X4 Foundations

That stream looked quite promising, actually! At any rate, this isn't another Rebirth style launch.

Originally Posted by Zloth
That stream looked quite promising, actually! At any rate, this isn't another Rebirth style launch.

My first impression as well. But just quickly skipped over it. I'm currently very interested in Starsector, which seems to be a gem. http://fractalsoftworks.com/ - there's some YT footage and it has it's userbase. Not on Steam.

Well the game is out an early reviews it is buggier than X3 on release….

The Steam reviews aren't all bad. One of them gave it 10 manual dockings out of 10.

I look forward to some proper reviews, and hope they can sort out the bugs.

It's available on GOG also.

Link - https://www.gog.com/index.php/game/x4_foundations

Costs $50 though.

Trolling through the forums and screenshots, there's some sort of bug that will cause your ship to suddenly teleport FAR out into empty space from time to time which seems to be the worst bug. There's some silly ones causing NPCs heads to be wrong (like only eyes and tongue) or NPCs to show up outside the ship. Oh, and some folks are having problems with the tutorials.

What really seems to be hurting the game is the lack of guides. How do I do this? How do I do that? Where am I supposed to go? OMG this game is stupid! Rage quit.

There's a ship emblem for @BoboTheMighty https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.n…4F6DF278EEB49/

Edit: More fixes today. The bug that sent you off into la la land when checking the map is dead along with a few others.

Game looks ok-ish - but where is the story campaign?

Is it really just another hollow sandbox?

None of them are hollow sandboxes! They are rather <ahem> rarified, though. Like, 10 hours of gameplay to get 60 seconds of story.

Originally Posted by Zloth
None of them are hollow sandboxes! They are rather <ahem> rarified, though. Like, 10 hours of gameplay to get 60 seconds of story.

Ahh, ok. Not my thing, but thanks for the info!

Well there is still a lot of bug squashing to do, really.
I tried to distance myself from that game but I never win against space and ships. I quite liked the feel of discovery and the 'real' going in and out of my spaceship even if I did not do a lot of 'piloting'.
Though, when I wanted to return for a second session, my game was restored with me under the floor of the station. I know because it was transparent and people walked above me.
I advise you to wait.

I'm getting poor performance so I'll wait for more patches and improvements.

News on future patches (and quite a bit of gameplay)

I watched some random guy broadcasting his session playing X4 on Steam last night…. Wow, the map alone looks like a vast improvement on X3. The fighting and environment sure looked pretty too. Have added it to the wishlist but realistically I doubt my ageing PC would be able to do it justice. Something for the future.

A little surprise…

Egosoft has announced that they will be announcing the new expansion at Gamescom. It's going to be focused on the Split and is due out… in 2019.

And the Split showed up. And there was much rejoicing. And now, the second DLC is out:

I couldn't resist any more and bought the game. I've "only" had 14 hours to play but I've really liked it so far.

• I really like these new stations! In Rebirth, you only got to see your own ship in the dock and that ship was actually fairly small. You could hear things going on outside the station (yeah yeah, no air in space, it's more fun this way) but normally couldn't see much. Now you can walk right up to where your ship is docked, see how big it is, and compare it to the huge ships docking a little further away. Those would be the medium sized ships.
• NPCs look a little better now. Given the Rebirth NPCs had their hair drawn on their scalps, though, I don't think that's saying much.
• People I hire seem to be able to teleport from ship to ship but I have to do research to figure out how to work the controls?? Weird but I may not understand what's going on there.
• There's more interesting things to do when popping out in your space suit than just using the little repair laser on your ship now.
• Factions are more of a thing. If you fork out the cash to join a guild, you can get some pretty well paying missions.
• Travel has been fun so far. Like in Rebirth, you can burn shield energy to get a burst of speed but it doesn't last long (at least with my paltry shields). Doing Shift 1 starts up the travel mode engines which zip you along at about 10 times the speed once they rev up. You can't steer much in travel mode, though. SETA becomes available to speed up time around you but not early in the game.
• To help your travels you have the good old jump gates (they move you instantly now, no more jump tunnel), a short range jump gate like thing that takes you to a different sector in the same solar system, highways to move you quickly from one part of a sector to another, and a highway loop that pulls you around through several sectors and jump gates.
• Exploration is far better. Each sector is much, much bigger than before so finding all the stations isn't as trivial as in X3. You won't be able to just drop one advanced satellite to cover anywhere close to an entire sector like in X3, either.
• You can make your own company logo now.
• While there's no loading time between sectors, saving a game is taking me about 30 seconds and loading it back in is more like 70.

Originally Posted by Zloth

• While there's no loading time between sectors, saving a game is taking me about 30 seconds and loading it back in is more like 70.

Sadly, this is one of the main problems with the game. As you progress and acquire large complexes and a fleet save times will increase to about a minute and load times will get close to 5 minutes. I've heard some people getting load times of up to 10 minutes.

The file format of saves (basically a whole bunch of XML files) is incredibly inefficent and Egosoft seem unwilling to move to either object serialisation (10-20x faster) or another customised approach. Perhaps most of the slowness is not just loading all the save files but at least it is an area for improvement.

Actually just one XML file zipped up with gnuzip. I peeked inside one and the XML file is half a gigabyte before compression. Seems like a really odd choice for saving to me but it sure will make it easier for players to edit their save files.

And now, X3 gets another expansion. Yes, X3, not X4. The one that last got an expansion ten years ago. Seems the fans made another expansion and Egosoft is giving it a big push. It will be FREE to all owners of X3:Albion Prelude.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4…rnhams_Legacy/

I'm seriously loving this game!

• The station building interface is harder to learn than before but much more interesting. You put them together in a more sensible way, storage space needs to be considered, and you can arm some of the parts. You can make room for people to live, too, but they are optional - a fully automated station won't run as well as one with a staff but it will run well enough to be profitable.
• Trading is way better. Like in Rebirth, you can reserve a purchase - meaning your ship that's 30 minutes away can pay for 1000 turret components at 400cr each and still get those 1000 turret components for 400,000cr when it arrives (assuming the station hasn't been blown up or robbed). Unlike in Rebirth, you can get the map to display which station has the best price for a given good. If the best price is too far, zoom in and the price check will limit itself to whatever area is being displayed!
• They nailed the sense of scale. The vulcan-based graphics seem to be working pretty well for everyone now, and they look great. I was shocked at how bland the ships looked in those videos I posted in late 2018!
• You can tell ships to do a lot more things than before. Some don't work so well (exploration, updating station prices) but that still leaves a lot that do. You can also assign them to stations in different roles, too.
• You can do quite a bit while the game is paused. I'm about ready to call the combat system pause-on-space (except you use the pause key).

A correction to something above: NPCs don't teleport around. They DO move mighty fast but they use transports. If you send somebody from your ore station in Pluto to captain a ship in the Turquoise Sea, it's going to take some time to get there.

Save and load times are getting longer. I think it's about 45 seconds to save now. Loading is over a minute. You can hit the pause key and go do something while it's doing either one. Egosoft says it's simply the time it takes to traverse the jillions of objects in memory. Faster drives don't help at all. (Everybody and his pet giant miniature space hamster has provided suggestions on how to make it better.)