X: Rebirth

Ok well, that settles it. Might as well delete it now.

I certainly did.

If this is ever brought to a decent state, it will take months and months.

However, you need to open your eyes to realise that.

That said, it DOES have some potential.

The first game I thought of while playing it was Battlecruiser 3000AD - which I bought on release day.

You can take that for what it's worth ;)
 
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I haven't tried RoA remake.

But Rebirth is such a huge project that I doubt it's fixable in less than 6 months.

I don't know what happened here, but it's a complete mess.

That is really unfortunate ... I hadn't planned to buy until after the first of the year (and figured I could get a sale by then), now not even sure about that. Sad, really.
 
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I don't know what happened here, but it's a complete mess.

It is Egosoft, since when are their release bug-free and usable on day one?
 
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Sigh - http://gamegpu.ru/racing-simulators-/-gonki/x-rebirth-test-gpu.html

There's just no excuse for that kind of performance. 11 fps average on an i7 3970x oc'd to 4.9ghz with a gtx 650 ti when these are your recommended (not minimum) specs:

Recommended:
OS: Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit)
Processor: Intel i5 (Quad) or i7 at 2.5GHz or AMD equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GT500 series with 1GB RAM or better, ATI 5870HD with 1GB RAM or better
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Hard Drive: 12 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card

Especially considering that maximum quality settings ad described in the article entail 0 AF, 4x AA; despite things like view distance and LOD being potentially rather taxing GPU and CPU utilization was low in all cases except for the extreme low end.
 
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It is Egosoft, since when are their release bug-free and usable on day one?

I don't know, I don't usually test their games on day one.

But I'm not expecting bug free - just something other than some early alpha version.
 
The game is broken and Egosoft knows it. Here is a response from the forums.
First, I would like to apologise to those of you who have had technical problems. I have started a thread in the Steam forums where I have listed the most common errors and have now collected a lot of information about this. All of this will of course be made available here in our support forum as soon as our server is able to remain stable under the load.

Secondly, I would like to say how amazed we all are here by the huge success of the game. Number one on Steam for several days in a row at this time of year when the big hitters come out... wow, we never expected that. It's crazy to see that more than 10,000 people are playing our game at any one time on Steam (even more if you include those who are in offline mode). Madness!

Great though it is to see that the game is so successful and that many people are having a lot of fun with it, it pains me to see every case where the game causes problems. Sorry folks, I can only apologise for that..
Three links with more information, and you will see there are many problems with the game right now.

1. http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=349253
2. http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=347917
3. http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=347278
 
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Yeah, too bad, I was thinking about getting this, even though I dislike the cell-like graphics style. Don't they test their products? Or do they purposely release buggy messes? I have a hard time supporting a company that operates this way.

I'll wait for it to be on super sale.
 
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It's almost like they never even looked at the improvements to the DirectX developer tools made since DX9c and had written off taking advantage of them while still maintaining broad hardware compatibility by say finalizing in a DX11.0 runtime with support for Feature Level 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10, and 10.1. Sure that would preclude Windows XP support, but since they only support XP x64 (also known as 0.33% of Steam users) they pretty much have written off the bulk of lingering XP users without any gain in terms of supported features and better methods.

It's also kind of like they didn't realize they were developing what would be a DX9c game released to windows PCs until it was too later either. I mean it's not like this sort of performance is inherent to a game which limits itself to that feature set. Other developers have had quite a bit more success in working around this limitation in the solutions offered in the SDK but then again I think they knew that they'd have to from the beginning. I'm starting to think the developers either weren't under that impression till it was suddenly sprung on them half a decade into development, or maybe they actually didn't think it mattered or that a platform which includes a wide range of hardware configurations might have a greater inherent need for efficient ability to manage thread synchronization than a closed platform like the Xbox 360 would.
 
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It's almost like they never even looked at the improvements to the DirectX developer tools made since DX9c and had written off taking advantage of them while still maintaining broad hardware compatibility by say finalizing in a DX11.0 runtime with support for Feature Level 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10, and 10.1. Sure that would preclude Windows XP support, but since they only support XP x64 (also known as 0.33% of Steam users) they pretty much have written off the bulk of lingering XP users without any gain in terms of supported features and better methods.

It's also kind of like they didn't realize they were developing what would be a DX9c game released to windows PCs until it was too later either. I mean it's not like this sort of performance is inherent to a game which limits itself to that feature set. Other developers have had quite a bit more success in working around this limitation in the solutions offered in the SDK but then again I think they knew that they'd have to from the beginning. I'm starting to think the developers either weren't under that impression till it was suddenly sprung on them half a decade into development, or maybe they actually didn't think it mattered or that a platform which includes a wide range of hardware configurations might have a greater inherent need for efficient ability to manage thread synchronization than a closed platform like the Xbox 360 would.

That's the price one pays if one decides to develop multi-platform (Mac & Linux as well).
 
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That's the price one pays if one decides to develop multi-platform (Mac & Linux as well).

No, it isn't some inherent price in chosing to develop for multiple platforms.

They decided use directx 9.0c exclusively because might have erroneously looked to them to be the cheapest and easiest way to be able to develop this sort of game for both the PC and Xbox360 at the same time without having to wory much about mismatched features or suppoting and testing different feature levels; XNA would have been at admittedly worse choice at the time. They also decmade heavy use of multithreading. Direct3d 9 does not default to being threadsafe.

There are two broad ways to go about multithreading large projects in d3d9 to work through or around that fact. The first is the most computationally efficient if executed cleanly. They would have to ensure their Direct3d and windows message handling threads remain strongly segregated themselves mostly involves careful adherance to threading rules and organization from all of your coders. There is little room for mistakes though as each instance of failing to segregate these threads is an point in the code which offers a significant opportunity for creating a deadlock (threads crapping on each other and crashing the program ungracefully.) This can be difficult to debug though because not every slip up will create a situation which always crashes, but can create situations that will have a chance of crashing more or less frequently depending on the configuration of the machine running the software.

The other broad choice in succesful multithreading in d3d9 is to use the D3DCREATE_MULTITHREADED flag to make the direct3d 9 API threadsafe. That has the advantage of making the entire process threadsafe - effectively protecting the programmer against creating deadlock scenarios and the rigorous attention and debugging that is otherwise often needed just to avoid this one flavor of mistake. The problem with this method is that it is extremely computationally expensive and entails high thread syncronization overhead which can be disproportionately worse on higher end systems because the speed at which they can process threads means they may also demand more frequent and synchronization.

It would seem, based on the performance issues, that they may have relied on the second option too much or even exclusively to sidestep some of the particular difficulties with multithreading in direct3d 9 applications. The price here is for specific choices that are not inherent to developing on multiple platforms. To use your example of Mac and Linux alongside Windows; OpenGL would be an alternative for such a multiplatform game which would not be nearly so problematic as heavily multithreading a direct3d 9 game. It's also not as though it is now uncommon for a multiplatform (PS3, Xbox 360, and PC) game to support at least DX10.0/10.1 and one or more 9.x feature levels on PC.

Also, Due to the way feature levels work, it would be far easier to develop something using direct x 10.1 runtimes and use feature sets to simultaneously accomplish much of the Xbox360, and Windows 7+ development than it is or would be to develop it using the most outdated commonly supported run times and try to squeeze the game design into its limitations. At the same time that would have also positioned them well if they had wanted to continue development on the Xbox One even if they still had to abort the 360 part of it; that is in addition to vastly improving both the process of codin and debugging a game heavily reliant on multithreading but also working to ensure it provides more even and stable performance across a wider range of PC hardware.
 
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Aha, apparently there is evidence it was originally developed for the 360, and then scrapped. Explains a lot of things, including worse graphics, poor design for the PC, controller based UI, and a lack of functionality compared to previous games.

Read the comments here

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/19/x-rebirth-dev-sorry-for-messy-launch-promises-changes/

Also, shield your eyes (care of Zenicetus at RPS)

zgg3.jpg
 
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I wouldn't be in a real big hurry to buy this game, though, as much as I expect to love it. Something this huge is bound to have some fairly serious bugs. Best to give it a month or three of patches, IMHO. I don't know if I'll be able to resist the hype but I'm going to try.
I love it when I make my saving throw. ;)

This is Egosoft, folks. I got X3:TC a few months after it was released and even months after that a capital ship would most likely crash if you tried to undock it from a space station (especially the neat ones) while you were still in the sector. Games come out buggy but Egosoft is willing to work on them and fix them month after month and even year after year.

There's great mod support this time, too so... (Zloth looks around to make sure Joxer isn't hiding behind any curtains) .. so the modders can do quite a bit to fix or at least blunt several bugs. There's a Nexus page going already. (And one of the first mods is to make your co-pilot's outfit LESS sexy!)
 
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Yeah, I worry about what I'm hearing regarding trading.

Oh, and that picture you posted? Yep, that's the future. Genetic engineers selling "great body for your child's whole life" chromosomes will do that. ;)
 
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