make it incredibly hard to hit anything especially in light of the fact that there is no auto aim assistance in X Beyond the Frontier and the more powerful the gun you use the worse the recoil gets so much so that when I open up the pilot information screen my hit rate with my guns is less that 30% therefore I have 2 possible suggestions for dealing with this first remove the recoil completely or have the recoil reduced gradually as you apply rudder upgrades in the same way that applying engine upgrade gradually reduces the shaking when using the turbo booster.

Shaking when getting shot
In a similar vain to problems caused by your guns recoil shaking the ship and throwing off your aim having the ship shake when getting shot makes it completely impossible to hit anything and is incredibly irritating and the only thing you can do in that circumstance is run because trying to fight is a completely futile waste of time, therefore I’d either like to see the Shaking when getting shot removed completely or have the shaking when shot reduce gradually as you apply rudder upgrades in the same way that applying engine upgrades gradually reduces the shaking when using the turbo booster.

Acceleration and Deceleration
Deceleration in X Beyond the Frontier is simply to slow and I’d like to see it adjusted because such slow deceleration frequently leads to you crashing into things particularly when trying to dock if you don’t have a docking computer or when fighting this is particularly evident when you are fighting the Xenon given there propensity to turn around and fly right at you when you attack them, so much so that I actually kill more Xenon fighters by crashing into them that I do by shooting them because the AI is terrible and the auto pilot provided by the Motion Analysis Relay System is just as bad, therefore it would be helpful if the engine upgrades not only increased your top speed but also upgraded the rate at which your ship accelerates and decelerates because acceleration and deceleration in X Beyond the Frontier is far to slow.

Cargo bay, engine and rudder upgrades
Currently in order to upgrade your cargo bay from 25 cargo units to 1000 cargo units you have to apply the cargo bay upgrade 195 times since each upgrade only increases your cargo bay by 5 cargo units and the total cost for doing so is in excess of 63,000,000 credits this is completely ridicules so much so that its actually not worth bothering with at all because you will never make that amount of credits from trading especially in light of the fact that you can make credits much faster and with much less effort by simply buying factories.

Therefore I’d like to see the number of steps to go from 25 cargo units to 1000 cargo units reduced to something a bit more reasonable like 39 steps.

How do I get 39 steps easy 25 x 40 = 1000

So if it take 40 steps to go from 0 to 1000 and you already start with a cargo bay of 25 units then you get 39 steps with each upgrade expending your cargo hold by an additional 25 cargo units

I’d then adjust the cost accordingly so that the total cost of all 39 upgrade comes to around a third as much as it does right now taking the total cost to around 20,000,000 credits which is slightly less that what it costs for 30 engine upgrades or 30 rudder upgrades.

I’d also slightly reduce the cost for 30 engine upgrades and 30 rudder upgrades because around 60,000,000 credits to fully upgrade both is a bit excessive and it should only cost around 60,000,000 credits to fully upgrade your engines, rudder and cargo bay meaning that each should cost around 20,000,000 credits

AI Behaviour
As I already mentioned the AI in X Beyond the Frontier is terrible now given the really basic functionality of the engine that runs X Beyond the Frontier I’m not really sure if its possible to do anything about this but if it is then improved AI behaviour would be good, even if you could just improve the most annoying aspects of the AI which results in AI ships crashing into you or you crashing in to AI ships when using the Motion Analysis Relay System that would at the very least be a step in the right direction.

HD Update
While back in the day when X Beyond the Frontier was first released it really wasn’t possible to do better quality graphics and textures due to the fact that computers where significantly less powerful and had significantly smaller hard drives then they do to day I’m wondering if it would be at all possible to do a HD texture patch and give X Beyond the Frontier a 21st centaury face life because there are a lot of textures that are really blocky and pixelated, a good example of this the Navigation map because you’ve used jpegs for this and because the images are being stretched the pixelatation is really evident especially if you where to do a side to side comparison of the current nav map and one that is done using a lossless format like png

https://i.ibb.co/5TR1ckT/untitled.png

As you can see my version is so much cleaner and sharper then the default version and while I’m on the subject of graphics and textures you can see the seams on the background textures so that could do with being addressed as well.

Minor Bug and Glitches
While for the most part X Beyond the Frontier is a stable game there are a bunch of minor issues that where never addressed

For example on the player information screen the line length is a bit to short which causes the split title to wrap to a new line causing the end of the line to overlap the line below causing a small graphical glitch as you can see in the screen shot

Image

Similarly when you tap the H key there is a small graphical glitch here as well

Image

As you can see for what ever reason the spacing is missing.

I’m not sure if the following are intentional or just a bugs but there are a few factories in game that are missing resources

Only 5 of the 10 wheat farms that exist require BoGas, Only 15 of the 17 Soyerys that exist require Nostrop Oil and Stott Spices, the Teladi Alpha P.A.C. Laser Forge requires Crystals instead of Quantum Tubes like the rest of the Alpha P.A.C. Laser Forges, Only 16 of the 17 Chelt Space Aquariums that exist require Soja Husk, Nostrop Oil, Spaceflies, Teladianium there is 1 in Family Zein that only requires energy.

Plot Issues
It’s possible to make the plot impossible to complete by destroying the Xenon Power Stations before the quest flag is set because the game does not run a check to see if the power stations have already been destroyed, therefore this should be fixed and the game should run a check to see if the Power Stations have already been destroyed and if so then the game should mark that quest as completed and therefore allow the player to proceed to the final mission the fight against the Xenon Super Carrier, the same also applies to the final mission to take out the Xenon Super Carrier if you take this out before the quest flag is set then the plot becomes impossibly to complete and therefore this should be fixed and the game should check to see if the Xenon Super Carrier has already been destroyed and if so mark the quest complete and therefore allow the player to get the final reward.

Also for some reason on the mission to destroy the Power Stations the other races capital ships are only equipped with 25mw of shielding clearly this is a bug and they should in fact be equipped with two 125mw of shields with only 25mw of shields they are sitting ducks for the Xenon fighters, the same issue also occurs on the final mission for what ever reason the destroys of the other races are equipped with only 25mw of shielding when they should have two 125mw shields, although curiously the carrier ships of the other races are correctly shielded.

In a similar vain when you buy fighters to protect your factories they are also under shielded for some reason m3 fights like the elite only come equipped with 25mw of shields when they should be equipped with 50mw of shields not sure about the smaller fighters but I’d be willing to bet they are probably under shielded as well.

While I don’t imagine that you would be willing to address the AI and the graphics / textures as that would probably require a fair amount of work the other stuff should be sufficiently minor that it wouldn’t take to much time and effort to address them.
Last edited by Terre on Wed, 10. Nov 21, 07:50, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Images posted directly to the forums should not be greater than 640x480 or 100kb, oversize image now linked

Post Reply

Return to “X Trilogy Universe”