Thank you most sincerely! Going to try and set some hours aside tomorrow to try and dive in straight away.
Although I just noticed I don't even have enough disk space to both download and then install the game (when did games start being this large anyway?!) :), so going to need to do some backing up and reshuffling things over my various harddisks, too. Long overdue, that, really, but somewhat vexing that I now need to spend time on that first.

:D X3 is really not that large by modern standards. Game installation kits have started taking up 2DVDs (or a double-layer DVD) a loooooooong time ago.

You don't even want to know how large the Witcher 3 installer is...

Anyway, never too late to get things nice, tidy and organized :P. Remember to leave some free space on your OS partition also, or you'll get terrible gaming performance.

Have fun!

*tentatively raises hand* If the game is playable with keyboard and mouse... Can't vouch for well-written logs though.

Yes certainly is. Despite owning a joystick I have disconnected it at home to play X3TC with mouse and keyboard and when away from home (1/3-1/2 of the time) I just play on a laptop with a decent mouse added.

Yes! Then I'm definitely interested.

Actually, KB and mouse is the way to go as far as I am concerned. If you ever played Freelancer, the ship controls will be very familiar :)

Not having played Freelancer is one of my biggest pet shames. ΟΓΖ

This is similar in many ways to Freelancer except the world is more alive and everything is more and more complicated. Sometimes when it feels like too much I miss Freelancer.

Scratch one Xenon K (in a xenon sector). I'm getting the hang of that now. I was strafing fine, it was the distance that was getting me. Keeping them at arms length allowed me to dispose of a K and escorts while only losing about 30% shields. Unfortunately it didn't drop anything. I've heard they can drop some nice weapons that sell for a million or so.

Thanks for your help.

You are welcome ;)

One hint, do not shoot till broken, stop at 80% and keep nagging a bit and if still nothing destroy. If you just kill, no drop :-O

For collecting, park a a transporter (QUICK one) outside of the battlezone and just tell him to pick up.

So you learned strafing ;) Good done my apprentice ;)

Ok, then please go over the "terms & conditions" I've laid out in my first post, and if you're fine with all that and I have your commitment (don't know if you've gone over them or not, so I'm just making sure you know what you're getting yourself into), I'll just forward you the code :).

Thank you, but I think I'll wishlist this game until I can do a proper job with it.

Pro-tip: <i>X3: Albion Prelude</i> has support for the NaturalPoint TrackIR!

Hopefully whoever wins has one, it's a great lil piece of hardware for those games that do support it!

Not a diary entry: Progress so far: Freed up 20GB of harddisk space (easy to do with a long-since-finished duplicate folder of 9GB of photos in my 'in progress' workspace, 3GB of solr logs files for a project I haven't worked on in 6 years, etc). Downloaded the Linux installer. Discovered it didn't want to run. Was grouchy from hunger at the time, so decided to just get the Windows version and run it under wine. Did that, and it works flawlessly. Learned to maneuver my ship a bit, fired on a spaceship, was killed by rockets. Started a new game, followed some actual instructions and was destroyed bumping into the space station while trying to figure out where the hell the docking station was. So, off to a good start, I'd say! :) But no sounds other than beeps :( and the wine appdb instructions for fixing that point to files which aren't there anymore. So today I'm first going to re-download the Linux installer and see if I can't make that work.

After that, I might have a look at the manual...