Matt: Boarding crew and wings

Hi all X Fans, I’m Matt Gravestock and I’ve been working as a DevNet volunteer in X3: Terran Conflict, many of you most likely know me as Cycrow from the X-Universe Forums. I started my X days with X2 not long after it was released, before getting X3: Reunion on release day. I was also scripting and modding the game since X2, although mainly it was on X3 from when I first got the game, before eventually moving onto development for TC. The development has been very challenging, but also enjoyable, and we hope you enjoy the results.


I've been working on many features since joining the team just under a year ago, these include the Flight Wings system that has been briefly shown in the Trailer and the Boarding Crews that has also been mentioned.

The boarding crews are basically an extension to ship capturing, allowing you to acquire ships that are not usually capturable, i.e. larger capital class ships. The process is a lot more involved than simply capturing and requires you to buy and train marines that you can use to board a ship. The marines are trained in a variety of skills, each will be used in a different stage of the boarding, which includes cutting through the ship’s hull while the shields are down, fighting with any onboard marines and hacking the ships control computer. Marines can either be sent in space suits or using a special type of missile, a boarding pod, capable of carrying marines to the target ship.

Marines, especially their training can be expensive and time consuming, you can send marines to training centers to train up in the specialized skills, but they will also need to gain experience from boarding operations to increase their skill level. This means you cant simply board an M1 ship, you need to board smaller ships first so your marines gain enough experience to be able to board larger ships.



On a final note, for the scripter’s among you, there have been many exciting things added to the Script Engine, which should allow you to create even better scripts than before, one such ability is the creation of custom input menus allowing you to get better input from the user.