Well that at least was one of the tongue-in-cheek marketing slogans for the second of the X games "X-Tension". XML based languages are also used in many other areas of designing a game with the new Rebirth engine. It will be strongly modified for the new engine, but if you understand MD already, chances are that you will find it relatively easy to write missions for the new game. The new engine supports a scripting system very similar to the MD language used in Terran Conflict. Since this is an entirely new engine, we can not provide any documentation and API support before the game comes out, but we hope to provide this soon after the release. We definitely aim to support modding again. We had a look at engines like Unreal or the CryEngine, but because we wanted to have cutting edge space graphics, an area very different from what these engines are specialized in, we had to develop our own engine. Our engine is quite different from all the big established names, because it is designed specifically for a space game. That does not mean we may not at some point also support DX11, but for now we do not see a need. X Rebirth will run on DX9 API as long as all the features that we need from the API are possible with it.
X Rebirth will make full use of latest generation CPUs by spreading the work in many parallel running threads. One of the biggest steps in developing an entire new engine was to design a true multithread-capable engine. Millions of people were isolated far away from their former home and many systems suddenly lacked the supplies of food or other resources they needed for everyday life.Īt the start of X Rebirth, these events are again a thing of the past, but they have formed a changed and new universe. This shutdown however had dramatic political and economical consequences. They were later used by the different populations that developed in the X universe and they relied on them for trading and for their everyday life.Ī while after the events told in X3:Terran Conflict however, the gates suddenly ceased to work. The gates were built by a very advanced ancient civilisation a long long time ago. Gates that were (almost?) the only technology that allowed its inhabitants to bridge interstellar distances. The X universe was always defined by gates. We can not yet answer what the minimum hardware requirements will be, but this will be announced before the release of the game. What hardware will be required to play X Rebirth? Adding features to a game that was not designed for these features at the start, is never perfect. X Rebirth is not less complex or dumber than any of the X games of the past.īut to make a game intuitive and easy to learn, you have to design it from scratch. Let me get this straight right at the start. However it also had a big drawback: It made the game more and more complicated and harder to get into for those who were not already part of the community from the start. We could listen to your wishes and feedback on the last game and incorporate much of that into the next game. Most importantly it allowed us to work very closely with the community.
This had a lot of advantages for us as developers.
Let me give you a quick tour around what X Rebirth is and is not.Īfter more than 10 years of developing the X games by adding features to an existing concept, we wanted to make a fresh start.Īll the games of the old X series after X:Beyond the Frontier, were developed by taking the prequel and adding features on top.