X Rebirth is the next in the hugley popular space series. The X-Series is the natural progression from the great Elite.

Egosoft are developing their own engine for XRebirth in order to handle all the deep space they want to cram into the game. Lets take a look at what we can expect...

Egosoft have this to say on the subject

"One of the biggest steps in developing an entire new engine was to design a true multithread-capable engine. X Rebirth will make full use of latest generation CPUs by spreading the work in many parallel running threads. 

Improved flight AI allows AI ships inside the complex docking station geometry. 

X Rebirth will run on DX9 API as long as all the features that we need from the API are possible with it. That does not mean we may not at some point also support DX11, but for now we do not see a need. Our engine is quite different from all the big established names, because it is designed specifically for a space game. 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.

We definitely aim to support modding again. 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. 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.

The new engine supports a scripting system very similar to the MD language used in Terran Conflict. 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. XML based languages are also used in many other areas of designing a game with the new Rebirth engine.

Your ship in X Rebirth will come with a co-pilot (possibly female) and a full crew of NPCs. They will follow your commands and will react according to how you treat them. I suppose this means charm them or bark cold commands at them and they behave differently. Not sure how necessary this is but it sounds interesting.

There will also be moments where you will be able to take control of drones and guide them through station air vents and so forth probably as you attempt to complete spy missions and the like.

For more information on XRebirth visit the forum where Bernd keeps us up to date.

The current predicted X Rebirth System Requirements are as follows

X Rebirth Recommended System Requirements (predicted)

OS: XP 64 / Vista 64 / Win7

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz / AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition

GFX: Nvidia GeForce GT 545 DDR3 / ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB

RAM: 4GB

HDD: 10 GB Hard Disk Space

Bear in mind that this game is likely to be released solely on the PC and therefore the new engine that Egosoft are building may require some serious power. As always I want to remind PC gamers that this is absolutely the best thing. We want developers like Egosoft, who do not worry about the performance constraints of the consoles, to push the boundaries of our gaming systems. As they raise the bar in what gamers come to expect from their games other developers will have to react by doing the same. When you then consider that the only place you can expect to get the power to run these future standards is PC then the PC will regain some of its lost focus in the industry.