#X3 TERRAN CONFLICT KEYBOARD LAYOUT SERIES#

If you don't want to keep the left button pressed all the time, you can turn the cursor flight mode on and off permanently with the space bar.

The lasers will even fire towards the mouse cursor! But on the other hand, in this case you'll have to live without the Auto Aim feature. This steering method is known from the game Freelancer and works very well - that way it's possible to play the game almost completely with the mouse: The scroll wheels adjust the ship's speed, and you fire your lasers with the right mouse button. You can steer your ship by pressing the left mouse button in space and keeping it pressed while the ship turns towards the mouse cursor. Now ships, stations, and other objects 'only' have unified context menus, which allows for much quicker interaction.Īnother important change is the new mouse control.

You will also find that there is no such thing as a big 'ship menu' or a 'station menu' any more, which have been rather central menus in past X games. For X3: Terran Conflict the standard menu system has been overhauled and the rest has been replaced by the sidebar and context menus. In X3: Reunion there are three separate menu systems that have evolved over time: The big standard menus, the so-called quick menus at the bottom, and the icon menus in HUD and in the sector map. but after all, X3: Terran Conflict is more than just an add-on, and the improvements over X3: Reunion are so enormous that we just had to try it. At first we were unsure if we should implement it since it's a radical change compared to X3: Reunion. The new UI concept that you can see in X3: Terran Conflict was designed by one of our artists, Christian Vogel, and implemented by Michael (aka BurnIt!) and myself. But don't worry, that doesn't mean that the UI in Terran Conflict is only half-finished. Ironically, a few months ago I had to suspend my work on the user interface to take an exam on user interface design. Almost at the same time I also started studying computer science, so my working times have been pretty irregular since then. I've been a great fan of the X games since X: Beyond the Frontier, and started working for Egosoft in 2002, during the development of X2: The Threat. Hi, I'm Klaus Meyer, one of the programmers at Egosoft, mainly involved in interface programming for X3: Terran Conflict. There is a lot to see & explore, I hope all of you enjoy playing it! just try flying to earth after beginning the game, you will surely meet them ) so they have built up an impressive defence force with huge military stations, outposts and defence fleets, always ready to attack. they were staying in their system for quite some time, afraid of the terraformers to return. We decided to make the terrans bright, clean & huge. The ships are divided up into military ships and civil ships, so for some classes you will find mutliple ship designs. Though we had already seen some of their ships in X3:Reunion, we obviously needed a lot more of them - as well as factories, stations and the famous ringstation around earth. The other big chunk of assets came in with the terrans themselves. for normal X3 planets we use a technique to circumvent this limitation, but for large scale surfaces that feature lots of unique details (jupiter's stripes & red spot, mars' craters, plains & volcanos) only texture resolution helps. One of the main restrictions for planet design was texture resolution. Though the best looking planets we have in the sol system were created by nature and I tried to stick as close to the originals as possible: jupiter and saturn. some of the solar systems planets are a bit boring in reality - so I decided to interpret them more freely to get atmospheric sectors. As some of you will surely notice, I've not always sticked to all the scientific facts, but (like in the case of Venus) let my imagination play in, too. I've created the solar system planets & backgrounds for those.

the most obvious ones came with the integration of the solar system and its inhabitants to the universe. this ranges from modelling/texturing, coordinating external teams to writing exporters & plugins for 3d studio max.įor X3:TC there were a lot of new art assets needed.

#X3 TERRAN CONFLICT KEYBOARD LAYOUT SERIES#

I've been working on the X series since X2: The Threat and my main work area is 3d graphics. My name is Markus Pohl, and I've been working on X3:TC as art director.

X3 terran conflict keyboard layout