Time changes things...
by the X-TL Dev Team - TrixX, Jack08 and Litcube
Website to report bugs/ask questions etc:
[ external image ]
NOTE - Not compatible with the Mac version of X3 Albion Prelude
Synopsis:
The goal of X-Timelines is to create a living universe where every action taken by the player and the AI has an impact on the game world in both positive and negative ways. Were are attempting to accomplish this by making every ware in the game seed from the economy and not spawned from thin air.
We are a dedicated team, this is more then just a mod to us - its also a proof of concept. We have put so much effort into making this mod feel fresh and new, to the point that each game will literally develop organically. Hopefully everyone will get as much enjoyment out of it as we have had making it.
[ external image ]
Features Coming in R1:
- Murdered God.
- Unemployment at an all time high! ( Disabled Jobs )
- Brand new Military based economy
- A new universe to support the requirements of the new economy.
- New wares and ship upgrades
- Drone & Refinery Based mining ( Concept from Eve Online )
- A Brand new class system consisting of 24 non-numerical classes
- 81 New Weapons + Military and Advanced Variants for most of them! (Yes, that's right, ~200+ Weapons!)
- Rebalanced Shields + Military and Advanced Variants giving a total of 18.
- An Unknown Amount of new missiles (This is still in development )
- A Completely new AI written from the ground up to be far more intelligent then before.
- A Completely new Script Engine based Mission system, the MD has been disabled - this new system allows for rapid development of highly dynamic missions based on in game events.
- A New UI system with LUA support for advanced menus, including the new mission menu
- A New modern game style "Action" hot-key for those common events like claiming a ship, or picking up cargo, etc. Which changes function depending on your current target.
- A brand new way of ordering ships from shipyards, allow for ordering of ships that are fitted by the shipyards own traders.
- Faster ship speeds, lets face it who likes 60m/s fighters? But with fast speeds comes a need to fix the autopilot issues, so...
- Built in Bounce 2.0: Its more reliable, and it runs on AI ships. Without the need for a wall file!
- A New Bounty System.
- Plus other things that will make this list to long...
We have been designing this new economy for the better part of the last year and a half, here is an overview of how it will function (the design hasn't changed much from the original concept we drew up almost 2 years ago now).
Mining drones extract 3 new types of ore from asteroids which is then transported to the refinery and refined into 6 new minerals & elements. These minerals & elements are common to everyone in the universe. The minerals and elements go on to become components, which then become weapons, shields and missiles, or ship components, which are then transported to a shipyard in order to construct ships. There are two additional ore types which serve a special purpose, but that is out of the scope of this description.
Features Coming in R1+
Features that may not make it into R1, but will be patched in ASAP after
- Weapon Retrofitting: Military. Retrofit your weapons to military grade hardware, if you can find the components you need.
- Extension of the ship ordering feature to allow for ordering of entire fleets
- Ship Weapon System Retrofit: Allows you to retrofit a ships weapon systems from Race to Race (Argon to Paranid, for example)
- A Unique New Bounty System, based on a ships actions in the universe, including trading as well as military actions.
- A new UI, giving a cleaner and smoother view of all menu's and icons ingame.
Features Coming in R1++
Features that will likely not make it into R1 or R1+ and will be pushed back to R2
- Area Based Passive Missions
Area based missions don't need to be accepted, you simply need to be in the right place to participate in them, which adds to the exploration element of the game. You will know when a mission is nearby due to a new overlay on the left side of the screen.- "Skirmish"
A Skirmish mission can occur when two enemy forces are in an engagement that is not driven by chaos, these missions appear from time to time, and usually appear at border sector as hostile races attempt to sabotage another races trade infrastructure. - "Escort"
A TL or Trader is about to enter space that has had high hostile activity reported by racial scouts, This create a passive escort mission which you can join in just by following the trader or TL - "SOS"
A Trader or TL has fallen under attack, but was not part of an escort mission, and has requested assistance. Bounty hunters, police, and privateers (such as yourself) will all respond.
- "Skirmish"
- Research & Development Stations to allow reverse engineering of advanced technology
- Deep Space Exploration:
This is not in any way tied to the UFJD, Deep space exploration sites actually reside in known space, and can be very dangerous for any who get too near. But they hold surprises and prizes for those bold enough to seek them. Beware, They will be guarded. - Weapon Retrofit: Advanced
- Ship Retrofit: Advanced/Enhanced/Prototype
- Shield Retrofit: Advanced
- Deep Space Exploration:
- Privateers & Bounty Hunters: They accept the same missions you do, and grow over time. They have independent relations and you can seriously annoy them if your not careful.
- Racial R&D: They compete for Deep space resources in order to build advanced technology for there own corporate fleets (Nothing is allowed to exist in XTL that does not have a purpose for both the player and the AI)
Credits:
Thanks to:
- Jack08 for his amazing coding skills and urge to push the team forward
- Litcube for his excellent scripts, backgrounds and special effects and his personal mod as a base for X-Timelines
- sms_747 for her stunning universe created from some badly drawn pics and random ideas
- shuulo for supplying tons of help, a load of starting plots and being one of the best testers a mod team could ever ask for!
- Sorenson for opening my eyes to fast gameplay with his Naval Shuffle Mod
- Blueshade_Zero for helping me realise the ideas of this mod
- urbanfreak for some great ideas and helping fix my attempts at modelling!
- Checkertwo, Blueboar & Shaddie for obvious reasons...
- Cadius/Axeface/Killerog/Killjaeden/+any others who contributed models to this game (this list will get long...)