Web Fed News Yearbooks - July 1998

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

Explorers and POs rejoiced in July because the new version of FedTerm Loaded was released, and it incorporated Genesis, the offline planet builder. Players who had been waiting to use the new tool to create beautiful planets sprang into action. Unfortunately some of them were hit by some bugs in the uploading routines to do with non-standard characters in descriptions, such as tabs and curly quotes.

We launched the buddy scheme where players get free time for introducing a friend to Fed.

Hazed onlined the planet Deep which was put together using Genesis, with a prize puzzle.

The FedSummer Madness planet Grease was opened up, with a very difficult puzzle that had players sweating for weeks.

Hazed completely redesigned the web site, with a brand new look which was less graphcis-intensive, thus speeding up the time it takes to load the pages. She also shuffled things around to make navigating easier.

Also new on the web site was the ibgames bookshop, which started by listing the books which inspired the locations on Starbase1 in Arena Space. The bookshop has links to Amazon.com, the online bookshop. The ibgames bookshop is at http://www.ibgames.net/shop/index.html.

Alan started posting book reviews to his site at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/.

SHAVED HER LEGS, THEN HE WAS A SHE

People who have been reading the old GEnie/Aries news bulletins that I uploaded last week have been puzzled about one thing. Why, they wonder, is Bella referred to in those old newses as "she". Isn't Bella a "he"?

Well, yes and no.

Bella is, of course, the Fed character of Alan Lenton, the creator of Fed. Alan is a boy, in real life. But Bella is a girl, in Fed, and always has been.

Real-life men playing Fed-women is not really unusual in Fed, although generally the people doing it prefer to keep it secret! But the origin of the character Bella goes back to before the start of the universe. Alan used to play a UK multi-player game called MUD, which was the very first game of its kind, the origin of all the MUDs and MOOs and MUSHes out on the Internet now. You can still play the original MUD - it's running on Compuserve under the title British Legends.

But I digress... in MUD, male and female characters had slightly different attributes: boys got extra strength, and girls got extra stamina. Alan wanted to do something that required a high stamina so she set up a female character. She wanted to use the name Belladonna, but it was too long, so she settled on Bella. And this was the character that she continued using, and built up to the highest rank in the game - Archwiz.

Then when Alan created Fed, he brought the character of Bella over to his new universe, and since then Bella has always been his official persona. So you may hear us refer to Bella as he or as she, depending on how the mood takes us, and we'll be equally correct whichever term we use.

HOW OBJECT RECYCLING WORKS

Alright, just one more Genesis-related piece of news this week.

Because Genesis makes it so much easier to design a planet, a lot of people who have never made modifications to their off-the-shelf mini-planet are suddenly gripped with the planet-design fever. Which is jolly good news!

Unfortunately, some of you have not read the manual which explains what you can and can't do on a planet, and how things work. Consequently you've been getting your knickers in a twist because things are not happening as you expect.

One of the things that has people confused is object recycling. So here's an explanation!

Under normal circumstances, an object stays where it has been left in Fed. If nobody picks it up, ever, it just stays there. If someone picks it up, takes it somewhere else, then drops it, it will stay in its new location. There is no auto-recycle mechanism that moves objects back to where they belong.

Objects get recycled when they are taken out of the game. If you give an object to a mobile, that takes it out of the game; so does logging off or dying while holding an object. When the object goes out of the game, it is added to the recycling queue. A random number between 5 and 55 is generated, and that is the time in minutes that the object will spend in the recycle queue. When that time is up, the object will reappear in the game.

So there is no standard, set time for recycling; it's a random length of time. Although you an bet your uninsured life that if you are waiting for something to reappear, it will take the maximum possible time! Murphy's Law rules ok.

Where will it reappear? That depends on how you set the values for your object. There are two important values that determine the object's home. The first is its start location. This is the place the object will be in when the game fires up, or when you bring your planet online. The other value is the offset from start. This is the number of locations away from the start location that the object might reappear in after recycling. So for example, if an object has a start location of 45 and an offset of 5, it might reappear in any location between 45 and 50. An offset of 0 means the object will always show up in the start location.

That range of locations, the places where the object might appear after recycling, is the object's home locations. That's important because cleaner mobiles have a part to play in all this, too.

You've all seen the cleaning droid which roams the Solar System planets, visiting each location in turn. Its function is to tidy up any objects it finds that are in the wrong place - that is, outside of their home locations. When it finds a misplaced object, the object is removed from the game and put on the recycle queue. You can have a cleaning droid or something similar on your planet; simply make a mobile and flag it as a cleaner.

There is one other way you can force an object to be recycled. You can put a flag on a room so that any object that is dropped in the room vanishes - it's removed from the game and recycled. This flag is the one that confuses people the most, because it has a very misleading name. The flag is called Lockable. Despite this name, the flag doesn't do anything to lock doors or close off entrances; however you need to make sure that you set this flag on any locations that can only be reached by someone carrying a specific object (ie any lockable location, hence the name).

Why? Because, if you don't set the flag, someone could use the object to get into the room, then drop the object, then walk out again. Thus nobody else would be able to get into the room, because the "key" would be locked behind the door. Setting the Lockable flag on the room means this can't happen, because if the object gets dropped, it gets recycled.

That's enough explanation for now. Next week I'll explain how to force someone to drop an object before they leave a room.

If there are any other aspects of designing a planet that you find confusing let me know, and I'll write something for future editions of the news.

HOW MANY WORKTHINGS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A NEW ONE?

You'd think that with the ease of cloning new bodies, you would only need one WorkThing to make a new one - or an army of new ones. In fact, you would only need a tiny part of a WorkThing, a fragment of DNA, such as could be extracted from a hair or a flake of skin, to bring forth new life in abundance. If they can do it for dinosaurs, surely they can do it for WorkThings!

Unfortunately, cloning isn't cheap, and there are drawbacks. Clones can have their growth process sped up enormously to bring a clone to adult-hood in just a few weeks; but this process destroys the clone's brain. This isn't a problem in the insurance business, where the possession of a brain would be a big problem ethically. A blank slate into which the personality and memories of the recently-deceased is far preferable to a thinking being who has to be brain-wiped in order to allow the dead to live.

However, WorkThings do need to have some power of independent thought. Not a great deal, admittedly, but it does take a modicum of intelligence, a tiny spark of awareness, to operate a factory production line even in these days of automation. So the clones can't be force-grown, they have to be left to mature at their own, natural, pace.

In which case... why bother? As I said, cloning is expensive - a lot more expensive than nature's way of reproducing the species. Far better to put two WorkThings together and let nature take its course. We all know that WorkThings are highly sexed and highly fertile (many and varied have been the rumors concerning factory and planet owners taking advantage of WorkThings' overtly sexual behavior; but we won't go into that now). They breed like rabbits. So why bother to clone them, when they can do the job for you just as fast and for a fraction of the price?

So, then, to answer the original question: it takes two WorkThings to produce another one.

The significance of this, in case you were wondering, is that if you start a build on your planet, not only must you have enough WorkThings to carry out the build but you must have two left over, to breed and make you a new workforce!

2 - 4 - 6 - 8 - Let your WorkThings procreate!