After being recruited to the cause by WinterSnowfall (thanks again!) and reading the manual from start to finish (yes, I'm that old school. ;-) ) I started my first adventure into the X universe only to be stopped immediately by technical problems.

The first one (horrible tearing) was easily fixed by forcing triple buffering and v-sync through the GPU drivers. (Why the hell aren't there settings for that? Or have I just missed them?)

I wasn't so lucky with these problems though:

*) Is there any way to get 3D sound working again? I know, because of its age the game uses EAX and EAX relies on Directsound3D which was killed after XP. I've tried emulation software for that (Creative Alchemy) which works in restoring EAX for quite a few games but it doesn't seem to work for X3. Does anyone know of any other way or was anyone here actually successful in restoring 3D sound to the game?

*) Is there a way to disable joystick/gamepad input for the game? I've seen where you can configure which Gamepad you want to use if you have several connected to your PC but if you have only one connected it is always selected and can not be deselected. I'm asking because I would like to play with keyboard and mouse and my gamepad seems to be disturbing my flight. Have I missed some setting there?

*) Is there a way to set mouse acceleration? The game was clearly programmed with mice in mind that have far less dpi than are common today. As a result the mouse pointer is far too fast. And I haven't found a setting to slow it down yet.


So I'm either blind and have missed all these settings or Egosoft did a really shoddy work by omitting essential settings from the game. Is there perhaps a config file that has to be edited manually which I may have missed as well?

All I can say is that my workarounds for two of your problems are: 1) I have disconnected my joystick, will connect again if I ever play the Independence War, or any other, games demanding it again. 2) My mouse sensitivity can be set on the fly with buttons on my mouse but not all mice have that BUT just about all mice do have a program you can download and set it with. Screen tearing problem? Never had in these games (60Hz monitors).

I hope you get things setup in ways to your liking.

EDIT: The Egosoft forums are always a rich source of information for their games, both in English und Deutsch.
http://forum.egosoft.com/

Sorry for the late reply, I haven't checked in on the X3 forums for a while now :). EAX support, though present, is somewhat skittish (as it's mostly a legacy option ported over from X3: Reunion). I haven't been able to get it working to be honest, but even the non-hardware 3D sound is spacial enough for it not to be that much of a nuisance. While I don't usually play X3 with a gamepad/joystick I did launch it once by accident when my gamepad was connected... only to watch my fighter do infinite barrel rolls for some reason :). You should be able to disable it from the launcher, by going to "Input Device" and unticking everything. You can also map it out of any game functions & commands from the in-game input menu, but that needs a lot of patience and a lot of clicks. I have a 600/1000 dpi mouse and have never had any problems with it in X3... perhaps it's something that you can fiddle with in your OS/mouse driver rather than in X3? Based on my experience with the series, if it's not in the in-game settings menu or the launcher then it's not configurable.

Game engine is after all from like 2004, not all modernities included.

Actually, the engine is from X1 and has been slightly modified for every X game till X3 Albion Prelude, but fundamental flaws like the single core limit remain. That's the reason why X Rebirth is so lacking - they had to write a new engine capable of multithreading which ate most of the resources. Now they have a solid engine for X4.