Made my first million! Quite enjoyed having a larger jump distances but I think now I'll start playing around in the other areas of the game. Need to find a 360 pad though... I knew I should have kept one.

Rub it in, why don't you?

HOTAS makes all the difference, Zio. It really does. I was sceptical too.

Offer of me bringing down my Rift (and HOTAS!) to Hemel when it's all received still stands

I can actually run it maxed and with a bit of AA at 1920x1200 with my trusty GTX460 1GB card, and although the frame rate certainly isn't 60 fps, in general it runs perfectly well and dogfights are smooth. I've got a fairly up to date CPU (Core i5-4670k), and it seems to be using about 30% of that.

It's also worth remembering for anyone who backed it in Kickstarter that the beta is at most 15 quid up from that regardless of your tier.

Sandbox spaceship game Elite: Dangerous may have only - only! - raised £1.58m ($2.5m) on Kickstarter, but that was just a fraction of the original budget.

"The original budget, because we put a lot of our money towards it, was £8m," David Braben - the man in charge - told me at Gamescom. And, he added, "it's grown by quite a lot".

"We're a public company so we can't put out figures without first putting them to the City, but let's just say we're very, very happy."

It may not be the $50m (£30m) that Star Citizen - that other crowd-funded space game - has managed to raise, but Braben's studio Frontier Developments has been turning out games reliably for a decade, and turning a profit.

Chris Roberts' Cloud Imperium Games, on the other hand, was founded in 2012 to make Star Citizen. Will it be as efficient - will it matter?

Elite: Dangerous continues to make money as people buy beta access at £50 a pop. This also buys you the full game.

In mid-August when we spoke, more than 75,000 people were playing the Elite: Dangerous beta, providing "more and more money that moves ever closer to the game breaking even in a really good way".

"Oh we already have enough [money] to see it through," Braben added, almost chastising me for suggesting such a thing. "It all means it just de-risks it in a really good way."

...

I could be tempted by this as long as I can buy it in a dvd style case and there is no "always on" internet thing.

In fact I paid £35 for C&C in 1996 so as long as I can get a physical box and no steam or shit like that I'll buy it - like I did with Freelancer in 2003.




I just know this wont happen same as people buy internet kindle electronic books whilst I still buy physical paper books.

Hey ho!

I still don't really understand how they plan to fund the server costs down the line, though. Maybe more stuff along the lines of the paintjobs currently on offer? I guess there are more surprises waiting ahead.

No news on beta 2 though, although now there's rampant speculation that it'll be released to coincide with the 30th Anniversary.

Hopefully it'll drop around the same time I get my DK2 - whenever that may be!

They've designed it so that even though entering and dropping out of supercruise is obviously intended to partially mask the loading of instances, it's not necessary to use the supercruise function to fly places (it just takes a colossal amount of time to travel large distances without supercruise). For instance, I was interdicted once on my way to a station and forced out of supercruise a few hundred km from the station - still well beyond how far you'd appear from the station by supercruising there normally. Once I'd dealt with the encounter I decided to just use conventional flight to go the rest of the way to the station to see what would happen - and sure enough, once I was close enough I could see the station far in the distance, getting closer.

Get an Elite 'remake' for free this weekend

http://www.vg247.com/2014/09/17/classic ... -download/

You know how, when you close your eyes and hold your arm out in front of you, your brain knows exactly where your hand is no matter how much you wave your arm about?