Oh, how wonderful and exciting X Rebirth looked in the run-up to release, but oh, how harsh and unforgiving is the cold light of reality. The space sim is more than a mite wonky in its current state, but developer Egosoft has plans to fix it up, and detailed them in a new dev update.

Egosoft's top priorities are fixing crashes and "gameplay showstoppers," and improving performance, studio director Bernd Lehahn explained in a forum post. He says Ego has already fixed "the most common crashes" but is still chasing a few down, and is looking at gameplay bugs from trade ships which start ignoring orders to some which even block progress in the storyline.

As for performance, the problems are with a mix of certain situations in the game and specific hardware configurations. Curiously Lehahn says high-end PCs are suffering some of the worst performance, and that he's witnessed the game running as badly on a hefty gaming PC running as it did on a laptop with onboard graphics. Which is a bit shoddy. Egosoft has another thread with a little more info and a few tips that might help, if you're one of the afflicted.

Once those areas are running a little better, Egosoft would like to start on "small but important features" requested by players, such as adding auto-saves and improving the UI. Then, after that, will come the "bigger features," like turning your head in the cockpit and external camera views.