Hello there!

My name is Matthias. I’ve been a programmer at Egosoft since July 2007, working on the X series. Egosoft was one of about a dozen game developers I applied to while writing my diploma thesis, one of three who actually interviewed me, and the only one who accepted me as an intern.

My work was immediately all over the place, including major work in gameplay, UI and AI. I’m now a bit more focused but still happily a generalist.

If you know X4 you’ll be familiar with some of my main areas of work:

  • Physics / Collision Detection. This isn’t something that we’ve written ourselves - we’re using an excellent open source library called Jolt Physics. I integrated it and maintain its use in our custom engine.
  • Flight & First Person Controls. I was practically solely responsible for these since we started developing X Rebirth and am still nominally the maintainer, though recently it hasn’t had much work done beyond a few bug fixes. My favourite is spacesuit flight without flight assist, sometimes also called Newtonian flight.
  • AI Flight. I helped author the system we’ve been using since X Rebirth, maintained it for more than a decade, but have finally passed that torch to a colleague who has been improving it much better than I ever was able to. Shoutout to Paul, the true MVP.
  • The Holomap. While the tabular panels at the edges are someone else’s area, I’m almost exclusively responsible for the 3-dimensional representation of the universe and its contents.
  • Mass Traffic. This is the system that makes these little ships fly around stations, but also handles transport drones executing trades and welder drones building or repairing something.
  • Regions. Any time you see a nebula, asteroid or wreck field it’s a Region. The things you see only exist in a radius around the camera, created and removed on a separate thread. This allows us to have massive and very dense asteroid fields while maintaining good memory usage and performance.
  • The Gravidar. I didn’t author it, but am now maintaining it. It’s an under-the-hood AI system that manages which objects can see each other, using their visibility ranges and factors like environmental obscurement. The results are used by several systems, including the UI and AI.
  • So. Much. Gameplay. Shooting with all its weapon types, personal mining, several kinds of scanning, lockboxes, and spacesuit “levels”, just to name a few.
  • Tutorials. Not technically exciting, but still a very interesting and challenging piece of work. The X games have always been mechanically dense, and even telling players about a feature’s existence can be a challenge.
  • Timelines. Probably the most controversial entry on this list :) It’s the expansion to X4: Foundations that I’ve been the creative lead on, since it was based on my idea - though it ended up deviating in some key ways from my initial pitch. Despite the mixed reception we’re very proud of it.