Official Screenshots for X Rebirth

[Neurotoxin]

Possibly the absorption of light through an asteroid dust cloud, although the likelihood is slim even in a thick field since small particles tend to take off fairly quickly. Otherwise it may well be the sort of nebula we saw in Omicron Lyrae or Tortuga (The latter of which is obscene, fyi lol)

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[apollo]

New screenshot: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.p...626958#3626958

To be honest I think it looks pretty awful. Textures look flat, pixelated and a bit randomly painted and normal mapping looks to be pretty poorly exploited. The lighting makes no sense whatsoever, and that yellowy wash is horrible. Yet again anti-aliasing seems to be missing or just poor (possibly due to early build I guess). That engine looks OLD! So very disappointed.

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[Urizen]

@apollo: the textures may seem pixelated because of your mentioning of missing anti-aliasing. and if you take a closer look, you´ll notice, that the textures at close-up are actually quite sharp.
And why does the lighting make no sense to you?

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[apollo]

@apollo: the textures may seem pixelated because of your mentioning of missing anti-aliasing. and if you take a closer look, you´ll notice, that the textures at close-up are actually quite sharp.
And why does the lighting make no sense to you?

I disagree, looking in the bottom left corner of the bottom left image - that doesn't look like a very sharp texture to me. And from the image it looks like they're pretty much 'in' a star, yet there is only a mild yellow on the station (with the exception of the solar panels), and the white station lights appear to be brighter, whilst having a very odd 'mist' around them for some reason.

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[Urizen]

first off, the station itself seems to be surrounded by fog, so there´s your mist around the white lights, and the station itself is clearly not in the star.
second, i said the textures are quite sharp, yes they could be more detailed (detailed as in applied Normal Mapping), but we don´t know a) how old is that shot actually and b) is the texturing final?

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[Eliah]

You simply do not make a 3d model with 'unfinished' texturing and do everything to get it in-game; it takes up far more time than to just do the textures right the first time.

Also, compare the size of the ships/shiplanes to the station - the textures are actually extremely big, so you will see them blurred/pixellated.

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[stemardue]

...and again it seems to me that they are using some sort of shader that gives all a 'toonish' look, like in Borderlands game: a mix of posterization and sharpened, dark outlines. Not clear if that is just a post processing filter that Toastie or someone else put on the image, but i hope that in-game the visuals will be different. The best one-word definition i can find for that image (or images) is: cheesy.

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[Neurotoxin]

Aye, it would seem Egosoft has gone from the contrast-lacking Reunion to the childsplay of Rebirth. Even the very first release of Terran Conflict had almost no colour contrast and everything was so dull and washed out, and I'm glad that was 'promptly' changed when I finally installed 3.0 after two year's hiatus from X3.

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[Jeff]

I don't think any of the glows are actual lights, mostly because glow effects in other engines don't have to be actual lights either. Take UDK (the unreal 3 engine) for example, it has glow effects which aren't actual lights. And making the glows we have now in X3 bigger isn't very hard either. Also I agree with stem on the cell-shaded look of things, I'm saying it's either that or simply a lot of black edges in the textures themselves.

btw, the dish with the sun in the background looks cool, but I'm quite sure a lot of detail on the actual dish comes from textures with alpha maps. It looks similar to the solar panels we have now in X3 (detail wise), and those are also alpha maps.

I kinda hope there is dynamic lighting, but to be honest that really wouldn't be that special, a lot of engines support dynamic lighting these days so yeah, I'm kinda expecting it to be in there. Anyway I'm not going to get my hopes up too much, I did that with Terran Conflict and it was a bit of a let down. I'd rather have the ability to say "cool, they did put feature X in there which I didn't expect!" then having the experience I had with Terran Conflict which was like "Oh awesome it's here! And... it's... almost... the... same... as... Reunion -.-". Actually I'm expecting something similar again as far as engine features and graphics go. Also my fist thought about the stations was "Oh, they liked the giant terran stations so much they expanded on it a bit, so I guess every single station in the game is now ginormous".

Anyway don't get me wrong, I'm still looking forward to it and I will buy and play it just like most of us here will (I assume), I'm just not going to get my hopes up too much, that way it can only get better xD

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[ApolloZani]

...and again it seems to me that they are using some sort of shader that gives all a 'toonish' look, like in Borderlands game: a mix of posterization and sharpened, dark outlines.

Posterization is the style of having the transitions between colours sharp, making the differences in tone obvious by a sudden divide between two or more colours. In this screenshot, the yellow, blue and metal whites are in great contrast to one another divided by paint jobs (or rather lack there of) and thus suggest that look. The lights from burning and the gate, however, transition smoothly across the background and the surfaces nearby, so that isn't a shader effect but rather the textures. In my opinion, it really brings out what colour there is and I'd say would give the models a kind of colour silhouette that would let players tell any similarly shaped stations apart at a glance as well as provide pretty details to draw the eye. This one from Albion Prelude has similar uses of colour, though only using brown and yellow for contrast on the station and green for the background.

The outlines are sharp because the ships and stations have hard edges.

I see no dark outlines. (For comparison, here is a screenshot from Borderlands 2)

I can see how the 'feel' of these styles can be similar, however from the trailer I'd say it's just following the trend of modern games to desaturate most of the textures in order to make what's saturated vivid and let the backgrounds be varied without being noisy.

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