That explosion represents what may have been happening inside your PC.
Egosoft has released the latest in its sprawling space epic X series today, in the form of X Rebirth. It … has one or two problems, some of which are to with bugs and others that seem down to optimisation issues. There’s already a pinned thread in the Steam forums for the game, attempting to collect all of the bugs encountered by players, along with requests for additional features.
One show-stopping bug in particular seems to cause regular crashes for those using Realtek audio chips. If your copy of X Rebirth is crashing at the point where the bar shows 100% loading, then you should give this Egosoft-endorsed fix a try. Right-click your audio devices in the system tray, find your default ‘playback’ device and navigate through ‘properties’ to ‘advanced’ options. See what your default playback is set to, and (if necessary) change it to 16 bit, 48000 Hz (DVD quality.)
Some players are reporting that 24 bit, 48000 (Studio quality) works too, so it’s worth experimenting with. An Egosoft representative in the thread has this to say: “We’re on it and fix it as soon as we can. Meanwhile, please follow the steps mentioned in the starting post.”
IncGamers will be publishing a review of X Rebirth in the future, but as beta code only functioned intermittently for us and the game is gigantic, we won’t be rushing with this one. Early indications show it’s pretty rough around the edges.
