Update 17 November: Egosoft apologises again for X Rebirth problems but are amazed at “success”
You didn’t have to be a fortune teller to know that when X Rebirth launched it was going to have issues but we were hoping it would be a smoother release than previous X games. After talking to Egosoft Director Bernd Lehahn last week we were hopeful. Sadly it wasn’t to be.
Today Egosoft issued an apology to anyone who picked up X Rebirth yesterday when it launched.
First of all let me start by saying that I am very sorry if you personally experience problems with our new game. We are doing what we can to fix these issues as fast as possible. Below I will try to summarise some tips and inform you about our plans for updates and patches based on the feedback from threads in this forum and the egosoft community (which is unfortunately currently broken under the heavy load).
X Rebirth appears to be another case of a game that has been pushed out too early and my advice would be to hang on a while if you’re thinking about picking it up. With poor performance issues, joystick problems and crashing it’s not going down well with many players.
Peter is currently in the process of putting our review together but this is a pretty massive game so we’re taking our time with it before whacking a score on it.
Thankfully, the official forums appear to be back online now after some downtime but they are up and down due to heavy load. At least there’s now a list of bugs the development team are currently looking which include:
###### Bugs we are investigating ######
– Broken or missing voice recordings in language other than english
There is an update for german voices today (nov 15th) and another update end of next week. We apologize for these problems. French voices are expected to be added in mid december, russian voices should also follow in december.
– Performance problems on very high end PCs
It seems that some of you experience an unsatisfying framerate even though you have really high end machines. We want to know which systems are affected by this and need to reproduce these problems here. To do this it would help us immensely if you could send your DXDIAG reports and describe the framerates you measure (e.g with the FRAPS tool) in certain situations. Please describe the situation and give different examples (e.g landed on a station, in an empty zone, close to a station, in a highway etc.). Please send your information to [email protected] with subject #PERFORMANCE INFO#
– Stuck object on platform: We are sorry that this still happens sometimes and will fix it ASAP, but you should however always be able to simply use ENTER – 5 to get back.
– We read reports of people who can not save: Please check if the harddrive that you are saving to has space left and the right are set correctly for the savegame folder. If you think this is all correct, please send us a DXDiag file to [email protected] with subject #SAVING BUG#
– Crash right at gamestart (but not in or before start menu):
This is very likely memory related. Do not try running the game in 32 bit Windows (this is not officially supported). If you still want to experiment with 32 bit Windows, be aware that it may crash. More importantly it will definitely crash if you do not set your machine to allow more than 2GB of physical memory. There are tricks to achieve this but in general the rule is: Use a 64bit Windows! UPDATE: Patch 1.12 will give you a message at the start if the game has zero chance of running because of “out of memory” and not even start!
– Exiting the super highway (blue) millions of km away from anything
This seems to be a bug several people report. We are trying to reproduce this but it is not easy. If you have information on how to reproduce, please email [email protected]
Please let us know if you had this problem with 1.12 or above, as we hope it was already fixed.– After loading cursor vanishes
While running around on platforms the mouse cursor is supposed to disappear. If it happens in normal flight, please check if you have more than one physical monitor and the cursor may just moved off the screen?– Ship flying through station:
We apologize for this happening. We hoped to have reduced the chance of this happening significantly, but are investigating this.
###### Tricks & Tips ######
– Dont run game in 32bit Windows and make sure you have enough memory free
– Make sure you have latest drivers installed.
– If you have problems with the game, reset all settings in the driver to default
– If you suffer performance problems set the LOD and view distance to low values. The game should still look good but this helps a LOT. Consider turning off shadows, consider medium or low shaders if your GPU is the bottleneck.
– Trading: Some people report problems that trade ships do not work as expected. In most cases this is not a bug with the trade ship AI but the ship did not get the right order through the trade menu. As mentioned above, we definitely want to improve this menu further, but most importantly you have to make sure that when you add a trade order to a ship, you click on NEXT after selecting the order and assigning it to the ship selected at the top of the menu. Then you select the amount and confirm the order. After this you should see that an order was added to the ships order queue. One thing we want to improve is management of this queue and show it more clearly in trade ship info menus.
– There seems to be a bug with menus remaining open sometimes. If you end up with a non working menu, please see if changing the screen resolution or AA settings (ESC – settings – graphic settings) helps to make the menus work again. You can undo those changes after it works again. If this happens repeatedly please email information on how you reproduce this to [email protected]
###### Feedback about feature requests: ######
– Map and other menu improvement: We have a number of menu and map improvements planned. This includes more control over the map like the zoom that was suggested here and changing the layout of some of the text menus. We are also considering showing the “minimap” on the eventmonitor whenever there is “no signal” at the moment. These are a lot of individual improvements some of which will happen soon.
– Autopilot / SETA: We will add some autopilot support. However it is our goal with X Rebirth that you do not need to run the game semi-automatically for extended periods of time. This is also he reason why we will not support SETA / SINZA time acceleration. There should never be a need to wait 20 minutes for your trade ships once you have multiple ships. You can queue orders and do many things in parallel. Time acceleration as a trick to accelerate trading will not be in X Rebirth.
– Facial animations: We will look into improving facial animations.
– External view / Ability to turn around in cockpit: This was asked for a few times. Yes we will look into this but it will be part of a larger update and take more time than just a few weeks. It will also be combined with support for looking around in the cockpit (e.g with a joystick POV hat) and maybe also support for Oculus Rift style VR. So please be aware that this feature will take some time to add.
– Targeting hotkeys: Another feature that was requested a couple of times. Yes we will do this. Based on your feedback that is for one of the earlier updates even though such “explicit” targets only work in the mouse / keyboard mode. Not with controllers!
– Talking to people on stations: We have a plan for an early patch (early december) which will make the conversations and finding NPCs for jobs a lot easier and more accessible. This has a high priority.
– Skipping conversations: We will look into this, but I can not promise that this is always possible.
– Joystick support: We are aware that joystick support (as opposed to gamepad) at this time is not perfect. We definitely will make this a priority for one of the next updates, but please allow a little time for this.
Also read: X Rebirth mods – Should fans fix it? Here’s some mods to try
Published: Nov 16, 2013 06:57 pm