Elite Dangerous launches 10,000 player fleet

[RockDoctor]

Elite Dangerous got a write up in last weeks - sorry, 2 weeks back - New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... ce-voyage/

"On 13 January, more than 10,000 people fired up Elite Dangerous, charged their ship’s faster-than-light drive and set off on the first hyperspace jump on an epic eight-month journey to the outer edges of the Milky Way.

The 200,000 light-year voyage to Beagle Point, one of the galaxy’s most distant star systems, will take the giant fleet across vast regions of uncharted space, including the Boreas Expanse, the Galactic Aphelion and the Abyss. “It’s a challenge in both endurance and navigation,” says Erimus Kamzel, one of the mission’s leaders."
It seems - as far as I can tell from the review, that the current version of ED can now get star data in real-time (I'm going to guess from SIMBAD, or some version of the recent Gaia data release, possibly hosted on ED's servers, otherwise they're really going to piss off the astronomers) and then make some inferences about the system. For example, there is a moderate association between a star's spectroscopic "metallicity" and it's number of orbiting gas giants.

I signed up for ED away back when, but I hadn't noticed that it was a Windows-only game so haven't made any effort to pursue it further.

[Cody]

I'm reminded of the First Great Expedition (was that its name?) - heady times, before it became apparent one could make Sgr A* in ten days!

I hadn't noticed that it was a Windows-only game...

Didn't ED have a Mac port? Or was that abandoned once FD had copped the money?

[RockDoctor]

Didn't ED have a Mac port? Or was that abandoned once FD had copped the money?

Blind stag (no-eye deer). As I recall, I was so narked over my mistake that I went off hunting and discovered Oolite.

[phkb]

Didn't ED have a Mac port?

Yes, they did, but development was halted because of technical limitations: E:D Forum Mac announcement

[tsoj]

If you're on Linux, you can try this: https://github.com/redmcg/wine/releases ... .16-4_Beta
I haven't tried it but is maybe worth a try.

(Proton is part of steam, based on wine: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton)