Hello,
today I want to give an update on our latest progress and an overview of what we are going to work on in the near future. I am sorry that I can not reply to every complaint and report.
Immediate work:
Priority #1: Fixing crashes
Right now we are still getting a lot of crash reports. We believe that we already have fixed the most common ones with the updates 1.13 to 1.15 but there are still crashes that are caused by the game code and it goes without saying that fixing these has the highest priority.
Priority #1: Improving performance
We are at work on a number of problems that cause the performance to drop to unusually low framerates. Some of these are very specific to certain situations only, while others slow the game down on specific configurations of hardware. Right now we are looking at where we can make fast improvements that will help as many people as possible achieve a better framerate and then we will work our way down to the more specific cases. Just to give you an idea of how crazy the measurements sometimes are: I have seen a very busy zone of the game today on a laptop with Intel HD4000 acceleration (an onboard integrated 3D accelerator which is not really inside the min specs of our game) achieving 10 fps at minimum graphics settings. This is not much of course, but I was surprised that it did run at all on that machine. At the same time I saw a YouTube video where somebody demonstrated performance problems in a very similar zone and also with minimum settings, achieving almost the same FPS, but this time running on a high-end PC with GT780 card. Clearly we have to focus on improving our performance on higher end machines. Another example of performance problems are machines with multiple GPUs, like laptops that have an integrated GPU and a second faster one. In some cases X Rebirth lists only the integrated GPU on these machines and this makes the game run extremely slow. One possible fix for one type of driver was already added to 1.15, but we continue to investigate this problem too.
Priority #1: Fixing gameplay showstoppers
There are unfortunately several areas of the game where gameplay features are not working as intended. In some situations these even block the plot (which makes an already bad bug a total showstopper bug for us). I am just listing them here because it is beyond the scope of this posting to explain trigger conditions and exceptions as well. But let me just say that not all bugs affect all customers and many can be worked around even if they happen. But please do not take this the wrong way, this is not an excuse: We are aware that bugs of this category are always very fustrating to everybody affected by them and you should not be forced to search for a workaround online to play our game. We are really sorry for problems of this nature.
- Trade ships that stop reacting to orders (this is not one bug but a number of special cases that all lead to the same result)
- Problems with repairing ships including a very common case where certain transporter ships that cannot be repaired after they were captured (small "non capital" ships with modular engines where you cannot place an engineer to do emergency repairs)
Priority #2: Adding small but important features that are requested by many of you
- Adding support to delete the order queue of ships (partially done already)
- Improving joystick configuration
- Adding fixed target mode (t/e from X3) as alternative to soft targets.
- Fixing character animation errors (work in progress)
- Giving you a choice of NPCs with good known skills after "winning" a smalltalk (so the reward is no longer random)
- Crates on platforms will be re-balanced
- Improve readability of menus
- Improve how NPCs are labeled to make it clearer who does what
- Improve the "asking for people" conversation
- Adding a logbook menu
- Autosave support (work in progress)
- Improve feedback when NPC can not be hired (e.g. ship is full / NPC is busy)
- Adding some crucial commands to captain and pilot conversations
- Ship trader does not clearly show if he is busy - shipyard busy output
- Showing minimap (gravidar) on event monitor instead of "no signal"
- Option to modify FOV (limited to a small range at first, maybe more freedom later)
- Unbinding a key to nothing
- Fix bug that sometimes you see negative cargo amounts
There are a lot more requests for this list and I will update it ASAP. Some people on the team are already working on #2 priority things.
Priority #3
AFTER all of the above are done (and these lists are probably not complete), we want to start discussing with you which bigger features we should work on first. You may know some of the candidates which had been mentioned in interviews before the release, like turning your head in the cockpit, external camera views, improved map features etc. We have a long list of things that we would like to add, but we want to listen to you and let you decide about the priorities. Before it makes any sense to discuss this in any more detail however, we have to fix all of the above.
I will post an update next week in this thread and inform you about our progress. In the meantime I can only thank you all and repeat my apology to everybody who does not yet have a good experience in the game.
-Bernd
