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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate June 2004 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate June 2004 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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Classic Fed suffered a hardware failure and was unavailable for several hours one morning. This was a symptom of the creaking hardware being well past its use-by date, which is the reason why we started to rewrite the game from scratch - the result being Fed II of course. Another brand new feature was added to Fed II: relaying. This allows you to send everything that happens to you in Fed to another player. That may sound just like a spybeam, but it works in reverse. The control is with the person being watched - they make the decision to relay the output, and can stop it when they want. The Galactic Noise Abatement Society were furious when tannoy announcements were started up in the spaceport again, thanks to Bella's wonderful and flexible new event system. The promotion requirements were announced for the Trader rank: 750 AK jobs and 400K (but you needed to have 500K in the bank so you had a float to start your trading off). You would also need a subscription to Fed II - trial accounts could not go any further than Adventurer. Hazed published the new rules for Fed II, which merged together the House Rules and the Fed Game Rules into one document, making it much easier to figure out whether what you want to do is allowed or not! On a lighter note, the Encyclopedia Galactica debuted on the web site, offering information on such subjects as the interregnum and akaturi jobs. A tentative date in mid-July was announced for Fed II to go live, subject to the Netbanx (the company that process credit card transactions for us) having everything ready. Final reminders were given about what was going to happen to Fed II characters when we went out of beta-test - anybody who was a subscriber to classic Fed would get to keep their characters, but all other characters would be zapped.
We have taken the decision that spybeams as they work in classic Fed will not be put into Fed II. Instead, they will be replaced by relaying. It has a lot of potential as a useful and entertaining tool: It will allow staff and other players to help new players, it will allow someone who is having trouble with a particular aspect of the game to show what they are doing to someone else, and it will allow entertaining players to put on a show for others - particularly when you are able to relay to a channel. It will do all the good things that spybeams currently do. And it's free to all players - no expensive equipment to install! But although relaying addresses some of the problems that allow spybeams to be abused, relaying can itself also be abused in different ways. Good manners dictate that you should never start relaying to a person without first getting her permission. Just launching a relay stream without any prior contact will be very annoying. The game gives some protection against this: if you block a player then he cannot relay to you, and if he's already relaying, then using the block command will cut off the relay. However, as with all the other communications tools in Fed II, if you act in such a way that other players constantly have to block you, then that is against the rules. So remember, don't relay without permission! There is one other big difference between using a spybeam and setting up a relay. With spybeams, the rule has always been that if you see something that you find offensive over a beam, you cannot complain about it - you should just stop spying. With relaying, the onus is on the relayer to not perform any actions that might offend the relayee. Performing vulgar acts or using obscene language while relaying is against the rules. Even if you are alone in a room, talking to yourself, if you relay to somebody you are no longer in private, and she will have the right to report you if you break the rules.
Death is traumatic, there's no question about that. Even with insurance making sure that death doesn't have to be permanent, it's still a shock to the system. So I am pleased to announce two measures to aid those recovering from death in Fed II. The first will help those of you who jump up out of your hospital bed and rush right back out into danger - if you leave the ward without insurance, you will be given a reminder that it's not a good thing to do. The second will be welcomed by all those wearied by the death experience, who cannot face the long plodding walk from the hospital back to the spaceport. There is now a hovercab service which will transport you in style, for a fare of a mere 92 groats. To avail yourself of this service, type 'HAIL CAB'.
QUESTION: WHEN IS ANNOYING SOMEBODY NOT HARASSMENT? Answer: When it's done with a twin laser. There is no question that - outside of the confines of a fighting event - if somebody shoots at you, you are going to get annoyed with them. But that does not make it harassment. The rules clearly state that shooting a player is not harassment, it's just part of the game. Fed is not a fighting game, it's about building alliances rather than indiscriminate killing. But despite that, spaceship fighting is a part of the game, even if it is a minor one. Firing a weapon at another player is all part of the game. If you don't like being shot at, then don't go to places where shooters lurk. Alternatively, take precautions to ensure that if you are shot at, the damage is only minor. Here's a few suggestions about how you can protect yourself:
Sure, doing those things mean you have to put a little bit of thought, a little extra work into Fed. They are all inconvenient. But they are as basic as looking before you cross a busy road. You wouldn't have any sympathy for someone who marched out into traffic without checking first if it is safe; taking precautions against death in Fed is just the same.
HUNTING THE TRACK OF THE ELUSIVE LAG A deerstalker hat and tweed cape are optional accessories for tracking down the source of the elusive internet Lag. However a basic understanding of what lag really is and how TraceRoute can help you figure out what is happening will enable you to find out why your connection is slow. The true name of this phenomenon is Internet Lag and that places the blame where it belongs because lag is usually a product of Internet connection congestion. A basic definition of lag is the time it takes for something you type to appear on the screen. This is usually due to one or more of several problems so you have to go into detective mode to track down the sources of your problem. The connection between your computer and your target site - whether a web page or Federation or anything else - is not a simple point-to-point connection like two tomato soup cans and a cotton string stretched between. You are really connected by a series of routers. There are machines that "route" your connection to the next machine in a chain of hops that stretch between you and your target. Each hop between machines takes time, and the more hops on the connection path, the longer it generally will take for your information to flow between your keyboard and your screen. If a router is too busy or congested or not working well, delays start to creep in. This is usually what creates lag. Now to track down where the delays are you need to trace the route your messages are taking to your target. So you use something called (amazingly enough) a "traceroute" to follow the connection path and report on each hop's location and timing. I find doing this is easiest with a tool that lets you enter your target's address, click a button and it finds and displays the information in a neat list. Once you have this list displayed you can look at how many hops it takes you to get to your target and how long at each segment. If it's taking a great many hops to get somewhere or some of the connecting routers have times listed that are way out of line with the rest, that's probably where your lag is coming from. A traceroute utility I recommend is this nice freeware one: http://www.trellian.com/traceroute/index.html. Note that if you run a traceroute to ibgames.net, it will fail at the last step - that's a security measure, it doesn't mean you cannot connect to Fed! Knowing where your lag is coming from doesn't stop it, of course. There are different things you can do depending on where the congestion/delay is located. If you notice the delays are close to you, in your local ISP's routers, you can call them and complain, send them a copy of your traceroute results, tell them what you have found. Saying to your ISP's tech support, "I'm getting a lot of lag" gets you nowhere, but being able to say, "I did a traceroute and I'm getting stuck in your congested machine at..." makes a big difference sometimes. Providers have several things they can do to improve your connection, but they'll usually only do it if you insist and have something like a traceroute to show it's their problem. If the delays are in connecting hops, you will be able to see which provider owns that machine, though it's not likely you can do much about it. An Internet Weather Report can sometimes tell you if it's a regional problem or a specific ISP having problems. A link to a good Internet Weather Report site can be reassuring that it's not just you, as well as providing you with a general snapshot of the current conditions of the Internet. You can google on "internet weather report" and find many sites. I recommend these sites: http://www.noc.ucla.edu/networking/weather.html I hope you find this information helpful. If you spot Freya in Federation, I'm always available to help you with how to run a traceroute and how to read and understand the results. You can also ask a Navigator for help and if they don't know, they'll help you find someone who does.
REAL LIFE NEWS: SPACESHIP ONE FLIES INTO THE RECORD BOOKS Until recently, space flight has been the province of governments. Only government organisations have been able to send men into space, partly because of the cost but also because that was just the way it was! But that may be about to change. The X Prize has been on offer since 1996 to the first team the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles). To qualify for the ten million dollar prize, the ship must also return safely to Earth, and then repeat the same launch within two weeks. There are a number of organisations working towards this challenge. One of them has come up with a ship called SpaceShip One, and as part of the journey towards the X Prize, this craft flew to the edge of space last Monday. In doing so, it became the first privately funded craft to carry a person into space, and Mike Melvill, who piloted the ship, became the first to earn astronaut wings while flying a civilian ship. Both SpaceShipOne and its launch vessel, White Knight, are reusable vehicles designed for routine, regular flights. There's more work to be done before they are ready to try for the X Prize - this record-breaking trip only barely made it to the edge of space, and only carried one person. It wasn't without problems, either. But it's a great start, and it could herald the start of a drastic change in the way spaceflight develops. News sites all over the web carried details of this historic flight, so you have probably already read about it, and seen the pictures. For more details of SpaceShipOne, go to their home page at http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/. Details of the X Prize are at http://www.xprize.org/.
REAL LIFE NEWS: VENUS IN TRANSIT Tuesday is going to be a special day for anybody even remotely interested in astronomy and the Solar System. An astronomical event is going to take place that is so rare, nobody who is alive now has ever seen it before. The planet Venus is going to pass between the Earth and the Sun. This is called a transit of Venus, and it has been observed only five times in the past. The planet Venus lies between us and the Sun, but its orbit is tilted relative to that of the Earth, so most of the time the planet is a bit above or a bit below the Sun. That's why transits are so rare. On Tuesday, Venus will appear as a tiny black dot creeping into the bottom left of the Sun, and will travel across the bottom of the Sun's face. The transit will last about 5 or 6 hours. It'll be visible to around five billion people around the world - from just about everywhere except the west coast of North America - so long as the clouds keep away. In the UK, it will start early in the morning, around 6.19am. Warning: do not try to watch it directly - you should never, ever look at the Sun with the naked eye, even just for a moment. Either wear special eclipse glasses, or watch the reports which will be broadcast on TV and on the Internet. For more information, take a look at http://www.vt-2004.org/ or http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/transit/venus0412.html. Previous transits were in 1639 - the first one to be seen, and only watched by two people - 1761, 1769 - for this one, astronomers knew it was coming and sent observers to all parts of the world to watch it, including Captain James Cook - 1874 and 1882. If you miss the one on Tuesday, there will be another one along in 2012, but that will be your last chance because the next one after that won't be till 2117!
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