SpaceSimCentral

Some here might remember me from alt.fan.elite in the 1990s, from #alt.fan.elite from the early noughties, and the Egosoft community during the noughties. I've loved Elite since... ooh, 186, I think I first played it, and I'm still a sucker for freeform space opera now.I was heavily involved with Egosoft, writing missions, bulletin board texts, testing and so forth (which earned me a few spots in the credits and a copy of the games I worked on) and I was the principle coder of the Argonopedia, the biggest X2 fan site and a resource which is now sadly lacking in development or currency.I had to abandon the X series, since the specs required to run the game quickly ran away from what I had during X3's development. I've only just replaced that old machine, and the replacement probably couldn't run it either, even if it did have a copy of Windows.I'm the founding member of Tyneside Linux User Group, which is now well over a decade old, and almost certainly able to survive without me if I ever leave, which I consider to be a success. I've been running Linux as my primary OS since 1994, only having DOS at first for the sake of Frontier (and FFE, when it was released) and Windows for the X series. I no longer have Windows in my life at home at all, and it was with much rejoicing that I discovered Pioneer last week. Oolite is lovely, but honestly, Elite was spoiled for me by Frontier.Imagine my astonishment when I found out that Tom from alt.fan.elite was the principle developer of Pioneer, and the maintainer is John from JJFFE; both people I've known for ages. Naturally, I jumped onto the IRC channel, and there everybody was! I'm getting well stuck in with testing now, and having a blast.So, er, hello!Brian Ronald

Welcome to SSC BrianYeah there is a lot of interest around Pioneer and with it able to be played on Linux as well that is a huge plus. Only thing that has ever stopped me from going straight Linux at home is the games. I hope games like Pioneer will show other developers that Linux does have a gaming scene and you can game on it. I haven't had too much time to play with Pioneer with SSC keeping me busy but once things calm down I tend to sit down with the latest alpha because last time I played with it was alpha3

Hi BrianWelcome to the SSC Glad your enjoying Pioneer. Tomm, JJ and the rest of the team have done a great job so far. I hope the project goes from strength to strength.