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X3: Reunion - Developer Diary #2 Feature
Derek dela Fuente
12/09/2005
TVG continues its look at Egosoft's impressive space-sim, sitting down to chat with the Team Manager and the Lead Programmer...
In the 2nd part of TVGâs continued look at all the exciting aspects of the soon to be released X3: The Reunion, we sat down and eavesdropped on Martin Brenner (lead programmer) with his colleague Greg Kingston (team manager) from Egosoft discussing the technical aspects of the game, the engine, the team, along with the importance of cutting edge technology.
The X3 Engine
Greg:X2: The Threat was a success for us and we basically reinvested all the proceeds directly into the development of X3: Reunion. A really small core team created X-BTF and X2, with some external help from volunteers in our Devnet community. X3: Reunion is very different in that we were able to make many of these volunteers full team members and also expand in other ways, including development of our new game engine.
Martin:The engine is extremely important for us but this doesnât mean we want the graphics to take away from the gameplay. But for our genre we believe it is really important to develop our own engine. This then allows us so much more freedom to develop the game in any direction we choose. Probably the single biggest improvement of this engine is its modularity in regards to shader effects. The whole lower level graphic part of the engine was redesigned to achieve a flexible modular engine which can support all the latest highend visual 3D tricks. The flexible use of shaders and the fact that our artists work and discuss directly with the engine developers allows us to come up with shader usage tailored for precisely what the artist wants to achieve. This even carries back to the concept artistsâ ideas â“ a great example being the hulls of the Boron ships where special pearlescent effects had to be programmed to achieve what the concept artist had in mind.
In terms of the other tools we use, being relatively small we still do rely on external packages such as 3D Studio Max quite heavily, but with every step forward we take, we take another leap in the development of our own tools as well.
Competition & Specificationâ¦
Greg:We do of course take the time to look at other similar games and what specifications they are aiming for. Naturally we try to get our hands on anything regarding âspaceâ! With regards to specifications, we aim our maximum very high â“ we start with thinking what could be done in theory and then spend time to try to turn it into reality. At one stage of development, the game ran at less than 1 frame per second! But of course, we knew why and knew of all the improvements that would follow. After this comes the initial optimisation stage where the engine programmers nervously sweat to keep all the beauty in the game at 30 fps and above!
Of course, there is also the other side to it â“ scaling down the visuals on smaller and older cards. No matter how long we spend or what magic we can do, it is just not possible now to render high-resolution high quality framerates on older cards like the Geforce Ti 4 series. So for that and similar generations of system, the engine will load special lower quality shaders and LODs.
Bridging The Gap Between Graphics & Gameplay
Martin:Picking up on an earlier point, I can explain how the design team interacts together. With X3, we were able to commission and give very detailed concepts to external artist teams. This was a first for us and there was a lot of learning for both sides, especially as we dealt with several external teams and had to figure out how to instruct and get the best out of so many people. To give an idea of what a huge change this was, the process of just co-ordinating the external artists teams now takes up more time than the entire internal design team used to take!
What did save us a huge amount of time is that we were very clear about what we wanted â“ we have great designers and artists in Chris and Markus â“ and we could always show them examples of what we wanted.
Gameplay is definitely on a par with graphics in terms of game design though, despite a large focus being spent on the engine. Gameplay shouldnât suffer from great graphics, but it can benefit from good graphics enormously. But of course, it is vital to look good in a very competitive market â“ people will not buy ugly games if there are others which look better. This leads to the reality today that although gameplay should never be sacrificed, sometimes the variety must be. If we were still designing a game with last generation graphics, we could now have countless numbers of different spaceships, cockpits, etc. However now with the escalating cost involved with designing next generation graphics variety is now so expensive that you do think twice to see where savings can be made. But as long as it does not negatively affect the gameplay then this is not a bad thing. It is better to have 70 great looking ships than 700 ugly ones, and we have a lot more than 70 ships.
Greg:Bridging one of the gaps between graphics and gameplay are the game physics. These are very important in a space simulation, and the flight physics and model are changed significantly from X2. Ships now drift a lot more than before adding more realism to the game but still keeping it within the players control and in fact overall enhancing the gameplay, to get more fun out of flying and fighting. Ships no longer turn as quickly as before, and it is more natural now to fly behind another ship, no matter if you are in a dogfight or trying to outrun / pursue other vessels.
Martin:Expanding on that, the AI has been improved a lot and can be described as being on two levels. One is the higher level of ship AI modules and benefits directly from the continuing development from X2 where players could design their own scripts to run within the game as part of it. This is a very powerful feature, and we got great feedback from our developer community which has gone right into X3. Some extremely clever fighter scripts for instance make choices on what lasers and weapons to load into their ship (even more important in X3) and then make changes as well. Things were far simpler in X2.
The lower level AI is the dogfighting. This is trickier as it involves tight, fast-paced manoeuvring under fire and therefore the involvement of the new physics comes into play far more. Sometimes, less is more here â“ the aim is to make combat fun and challenging and it can be too tempting sometimes to make the ships too clever and over-complicated.
Greg:These changes mean a very different feel for X3: Reunion compared to X2. As weâve already covered in detail previously, the other changes to the user interface, plot and the dramatic changes to the economic model have elevated the latest instalment in the X Universe to the mainstream level. More immersion, more missions and more playability for gamers of all levels gives us a very exciting proposition.
TVG would like to thank EgoSoft for taking the time to chat about the game whilst we listened in; weâll have further coverage on X3: Reunion shortlyâ¦
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Date Added:Sun 20th Jul 2008 03:53
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Date Added:Tue 13th Nov 2007 00:40
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Date Added:Tue 30th Oct 2007 12:37
is a good try,ships are very good
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Date Added:Fri 5th Oct 2007 14:22
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Date Added:Thu 28th Jun 2007 12:52
- 2006-10-30 11:10:37 - you probably are tvg rules! at it, and you didnt have a decent gun. you need to upgrade to kill lots of things in the game. take your time to play it.
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Date Added:Tue 30th Jan 2007 19:48
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Date Added:Sun 10th Dec 2006 21:02
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