Thanks for the info, someday i'll get around to digging into hlsl enough to actually understand...Today I found a newsletter from GameSpot announcing a World Premiere:
Visit GameSpot on Friday and be the first to download the DarkStar One demo
The thing is, it’s already on my hard disk and I already played through the story part of the demo. After checking two sites and running the game once again, it got clear to me: I have the german version, downloaded from a german site. So its probally the world premiere for the english version - but that’s not mentioned. 
About the game: if you like games like Elite, Free Space and Freelance then you can download it and give it a try. I liked it. It’s very colorful which one may like or not but at least it stands apart from other products like EVE online (very beautiful)
