Web Fed News Yearbooks - June 2000

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

Age of Adventure, ibgames new role-playing game, opened for free play testing - details at http://www.ibgames.net/age/index.html. This prompted yet another revamp of the top page for the ibgames web site, and a splitting of the What's New page into separate pages for each game.

The first season of Fed event leagues came to a close, and the winners were sent their prizes. The fighting league was topped by Eaglewing; Zrasputin was the brainiest, winning the Cerebral league; and top of the Exploration league was Avoca.

Alan wrote an article about the plans to break up Microsoft at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/technical/microsoft.html, and a technical article about coding maps in a game, at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/technical/maps.html.

I wrote two new articles for my web page, one about my failure to take enough exercise, and the other about online bookshops. Find them at http://www.ibgames.net/fi/whatsnew.html.

SOL EXPOSE: KRYSTAL AND PUDDY

In order to write this week's Sol Expose, I had to find the mobile called Krystal so I could capture her description. Since she moves through all of the locations in the Solar System, she could have been absolutely everywhere, so I set out to teleport to every location until I found her, starting on Castillo (which has the lowest teleport numbers outside of space). Imagine my amazement when the second location I ported to, contained that wandering mobile! How lucky is that?

So, this week I want to talk about the mobile Krystal, together with another reference that is linked to her. First, let's take a look at Krystal:

Krystal the Muse drifts past you.
Krystal is engaged on her eternal task - gathering in the gossip for the micro-community! She looks knowingly at you and whispers into a recorder.

She seems like a typical newsdroid, just as you would expect to find in Fed DataSpace, but in fact she dates back to the days before Fed was even a twinkle in Bella's brain. Before then, the most popular multi-player game in England was called MUD - which stood for multi-user dungeon. It was the first game of this type ever to be written, originally on the computers of Essex university, and the term MUD is now used as a generic name for this kind of game.

A few years BF (before Fed), MUD was running on the commercial network, Compunet, and Bella was one of the high-ranking players. When she decided to write her own game, she put references to her friends from MUD into Fed. Krystal was one such MUD player, who was famous in the game community for writing a newsletter about players. Hence her search for gossip as she wanders round Fed.

A passing note should be made of another MUD player, Puddy, who was famous for dying very frequently. In that game, if you died, you lost your character completely - there was no such thing as insurance. So death was something of a big deal. When Alan put insurance into Fed, other game designers were horrified at the idea (as they were at many of his innovations, which are now taken as the norm for multi-player games)!

So Puddy, too, got her mention in Fed - not as a mobile, but as the name of the ward where players wake up when they die in Sol. As it says in the corridor outside:

Southwest is a door marked 'PUDDY MEMORIAL WARD.'

Is there anything you would like to be covered in a future Sol Expose? Write to feedback@ibgames.com and let me know.

MY GM

An email fell into the ibgames inbox yesterday with the subject line "My GM". My first thought was that this was some kind of branding exercise - after "I want My MTV" and "My AOL", someone was attempting to lay claim to the rank of Guild Master and personalize it as the most attractive and beneficial rank in the game.

Then I shook myself and realized the letter was simply a plea from a player. "I'm not sure if you can help, but..." the mail started. I sighed heavily. Surely this was going to be one of those badly spelt letters with no punctuation along the lines of:

"ive been serching for 3 weeks and i know ive visited evry loc but i just cant find my gm anywear please oh please help me find him tell me where he will be cos i want to b a trader and i just cant find the gm and i have mapped honest but he isnt their"

I prepared to fire off the standard reply about how to search for the GM successfully. Then I decided I'd better actually read the letter to find out exactly what this whingeing player was begging for.

Much to my surprise, the mail wasn't from someone who had a problem because they couldn't find their GM. It was from someone who had a problem because they HAD found their GM:

I'm not sure if you can help but I somehow accidentally stumbled on my GM and never saw her. Is there some chance that this is logged somewhere? I mean, heck, it's a big event when one finds ones GM! It makes for good stories of "I remember where I found MY GM" while sitting around the campfire... you know. :-) Really, how embarrassing to tell everyone - "I never saw mine! I just stepped right on her and kept on goin!" <G>

"Silowetkat"

That really is the first time I've ever been asked that! Sadly, I was unable to oblige, since the game doesn't store details of where the GM is found - just when. Silowetkat is doomed not to be able to join in those campfire story-telling sessions.

Of course she could always make something up.

Except that anyone who has read this article will know it's a lie.

Oh well.

MYSTERIOUS SUN OUTAGE CAUSES CHAOS

The entire Solar System was plunged into darkness earlier today, when the sun, center of the system, suffered an unexpected outage. Chaos ensued as night fell on all points of the planets at once. The cause of the darkness, which lasted for several hours, has yet to be established.

A Galactic Administration spokesthing spoke at a rowdy press conference, and appealed for calm, saying that the inhabitants of the Solar System should look upon the light failure as "nothing more than an extended eclipse".

Insurance companies were quick to brand the mystery blackness as "An act of God (or equivalent supreme being)", no doubt in an attempt to avoid paying out damage claims. However, the demi-goddess Hazed, who is generally reckoned to be the most approachable of the beings that might have that sort of power, disclaimed any responsibility.

Meanwhile, the GA's engineers are working flat-out to find out why it happened, and to ensure it does not happen again.

In financial news: shares in the Acme Torch Company went through the roof today...

ENGINEERS ANNOUNCE CAUSE OF SUN OUTAGE

Galactic Administration engineers today announced that they had traced the cause of the mysterious outage which plunged the Solar System into complete darkness for several hours.

A spokesdroid read from a prepared statement:

"The failure in the Solar System's lighting system was due to a complex set of circumstances, each of which would have had no serious effect had it happened singly; but the combination had the devastating effect that you all experienced.

"The first problem was a simple mechanical failure. You must realize that the equipment powering the sun is immeasurably old, and from time to time parts wear out. A built-in redundancy means that under normal circumstances, the load can be taken up by the rest of the machinery while the faulty part is repaired or replaced.

"On this occasion engineers rushed to the scene to carry out repairs. Unfortunately, in its zeal, one of the droids accidentally drilled through a cable connecting the faulty part to the central operation unit of the solar machine. This caused the complete failure of the unit.

"The powering down of the main sun unit should cause the backup sun to kick in, thus causing no more than a momentary flicker in the Solar System's ambient light. On this occasion, the backup generator failed to operate. Therefore, when the sun failed, the system was plunged into darkness.

"As to the cause of the failure in the backup solar unit, we have traced this to outside interference. The culprit is the cleaning droid. As he goes on his rounds, picking up litter and cleaning away dirt, he from time to time avails himself of convenient power circuits in order to recharge his cells. On this occasion, he unplugged the generator in order to plug himself in, and then failed to plug the generator back in when he had finished.

"So the blame for this breakdown, it seems, must be shared. The cleaning droid's negligence is a major factor; our engineers, we are embarrassed to say, played their part; and the wear and tear expected in a machine which has operated for so long. But none of those factors on their own would have caused this disaster; it was only the coincidence of all three serendipitously coming together that brought about the catastrophic failure.

"It seems that Murphy is still wreaking his havoc even in this day and age."

The spokesdroid refused make any further statement, or answer any questions.

Police have issued a bulletin saying that Mr. Murphy is wanted for questioning in connection with this incident, and that possible criminal charges may be brought.

ATTACK OF THE CYBORG FISH

Those wacky scientists - doncha just love 'em? If they're not creating identical copies of animals that normally can't be told apart anyway, or conducting studies to research things that are blindingly obvious, they are inventing, or creating, or giving birth to, wacky new lifeforms that could have escaped from a 50s sci-fi flick.

This time, they've come up with a strange hybrid creature which is half-machine, half-fish. Honest. I am not making this up.

Scientists have taken some of the neurons (cells from the brainstem and spinal cord) from a sea lamprey, a primitive eel-like vertebrate, and coupled them with light sensors attached to a mechanical body. The sensors feed the brain sensory information; the brain processes the information and generates command signals, which instruct the machine which way to turn in response to its environment. A genuine cyborg - a hybrid of the organic and mechanic.

This ludicrous creation actually has a serious purpose. Research of this nature may one day allow people to be fitted with prosthetic devices that are controlled directly by their brain.

Of course, this gives a new punchline to the comment about a woman needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle...