FEDERATION 2 DESIGNER'S NOTES
by Alan Lenton
10 December 2003
Just got back from New York. The failed disk drive on the Federation Server is now back in action. However, there is no guarantee that it will stay that way, so we need a new version asap.
I've resisted doing a new version of Fed for quite a long time, for all sorts of reasons. I'm worried that it will split the fed community, resulting in two smaller unsustainable communities, rather than one larger, sustainable community. There is also the personal fact that I've no wish to get a reputation as a 'one hit wonder'.
My preference would be to port the old version, which runs on an archaic HP 'D' Series server over to Linux running on one of our ProLiant servers, which seem reasonably stable, now we've replaced all the power supplies. Unfortunately, this isn't really possible because the current version relies on versions of support libraries which are no longer available.
And anyway fed1 is now 18 years old and getting a bit long in the tooth.
I've learned a lot in the intervening years, and we developed some nice tasty technology for Age of Adventure, which Federation players could benefit from. Also there were a number of features that I intended for the original version of Federation that I never got round to adding in.
This will be the first time I've written a game for which a prototype already exists. That should mean it will be faster, event though I will be doing some game design as I go along. Also, C++ is much more powerful than C was, so it's easier to encapsulate the game concepts than it was with C.
Realistically, I need to have something up for Xmas, and that's only two weeks away. So where to start?
Not that difficult - the players need something to stand on, and we need get the basic, underlying TCP/IP communications working reliably.
