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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate February 2004 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate February 2004 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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Bella continued to add new features to Fed II at lightening speed. Unfortunately, she also added a few bugs, which baffled and entertained players. First Jarrow started selling ships for free. Then Almandot realized he could keep on buying new ships, pushing up his loan to astronomical levels. And Armstrong Cuthbert were offering zero ton jobs. Bella soon fixed all these problems (except for Almandot's loan - he was stuck with it, having continued to muck around with the bug rather than just reported it). A more amusing bug had some players, who had experimented with buying huge ships in order to prevent the taxman seizing their groats, from ending up with negative fuel tanks. Yes, the tanks would carry a negative amount of fuel! Quite what effect this would have on the ship's performance, I don't know. Would they go backwards, disappear into another dimension, or turn inside out? The first brand new feature was added to Fed II - that is, something that had not been in classic Fed: the 'BLOCK' command to let you block out comm messages from players you don't want to hear from. The command to let you remove your messages from the electronic noticeboard was implemented:
The Adventurer rank was added, with another brand new feature: akaturi jobs. Comms channels appeared, which unlike the classic Fed channels were not fixed and were given names rather than numbers when someone chose to set one up. The biggest change of the month was the remodelling of the Solar System planets, forcing players to get out the mapping paper again. The change reflected the fact that Fed II takes place about 100 years later than classic Fed. Sol space didn't change, and on the ground the roads and corridors mostly remained the same, but buildings and rooms changed their functions and in some cases exits and entrances were different. There were also some brand new locations. Commanders were relieved to know that Armstrong Cuthbert offices did not move! Bella started work on the event system, intending it to be much more sophisticated than the one in classic Fed. In the old version of the game puzzles and other interesting happenings on the planets were all hard-coded in the game; the new system for Fed II allowed all that kind of thing to be done using events, which meant Hazed could work on the planets, leaving Bella to do the actual game code. The first fruits of the new system to show up were customized no-exit messages, which you can see if you wander around blundering into walls. Bella coded up a new front-end: Fed2Term, which logged onto Fed II and handled account and character set up. Fancy ran the first official Fed II event - a game of Fedpardy.
FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA Akaturi - Rigellian term that loosely translates as 'trusted messenger'. The term dates back to the Warlord period in Rigellian history. Some flavour of that period can be gained from the fact that the Rigellians have the same word for both 'tax collector' and 'bandit'. More recently the term has come to be used by interstellar freighters Armstrong Cuthbert for their courier service, although there are legal battles with the Rigellian government over the patenting of the term. These disputes are expected to reach the supreme court for a final judgement some time in the next thousand years.
FROM THE POSTBAG: WHAT ARE TQUARKS? Regular readers of the Fed Chronicle will know that we newsdroids pride ourselves on our ability to answer our readers questions, no matter how obscure. Not that we are particularly knowledgeable, you understand - but we do know two things: we know how to find out stuff, and when that fails, we know how to make stuff up. Fed II DataSpace is a brand new universe for us, and we are fumbling around, figuring out how it works just as much as the players are. So we were a little perturbed to be hit by two questions so fast, one of them extremely complex. We suspect people may be trying to catch us out. Still, it's our job to appear as if we know everything, so here's the first of the questions - the other will appear in next week's Chronicle. It's a long and complex question, so pay attention:
Yes, well, if your eyes are now glazing over, imagine how we felt when we received this? Full of wisdom we may be, but quantum physicists we have never pretended to be! We had no recourse but to go talk to Bella herself. After tracking her down, and plying her with copious quantities of her favorite tipple (green chilli vodka), we asked the question, expecting to get one of her usual trademark vague replies. But she actually came through with a sensible answer, and what's more, one that even dumb newsdroids could understand. Tquarks, she told us, were not top quarks but tangled quarks, which are used for faster than light communication. A pair of tangled quarks (or entangled, as it's more commonly known) can be separated, but remain linked in some way. Therefore when you carry a cargo of tquarks, you are taking one half of a pair somewhere, while the other half remains behind. Well, you're taking an entire container load, 75 tons of the things, and that's a lot of quarks. Comm units, apparently, make use of this effect to allow you to send messages all over the Galaxy without having to worry about the speed of light. So next time you blow a remote kiss to your loved one, you are doing it using tquarks!
FROM THE POSTBAG: SECOND-HAND SHIPS This week, the question we were asked was a lot easier than the one we tackled last week, which was about quantum physics and entangled quarks, subjects guaranteed to make the electronic brain of even the most advanced newsdroid start to bleed oil.
Well, it sounds like that would be a really cheap option, doesn't it? Who wouldn't like to get hold of a ship for much less than the going rate? Unfortunately, Jarrow have taken steps to ensure that you have to come to them for ships. Even the ships sold by out-of-Sol planets are actually supplied by Jarrow - they really have sown up the market. In fact, Jarrow's recent merger with Woodspring Ship Auctions means that they are screwing you both ways. Not only do they have a captive market so they can charge as much as they like, but when you buy a new ship, it may not even be new anyway! Yes, the reason that you can't pick up a second-hand ship anywhere is that Jarrow recycle them and sell them as new. That's what happens when a company gets a monopoly!
SHIPS THAT DON'T MOVE USE FUEL TOO Several people have reported the following as a bug in Fed II:
No, it's not a bug - it's supposed to do that. Remember that each location in space is a sector - and a sector is pretty huge. After all, a sector can contain a whole planet. So moving in space is not like moving on the ground, where you simply take a couple of steps to shift from one location to another. When you are in a sector, you are somewhere in the middle of it. When you move in a no-exit direction, your ship flies to the edge of the sector, before realising it cannot go any further, and then it returns to the centre again. This uses up fuel - just as much as if you had moved into another sector.
REAL LIFE NEWS: WHERE DO ALL THE BRITISH JEDI LIVE? In Brighton, apparently. (Note for foreigners: That's a very trendy town on England's south coast.) Censuses have always asked people about their religion, but in the most recent census in 2001, many jokers decided to put themselves down as being members of the Jedi faith. The government at first just ignored that reponse, presumably lumping it in with "other", but now they have given in and included the distribution of Jedi warriors in the published census data. A fascinating little table at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/rank/jedi.asp shows the proportion of Jedis in each region, and it turns out that the highest proportion live in Brighton. In all, 390,127 people professed their religion to be Jedi - that's 0.7% of the total for England and Wales. Brighton's percentage, though, is 2.6. Fascinating stuff!
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