This mod takes the entire map of the current X4 universe and scales each sector to the size of small to medium sized countries - instead of very small local regions. The aim is to improve and/or increase immersion of the game which has a sci-fi setting - primarily in space, so that the space one plays in does not feel like crammed small cities in space... which, as you probably know, is extremely vast. While this mod does add to the immersion and entities being spread out on their horizontal axes, it's still very small compared to actual space.

-> If you played with one of the older files for testing, remove them. Install this mod instead. It now works correctly.


QUICK SUMMARY (if you do not want to read it all):

- Normal systems got an upscale between 9x and 12x times
- "Embedded" smaller systems (Saturn I, II, Titan for example) got an upscale between 4.5x and 6x times
- Scanner range 750km
- Many sectors now span across many THOUSANDS of kilometers (!!)
- Scaling applies to all dimensions - X, Y, Z
- All DLCs including Kingdom End required
- New save needed, save will need this mod
- New custom save with Highways disabled recommended, as Highways do not function properly with this mod
- Ship engines NOT modified
- Good travel engines with high maximum travel velocity gain high importance for your loadout
- Traversal of a sector may now need several minutes instead of just some seconds or maybe a minute
- Asteroid, gas, and hybrid regions have not been scaled due to technical and game performance reasons
- Stray "?" icons may appear in your map outside a sector - simply fly to it (or command a ship of yours to fly to it) to appear inside the sector and then be fixed in that location
- Due to the nature of this mod and what it does, I think it should go without saying that this one is NOT compatible with Ventures


Addition version 1.10:
- Local Supergateway has been added as optional download to the Mod. It adds Accelerators to all system which contain Superhighways. These do not work properly with the main mod file - so the Local Supergateway Addon is HIGHLY recommended

Fix version 1.10:
- Bugs in map re-generation and how the files were packed caused many sectors to be ignored for the scaling. This has been fixed - all sectors including the entire Kingdom End sectors - are now scaling correctly

Fix version 1.01:
- Sanctuary of Darkness excluded from scaling so that the gates remain in the Safe Zone

Thanks to Eucharion / Realspace for pointing me in the right direction!


QUICK TIPS

- Scan early, scan often
- If an object is in range of less than 750km, stop and scan again - you may find remaining gates and stations
- Comm other ships to ask for the way to another sector
- Satellites will be more important than ever
- Equip your ship with the fastest engines you can afford
- Mod is even more fun when coupled with VRO (just tried it!)


DETAILS:

General

Every entity - stations, gates, and other things - are now much further apart and can no longer be made out just by flying through even without scanning - an issue that always bothered me since I am playing X4. When something said "Unknown Object", I was able to make out that this is a Jump Gate (apart from that that apparently scanners don't work for objects less than 100km away?). This mod changes this behaviour considerably. One will have to fly to a "?" on the map, or at least get close to it, to make out what something is.

The scale factor is not uniform, and is applied differently, depending on the type of system. I have experimented with re-scaling the map before, and this is a result of what I learned. It is as follows:

- Normal systems got an upscale between 9x and 12x times
- "Embedded" smaller systems (Saturn I, II, Titan for example) got an upscale between 4.5x and 6x times

Smaller systems cannot be scaled much further as their skybox is apparently smaller than normal systems... one would eventually hit that "wall" and just be in complete black space. To mitigate this issue, the smaller systems got a smaller scale - but it's still big enough to notice a change.


Resources / regions

Regions with resources, so asteroids, gas clouds, and hybrid regions containing both, have NOT been modified. The reason lies in the technical nature of the game. Every asteroid and gas cloud is its own entity which the CPU has to process... this means where it is, its contents, has it been mined, and if so, which yield was acquired... and so on. If I scale this up as well - meaning in amounts (also number of asteroids) and dimensions of a region - the game will maybe produce 5 FPS on every machine. For this reason the regions have not been scaled. Maybe at some point I will find a way to do so. 


Ship engines

All ship engines continue to function as before - no changes have been made to those. In some systems, a Jump Gate may now be about 1,600km away. If you have an engine that can propel you with about 8,000m/s in Travel mode, you will need 200 seconds, or 3 minutes and 20 seconds, to traverse this distance. Applying a good engine for these distances becomes much more important.

Conversely, AI ships such as Xenon and Kh'aak will also need that travel time to get somewhere, which means you can base your strategy for their arrival somewhere (or your arrival somewhere) around this factor of time. If anything, a side-effect of this mod is that it will probably give you more time to prepare defenses and offenses... but the same goes for Xenon and Kh'aak too - so be aware of that.


Scanning and scanner range

So that you can still find everything in a system, but not all at once (one should still have fun exploring), I have increased the scanner range to 750km. As many systems are now larger than this, you most likely will only find some of the objects to be found in a system... you still have to perform some scanning sweeps in different positions to uncover all objects. In smaller systems you will probably see all objects in one scanning sweep.
Highways

Local and Ring Highways will immediately cease to function when using this mod (apart from that I personally always hated this Highway thing). According to my tests, the highway "columns" and the associated model(s) with those Highways seem to have a fixed length and size, which depend on the fixed locations of the connecting Jump Gates. But since the Gates are being moved and spread around the sector, the Highways no longer function and result in lonely, essentially useless strips for high-speed boosts. For this reason, start a new custom save with those disabled.

At least in my testing, the Highways appeared and work as intended, but they are very short and disconnected, so there is not much use in them.


Unknown entities with "?" outside a sector on map

In some systems, you will encounter stray "?" icons on the map which appear outside the border of a sector. Simply fly to that marker. This will then not only place it inside the sector, but also leave it fixed in that location so that it does not go "stray" again. But then on the other hand, I did have this phenomenon happen in a vanilla save also. May not be related to this mod.


Local superhighways "frozen"

This issue is now fixed.

I have added the optional file "Local Supergateway", which adds Accelerators to all systems which have Superhighways. NPCs can and will use those also.

I have encountered the occasional issue in testing where local superhighways (connecting one smaller system to another) suddenly freezes in its animation and stops working for you (not for NPCs). In this case save the game (normal save, not quicksave), exit, and load your game again. Animation may still be frozen - but the highway works then.


Ventures

... cannot be used/done/played with this mod. Obviously.

!! IMPORTANT !!
!! READ THESE POINTS! !!

- Requires ALL DLCs - including Kingdom End
- Using this mod absolutely requires a new save!
- A new custom save in which you disable the local and ring Highways is HIGHLY recommended (read point about this below)
- Any save using this mod will continue to require this mod as the locations of everything are dependent on this data
- Local and Ring Highway(s) DO NOT WORK! It seems the models used for the highways have a fixed length and size, and depend on vanilla Jump Gate positions. These change with this mod, thus severing the Highway connections. NPCs will act confused when leaving a lonely Highway strip
Technical notes:
- The scaling was done by extracting the corresponding map XML files from the game's data
- The XML files were run through a PHP script which evaluated the X, Y and Z positions, and then applied the scale
- The PHP script got minimum and maximum scaling values for normal and small systems, then find a random number between those two and then apply this scale, hence making the scale not uniform and feel more unique

- PHP script can be provided for your own tweaking if you want to. Script is only 147 lines in size

Questions, issues, comments, or praises? Post them in the comments and I will come back to you.