Official News page 1

NOTHING TO REPORT

by Hazed

After the enormous amount of new stuff I had to write about in last week's Star, this week I have nothing to report. There has been no new code put into the game in the last seven days. This doesn't mean that Alan is slacking, though - far from it, he is hard at work on the event editor for planet-owners.

If you are thinking that it is taking an enormously long time for the event editor to appear, you would be right. This is the third time Alan has worked on the new version of the editor. Here's why.

The original event editor for Fed2 was written back in 2004 before this version of the game was launched; it's the program I used when I made all the changes to the Sol maps, to write the events that allow you to do all the fun stuff in the Solar System. It was written in a bit of a hurry, and it wasn't perfect. Alan continued to work on this version for some years, fixing bugs and adding new features, but it was always just a bit flaky, and it occasionally did annoying things like eating your events.

Because of this, it really wasn't suitable to release to players (although we did allow a small number of players to use it as an experiment, and they will tell you how annoying its flakiness could be). It needed to be re-written from scratch, using a more up-to-date set of coding tools, and the program needed to be structured differently to make it work more effectively.

So Alan set out to do that rewrite, but both the first time and the second time, he got a certain way into the coding before realizing that he still didn't have the structure right, and he was going to end up with a program just as hard to maintain as before. So he junked that version and put the project to one side to think about while he did other things.

So now its third time lucky, and the coding is going well, so it looks like the structure works this time! I can't estimate how long it will be until it's ready to be given to players, because there is still a lot of work to do, and then it has to be thoroughly tested, but I will keep you posted as things develop.

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