Graphics options . . .

[Whiplash 1983]

Hey FD - How about adding another graphics option just below LOW.
A monochrome hidden line removal wireframe mode with no textures or surface mapping.
Great right?

Then I could use my old laptop to play it again.
- except the loader would still expect a Cadillac (or Rolls Royce) even for a single passenger.

 

[metatheurgist]

I do think a mode where you play the game with just the holo model you see when loading would be interesting.

 

[Whiplash 1983]

Understood.
But . . .

Some of us have been playing for 35 years and the graphics (though well done and interesting in and of themself), are un-necessary for some of my interests and I would like the ability to load and run the game on the road on my $5,000 M1 Alienware laptop I built just for that purpose six months before it became obsolete to the Horizons version loader which refused to load due to under-spec. dual Nvidia 280m graphics cards running in SLI configuration. The machine is still sitting unused.

Be nice if the loader would load on anything and then let you choose a graphics mode and at least try to perform.

 

[Morbad]

At this point, it doesn't matter what they do to the graphics, it's not going to run on a 280M because the 280M does not support the graphics API the game engine uses.

The 280M was launched in March 2009 and the Alienware models equipped with them are very nearly ten years old. If you paid $5k for any laptop of that era six months before the ED Kickstarter, let alone six months before Horizons, you paid ten times what it was worth.

If you don't care about graphics, you can get a laptop that will muddle through ED on low for around 500 dollars and something that's decisively faster at anything a decade old top-of-the-line Alienware can do for slightly more.

 

[MickyG1982]

Game requires DirectX 11

Card(s) Support DirectX 10

Even if there was a "Wireframe" mode the game would not run, simply because of that (& now massively obsolete graphics drivers as the 200 Series of cards has not been supported now for many years by NVIDIA...)

 

[Whiplash 1983]

Yeah. Really sad eh? Bought just months before the new I-Core processors came out and obsoleted the whole thing.
Now it sits beside my old Commodore portable SX C64 (which still loads and runs my original copy of Elite by the way).

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]