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?

I do hear you with the graphics bug - on mine the gamma seems to go wrong and things appear much too bright. Going in and out of the galaxy or system maps resolves it temporarily though.

Being able to just say, "Computer, landing gear" or "Computer, request docking" has its benefits.

Now that there is an actual release date, i've done a pre-order.

I need joystick thingy to go with it I expect, I want a reasonable one for cheap monies, any recommendations?

Now that there is an actual release date, i've done a pre-order.

I need joystick thingy to go with it I expect, I want a reasonable one for cheap monies, any recommendations?

This one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thrustmaster-T- ... B001CXYMFS

However, he said, it faced strong competition from another title, Star Citizen,... Star Citizen is scheduled to be released in 2016 though some parts of it are available to backers already.

Only thing I use the keyboard for is lateral thrust (ie only when landing), landing gear, and jump drive. Everything else is on the pad.

For those hoping for an option for a 100% offline game, it seems the latest newsletter basically rules out that possibility, unfortunately.

I noticed that, but all throughout the game's development they've been saying there will be three modes: an online multiplayer mode, an online single player mode and an offline single player mode. So I'll be extremely surprised if they back down from that now.

Frontier now has to recuperate 10M somehow, and that's while paying for servers as well. My guess is they aren't going to get much more money from backers after this, so Lord knows how they plan to make this work. I don't even want to think this, but I feel that a subscription is going to be unavoidable.

The game is fundamentally architectured around the principle that all player-to-player "serving" is done by one player's machine, not by centralised server farm; similar to how, say, a CoD match is negotiated when you start it up. So the server bill for E:D will be orders of magnitude smaller than for a traditional MMO.

More fundamental than that is the simple fact that without the 'master' server or servers, (even if they're only there for initial authentication), the whole thing just stops working, however streamlined they make it and/or offload the load to P2P style transactions.

When Frontier took to Kickstarter to fund Elite: Dangerous in 2012, netting £1,578,316, they said folks would be able to play an offline singleplayer mode. They weren’t entirely sure how it’d work, given that many of their space sim plans involved an online and interconnected galaxy, but they said it’d be in there. With Elite’s official launch less than a month away, Frontier have now said that won’t happen. It’ll have an online singleplayer mode, as always planned, but no offline support.

“A fully offline experience would be unacceptably limited and static compared to the dynamic, ever unfolding experience we are delivering,” creator David Braben said in last Friday’s Elite newsletter. Naturally, players wanted to know what exactly that meant, so executive producer Michael Brookes took to the forums to answer loads of questions.

Offline singleplayer will “probably not” ever get added, Brookes said. “We have put considerable time and effort to try and make this happen, but we’ve had to make this decision to make the game we set out to do. We would happily support offline play if it were possible for us to do so.”

An offline mode “is impractical rather than impossible, but circumstances mean that it cannot be done,” he explained. They can’t simply release a separate version without universe syncing, he explained, as so much of the game is server-side. “To make that happen we’d essentially have to create two games. The servers handle more than just the data, they handle all the key processes for interaction in the game, so trading, mission generation and background simulation to name a few.” And they don’t want to release server code to folks “as it contains the secrets of the galaxy.”

As for why Frontier have let people believe for so long that offline was coming, Brookes said “Because we wanted to be certain before announcing.” Reading his responses and Braben’s statement, though, it seems they’ve been fairly clear for a while about the game they’ve wanted to make – which, as they say, doesn’t really allow for offline singleplayer.

If you’re unhappy with this, Brookes pointed out that they offer refunds. They don’t have a firm policy in place for backer refunds, as everything is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. They should probably be a bit more proactive about that.