Galaxy in Chaos is another mod based on SWLU which is very fun, but with the difficultly heated up. Star Wars LU 1.2.9 released less than a year ago, bringing new ships and stations. It combines my work and work I've been given permission to distribute.
I created the Alaankwa mod and update it in spurts of development a few times a year. Star Wars Mayhem 2 released mid last year, then last month received a quality-of-life update with 2.0 (and a bugfix update today, incidentally). Star Wars Mayhem 3 gained a ton of content just last month and was created last quarter. X3LU Modding development is still active: The UI is really dynamic, probably because of the generations of PC hardware it had to support. I play it on an ultrawide monitor 3440 x 1440 resolution, and it looks great.
After that it's just learning to set and use hotkeys so you don't have to use the mouse all the time, because mouse movement can be slow on higher resolutions. The learning curve for LU basically boils down to either watching some youtube tutorial videos (XenonArchitect7 for LU or Darth Fiscus for Mayhem) or reading Litcube's Wiki. I don't know if the game is more complex than X4, but it sure exposes a lot of that complexity to the user. You sacrifice a lot of graphical fidelity to go with X3, and there is a learning curve. The game is more about building an empire of ships, with fleets, that functions cohesively. However, X3 is where you go if you want to focus on using more than one ship at a time in a practical manner. Egosoft did a good job at sticking with what they released, as they always do. It's your game if you want to have a cool ship and live in a breathing, simulated universe, with aliens and some empire building, trading, exploring, war, and the RPG progression of upgrading ships and ship classes. Without this tool, it's just too burdensome to develop anything deep and interesting.Īll that being said, I think X4 is a great game. It's an IDE which parses Egosoft's xml script language, MSCI I believe it's called. X-Studio in particular must exist in some form for me to work on X4. For X3, we have X3 Editor 2 and X-Studio, as well as other tools. Neither Egosoft nor the community have come together to create the tools which are needed for the development of mods, so far as I'm aware. Mod Support - This is the elephant in the room.
But I digress :D This is easily fixed with cheat mods by always giving yourself 5-star crew. How well the ship performs the task is better handled with bonuses or penalties based on crew level instead of shackling AI routines, imo. When a player tells a ship to do something, they expect it to do it, and do it convincingly. In practice, it ends up that you can't tell whether your ship is behaving erratically because it is bugged or because everyone's first experience to the game is with low level crew. Leveling up crew - In theory this is a good decision on Egosoft's part, adding a fun leveling mechanic to the game. The lack of camera options that came in X3 for viewing your ships externally, chase cameras, etc. (Edit: This has been fixed, although the AI is still very dumb) The problem for me with X4 came to 4 things:įleet management - I couldn't get 2 ships to jump across the sector together, stop warp together, and enter battle or a station together. Now I may be out of date or misinformed on any of this, so please do advise me if so.
Just know that my views on X3 basically come extensively from a subset of the modding community. I remember playing XRM and enjoying it many years ago, and there are other mods I haven't tried that are just as good out there.
When I speak of X3AP, my experience comes almost exclusively from Litcube's Universe (LU) or mods build on top of it. For X3AP, I've played since release in one form or another, about once a year. I've played 50 hours of X4 up until Split Vendetta.
I had some free time today and thought I'd share my thoughts with candor. There hasn't been a lot of discussion on the internet about the state of things in X3 recently. TL DR If you want a modern, immersive experience, play X4.