1981

Dude you really should be doing some of the missions on the bulletin board. Haul a couple tons of crap (biowaste!) for 2k, then another four tons of silver for 20k.

Or you could risk it all in your free sidewinder and go pwn some pirate butt near the nav beacon of a nearby anarchy system. It helps to carry at least one can of a trade good. This makes hungry pirates shooty pirates which helps sorting the wolves from the sheep.

1982

I know, I’m being somewhat facetious about my money-making exploits, mostly because I’ve yet to settle into a comfortable gaming position, traveling as I am, snatching a bit of game here and there. Trying to play this with a mouse is a serious exercise in NOPE, and until I can get my hands on either a 360 controller or a HOTAS setup (both of which are currently being investigated) it’s going to be dabble-time. The money I’ve earned so far has all been from bulletin board missions, which I’m enjoying, and there are certainly more lucrative ones available that I’ve not grabbed yet because I don’t trust my control setup. I’m not worried nor complaining about lack of money, in fact I’m rather enjoying feeling like a very tiny fish in a very, very big ocean.

1983

Thanks folks. Probably won’t do me any good when I finally try to land, but i have lateral motion set to side to side joystick. That seems logical, but we’ll see on the 16th…

1984

Okay, I finally made a little progress this morning!

It sure seemed to take a long time to install/re-sync again last night, but I did get the single player training installed and was able to get through the “Upgrade” install and enter the main game also. It seems I am in a place called Trevithick Dock in the LHS 3447 system which says it is Federation, Democracy, Agriculture. This was my first time in the main game and I was browsing around the menus and information available. I see there is a traffic report, which I am used to getting similar in Eve Online through 3rd party website info, so that is neat. It also listed the nearby bounties and one was over 2.5 million. Wow! I better stay away from those pilots.

I finished up the training missions and even performed the docking ones without trouble the first time. It is different, but my time in Evochron Mercenary recently helped a lot with the entry into the stations. I had some trouble learning travel for the first time in the training mission, but eventually figured out how to get there. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to enter the spinning dodecahedron like station and I initially tried landing on the surface of it, heh. I finally realized if it was the target I could see little arrows on the faces pointing toward where the entry slot was to get inside to the docking platforms and finally was able to complete it after searching for 20 minutes.

I joined in with group play the first time, but have no idea how to start. It sounds like I should maybe take a few delivery missions to start? Can I mine right away or do I need money to buy one of the extra modules for that? I will have to poke around the settings and see if I can get my headset configured and ready.

Overall, first impressions look very good. I can’t wait to dig into it more.

1985

It sure seemed to take a long time to install/re-sync again last night,

Yeah, the client is super-slow. One of the downsides of distributing yourself as a smallish dev, I suppose.

1986

Yes. I expect Tuesday to be disastrous when those of us who pre-ordered all try to download.

1987

isnt it peer-to-peer? should be allright. and if not. whatevs. imo having a slow download for a day or so is not a disaster. a fucking hurricane destroying your town, your house and everything you own and drowning two thirds of your family is a fucking disaster.

1988

Yeah, it doesn’t bother me if I have to wait a bit longer especially if it allows Frontier to make a little more money.

I decided to play a bit and flew to another station to look for some missions and had some trouble trying to dock there. I thought I was at the proper numbered dock that they told me to go to, but seems I got mixed up somehow. Then the timer was running out on me and I requested to dock again, which was denied, heh. Then they proceeded to rip my ship apart while I scrambled to exit. I was pretty sure I was landing on the proper spot the second time right as the timer was running out, but not sure what happened. It showed a target and that it was turning from red to blue when I was over the top of it, but when I slowly used the down thrust to land, it would just bounce off of it. I double checked I had my landing gear out so not sure what happened. Oh well :).

EDIT: Oh, also it told me they were coming down in 20 minutes for a patch, so they may be doing that now. I am not sure how long it will be, though.

1989

One possible problem is that you need to be facing the right way to be able to dock, confused the hell out of me when it happened to me.

1990

I also don’t mind having to wait a bit. But I’d bet the officials forums will have scads of pre-order owners screaming if they can’t at least try it out on day one, and it is in that sense that I mean disaster.

That said, I wasn’t aware the client DL is peer-to-peer, so perhaps things will be slow but manageable. I for one probably won’t even try until late in the evening.

1991

I finally caught up on this thread. A few pages ago, I was really excited about preordering my own copy! But then the enthusiasm died down as I read the rest of the pages.

Central to my hesitation though is the idea that I’m just clinging to the idea of liking space Sims since it used to be my favorite genre. That I am fooling myself into thinking I can get back into the genre from a sense of nostalgia that’s misplaced. The last space Sim I enjoyed playing through was Tachyon: The Fringe. I think that was back in 2001 maybe? Thirteen years later, maybe I should just admit to myself that it was a genre I loved back then, but not anymore.

On the other hand, the handful of space Sims I’ve tried in the meantime have been pretty poor. Whether it was the Square Enix one on the Xbox 360 or the crappy ones that I’ve tried on the PC in the intervening years like some in the X series or ones which I can’t even remember names anymore.

Maybe before I preorder, I need to install I war 2 and find out if I still like the genre.

1992

Are you sure? I-War 2’s prologue is a bit overtly difficult, especially with its last missions.

1993

I think KrayzKrok said it very well and i couldnt improve on that: “feeling like a very little fish in a very big ocean”. Few games do this that well.

1994

That’s exactly the feeling I want too. Love it. I think I’ll be streaming more today. Yay!

1995

What caused the drop in enthusiasm? This game is awesome (for my tastes, anyway :)).

1996

Here’s the Gamma 2.05 changelog:

Gamma 2.05

  • Fix a rare crash that could occur if a ship belonging to a stale but valid faction shot someone
  • Fix a rare crash that would be caused by a missile that was partially constructed (or partially shut down) appearing on someone’s radar
  • Fix rare crash in nebulae sorting
  • Fix a rare crash when hyperspacing
  • Prevent crash if we fail to allocated vertex or index data
  • Scrolling with the Game Pad in a module slot in Outfitting causes the highlight to disappear
  • Fix unrecoverable error when trying to abandon a mission
  • Stop missions disappearing when switching servers
  • Stop in progress missions disappearing when switching servers
  • Reputation fix for massacre missions
  • Decrease many reputation gatings for missions
  • Increase number of missions on a board
  • Fix independent permit missions
  • Fix salvage mission contracts so that they tell the player what system to search
  • Make sure that permit missions are included in the upload
  • Added in game links (in the training descriptions) to the external tutorial videos
  • Fix for several system specific mission components failing. Specifically addresses salvage and assassination missions
  • Don’t allow the route finder to make more then one step which performs a galaxy octree search to improve performance
  • Filters are reset when you exit from the map fixed
  • Avoid showing trade route lines for the same commodity flowing both ways
  • Update stations to allow for planet classification changes (fixes some missing stations)
  • Fix a bunch of incorrect meta-data about terraformed planets
  • Mission jump distance corrected for long range jump distances
  • New batch translations (French & German - not text complete yet)
  • Better debug output for starsystem web request errors
  • Rename slave category to ‘slavery’ to hopefully reduce confusion about slave legality
  • Various text fixes
  • Fix erroneous cargo item “CropHaarvestors” in USS
1997

Maybe not I war 2 then. Got any suggestions? I’d prefer something with Newtonian physics, but I’ll take the WC model if that’s a better test.

1998

I thought it was the lack of good games, which is not in dispute, but maybe over the years, I’ve lost the taste for it in other ways too? I’m not sure, just speculating. $50 is a lot to spend to discover this about yourself.

I recently contemplated removing racing games from my play lists, calculating that it would free up more time for me for playing everything else. It would free up more time than giving up epic RPGs like Skyrim or Fallout 3, for example. But then Forza 5 came out last year and I loved my time with it so much, I thought, wow, how can I give this up? Maybe I just need a similar reminder from a good Space Sim.

1999

OK, fuck it. I ordered it.

$56.48 at the current exchange rate from Paypal.

2000

But it seems like you love a good racing game. Can’t you cut out something else, like showering or mowing the lawn?