[MOD] [TC/AP] X3 Rebalance Mod (XRM) - Total conversion - v1.30d (02.12.13)

[Teleth]

2) With regards to the 'war', why does the Terran fleet never seem to progress further than Circle of Hope even when the sector has literally been cleared of all Argon stations and fleets?

They make it right into omicron for me.

[Gungy]

Ok got decent frame rates going now, but I want better. So how do I remove fog?

Also Paul please explain one thing for me. The scripts you have placed into this mod , can they be modified? And if they can how ? I would really like to play, and I'm aiming to sacrifice a bit of action for it. As I'm assuming ships are spawning and jumping through gates into combat in systems I can't even see. With that in mind whether its right or wrong I believe changing the scripts to run less often. Will have only a positive affect on my system performance.

It's all I can think of for the difference in performance between vanilla and XRM is the war script etc. I may be very wrong but I'm happy to give it a try. Just point and I'll do the leg work. I'm sorry but I really want to play this mod.

[Requiemfang]

2) With regards to the 'war', why does the Terran fleet never seem to progress further than Circle of Hope even when the sector has literally been cleared of all Argon stations and fleets?

think you mean Circle of Labour

[Gishank]

Yeah, I did. lol... But still, my biggest concern is with the fact that I can't seem to dock in 99% of stations.

[swatti]

QUESTION:

The 2 FFR fixes, what is the difference between them and can i install one over the other to replace the previous?

Cant remember the one im running atm, but the terran fleet seems to go quite far before actually finding any resistance.

[Scoob]

Hi,

Just to prove how CPU-bound things are - I get the same overall FPS in battles if I have NO AA as I do if I have 8xAA in-game enhanced to 32xAA with 8x Super Sample at the driver level. System is a 2500k @ 4.5 with a pair of GTX 570's and 8gb 1600mhz ram - all on Win 7 64 Ultimate.

This machine is a pure gamer, so no codecs or other stuff that my Gateway and Media boxes have.

When I first started my current XRM game (1.18 now 1.19e) I started the "Bankrupt Assassin" start away from the war areas and FPS was silky smooth everywhere. As I progressedd and eventually entered the war zone I started seeing the FPS drops during large battles.

If I'm in a capital shipsand FPS drops to say mid-20's it's fine, as my turrets are doing the work. However it means jumping into a fighter or M6 isn't fun.

I really do consider this an engine issue as my GPU's are near idle in this situation at <10% load and my CPU, while certainly busy, is generally no more than 80% on one core. Ok, there may be spike to higher than this that the tool I'm using smooths out, but still. Also I find the game rapidly goes to over 3gb used after I've traversed a few sectors but I don't get the stutter as I near 4gb usage prior to the memory purge I did in TC.

To be clear, the ONLY time I see my FPS drop below 60 is when there's a large fleet battle going on. I'd suggest the engine, despite Pauls excellent performance enhancements, still really cannot cope with epic battles.

Note: friends of mine with equally spec'd gaming PCs experience the same low FPS during big battles.

Cheers,

Scoob.

[Chull]

To all these people with issues and high end PCs: the FPS drop you're seeing is not X3:AP or XRM, I have everything max 16x AA 8x AF multi monitors on a stock-clock i5 with 8gb ram and a single 560ti. I can fly fighters through epic fleet battles no slowdowns.

Only thing that does slow down FPS is the last 20 feet when docking in an internal docking port of a station, weird.

Anyway if I have silky smooth performance, you should too on your higher spec rigs, just look elsewhere other than the stock game or XRM on it's own.

[Gungy]

Your response is exactly why I want to change the scripts in the mod to be a less active. I'm prepared to see a drop in the action in return for an increase in performance.

There is another mod in the list above this one (script and mod thread, can't. Check because I'm on my phone.) That has 3 versions. Normal, 2.3ghz and low end pc. And from what I can gather the only immediate difference is how active the scripts are.

Now I'm not asking for Paul to do this himself, but given a pointer I'll quite happily attempt it for myself and report my findings here. Shit if it works. I'd even consider offering to make a performance patch with permission from Paul of course. And continue to do so. So he can just concentrate on the mod he wants.

I'll use one statement to argue for my option. A lot of pc's today are 8gb ram I5+ beasts, but steams proves the vast majority are still 4gb mid range CPU,s with high gpu's because that's what majority of games require. It's seems X3 is one of the exceptions.

[paulwheeler]

The XRM is not scripted.

Its all done through jobs. Open the XRM jobs file in the X3editor2 and you can play with the numbers. You can reduce the size of the Terran fleet, reduce the RRF ships etc. The file is all fairly well commented so it should be easy to find what you're after. Just dont reduce trader numbers. It will have little effect on performance, but may break the economy.

Top of the list - you could swap out all of Expnobody's M2+ and M1+s for standard ships. They are always the flagships and commandships.

Unfortunately X3 is not like other games. It is CPU and RAM bound - the GPU has little to do.

[paulwheeler]

QUESTION:

The 2 FFR fixes, what is the difference between them and can i install one over the other to replace the previous?

Cant remember the one im running atm, but the terran fleet seems to go quite far before actually finding any resistance.

Read the readme included with part 2.

You can swap between them at any time.

[paulwheeler]

Yeah, I did. lol... But still, my biggest concern is with the fact that I can't seem to dock in 99% of stations.

Try starting a new game and see if it happens again. The XRM certainly doesn't mess with anything like that.

[paulwheeler]

ah binding a key worked.

But its still not what im talking about. ok basically, in X3TC both RFF and Improved races 2.0, have options like. showing the war, invading sectors. etc

And like, if your friends with lets argon, and they attack the paranids often, that effects your friendship with them. you really choose your side and they choose you

and you had menu options to see that effect

and the ships had renames like "response fleet" Tyr. etc, i dont see any of that so im not sure its working

The AP RRF is not the full TC script. It is very cut down - there's nothing I can do about that - blame Egosoft.

The full RRF is not compatible with AP so there is nothing you can do.

However, I have made the XRM:AP RRF ships subtle. They are just called "military". If you see a "military" ship jump into a sector and start attacking then its likely your RRF is working just fine.

Each race has one RRF command ship, four M2s, about seven M7s and twelve M6s.

[Gungy]

QUESTION:

The 2 FFR fixes, what is the difference between them and can i install one over the other to replace the previous?

Cant remember the one im running atm, but the terran fleet seems to go quite far before actually finding any resistance.

Read the readme included with part 2.

You can swap between them at any time.

Sweet, thank you. I'll give it a look when I get home and see if I can improve performance wihout losing the effect of the overall mod.

Also I'm sorry if I'm coming across as pain in the ass but I just want to play this so bad. Which you can only take as a compliment , this prettty much leaves oher mods lacking.

[paulwheeler]

One thing I would recommend...

Turn off your FPS counters!

Its easy to become obsessed with the numbers. They can be pretty meaningless depending on how frequently it is refreshed and running monitors in the background affects performance too!

The question you should ask yourself is - does the game feel smooth? Don't be too hung up on the number - remember the human eye can't detect much difference between 30 and 60 fps, movies and TV are generally 24-26fps. Without actually looking at the numbers, you'd probably find even 20fps wouldn't bother you too much if it was only every now and again.

[EmperorJon]

It's important to note that if you're new to X, which your forum account may suggest, XRM is significantly harder. It's costing me about 5 million credits to set up an automated trader here, as opposed to less than 1 million.

[InFlamesForEver]

It's important to note that if you're new to X, which your forum account may suggest, XRM is significantly harder. It's costing me about 5 million credits to set up an automated trader here, as opposed to less than 1 million.

I never use those any more, they usually die before they can get your money back. If anyone wants it, I have a tip for a budding trader.

Spoiler

Show

I suggest making a quantum tube fab basically anywhere near the resources needed. I get about 1mill an hour from the 2 fabs I have, although they all have 3 fabs inside them.

[Gishank]

Paul, I've done several new games (both scripted start and custom). Hell I've even reinstalled the game completely several times. Only other mods I had active when playing were Crycrow's cheat script and IE/IEX + Compatibility fix.

And as said, my friend also installed XRM (nothing else!) and had the same issue.

[Mizuchi]

Turn off your FPS counters!

The other thing to keep in mind is that the X3 Engine is old. New hardware doesn't always mean vast improvements in performance if the game in question doesn't take advantage of them.

If there are bottlenecks in the code, then there are bottlenecks in the code.

Morrowind is a good example of this: the game's from 2002, but you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who can run it without it chugging along now and then because of the code.

[nankura]

Turn off your FPS counters!

The other thing to keep in mind is that the X3 Engine is old. New hardware doesn't always mean vast improvements in performance if the game in question doesn't take advantage of them.

If there are bottlenecks in the code, then there are bottlenecks in the code.

Morrowind is a good example of this: the game's from 2002, but you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who can run it without it chugging along now and then because of the code.

This is extremely correct. even some new top grade computers with i7 Sandy bridge and the latest 580GTX have been posting complaints about playing the old school games and extreme lag etc

You'd think "the better the card, the better old games will run" but thats simply not true because new cards use new shaders, new features, optimised for newer engines, such as Frostbyte 2, and DX11.

So there not optimised or designed to work with older coding, older engines, older shaders

A Good example is this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ohXXKnhxI

this guys running a Quad core intel processor. ddr2 ram, and an overclocked GTX 260. running the benchmark for TC on full settings and graphical display and high frames

There was another video of a guy showing his TC fleet and he had a GTX 260

My point is. ive got a GTX 460, a step up from the 260 , basically an overclocked 460 stock. and i cannot pull frames like that or even close.

[Gunganatorz]

As you can see Paul I'm not so new. Just in the rush to get the bonus pack for AP, I created a new account because I couldn't remember the email or user name lol