**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 93.06.13 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> GUEST TIME Next week's news will be done by Tellurian, stepping into the Guest Newsdroid shoes recently vacated by Jade (and her anonymous helper). We aim to have one news bulletin each month written by a guest, so start thinking up ideas now in case you are the next one selected! **>> ALMOST THERE... Over the last week, Bella has been trying very hard to track down the bug that was causing the new version of the game to crash. She thought she had found it when she identified an overflowing buffer that would cause problems when people looked at the display, but that obviously wasn't the whole story. Finally, she resorted to reverting to the previous version of the code, and rewriting the new parts, adding them one by one to see if they were the bits causing problems. Fixes are now in for some of the annoying little bugs. Firing lasers will no longer bring up a nonsense message. Bonuses for milkrun jobs have been sorted out. The problem of factories not shutting down on exit hasn't yet been fixed, but she has put in a bodge that will zero any negative cycles when you log on. She'll fix it properly next week. Provided nothing dreadful happens in the next few days, sendmail will be put back in a few days. Honest! When she found there was a problem with the display, Bella decided to remove it completely. This may sound like a drastic solution, like chopping off your head to cure a cold, but she had been intending to take it out for some time. It has become largely redundant since networths don't mean anything for the higher ranks. The information about how to advance to the next level has now been put on the display, which is a much more logical place. For the time being, typing will bring up the display; eventually the command will be removed altogether. Similarly, Bella has put in a new command, . This does exactly the same thing as - it shows you who is in the senate. Eventually, will vanish as a command. **>> LAND-SPEED RECORDS Anyone who has completed the fiendish GM puzzle will know how nerve- racking the last-minute dash for safety can be, particular when there are network slowdowns. Consider, then, the plight of the French wannabe-GMs. The system on which French Fed runs suffers severe network delays; the terminals the players use are very small keypads; and there are no script or macro facilities. Taking pity on them, Bella has increased the length of time allowed for that hair-raising dash, and because it's easier for her she has put this increase in the GEnie version too. It's not a huge increase, there's still no time to stop and sight-see on your way, but it will make the run just a little less fraught. **>> NOT A BUG, A FEATURE! Everyone is a bit sensitive about bugs at the moment, understandably, and whenever they see a negative number somewhere they instantly think it's a problem. However, there are some parts of the game that are supposed to show negative numbers! One of these is when Dukes and Senators build items for their naval bases. If they have several projects building the same item, when the game fires up again it will lump them together, and if they add up to more than a complete build it will temporarily display that as a negative number of hours remaining. Then every hour, when it checks on the status of builds, it will convert that into a completed item. **>> A REMINDER... Explorers who are entering planet details sometimes get hit by line noise, and this can do rather strange things to their location descriptions. If non-ASCII characters get embedded in the text they can be very difficult to get rid of. There is an menu option that allows you to Zero the description. This just wipes out the text of the location completely, getting rid of any strangenesses and allowing you to enter it again. **>> WELCOME BACK! Many old friends have been crawling out of the woodwork and showing their faces in Fed Data Space after long absences. They are preparing to make a return on July 1, when the price of playing Fed will be halved to $3 an hour. We expect July to be a month-long reunion party, and we'll make sure a newsdroid is there to capture the joy of old friends getting back together. One of the returnees is Marcia, back after a long absence. Tao is delighted to see her return! **>> FEDTERM PICTURES Tao has uploaded a very nice large picture of Azure, in subtle shades of blue (naturally). It's all ready to be added to your FedTerm configuration. Tao has also provided a GIF of small pictures which you can convert to FedTerm format. They include a very nice picture of Pegasus, several spaceships, and a beautiful picture to be keyed to anyone giving you a kiss - or perhaps to visiting Chez Diesel Executive Services! AZURE.ZIP is file number 68 and TAOPICS.ZIP is number 69. *>> FROM OUR UNDER-THE-COVERS GOSSIP CORRESPONDENT Tellurian walked in at exactly the wrong time the other night on his new love Gemini and his ex-wife Ni in a passionate clinch, attempting to perform elective tonsillectomies on each other! Soon-to-be-planet owner Tell took matters into his own hands, performing a tonsillectomy on Ni with his trusty rusty army knife! The upshot is unknown... but Gem and Ni were busy entertaining the newbod Steelbeard in the choo-choo on Venus, whilst doing each other up brown in the meantime... :> Rumor has it that Gemini has been getting *extremely* friendly with Destiny, too. Funny: last we heard, he was threatening to cut out her tongue, and only Emmi's intervention saved her from a very nasty fate. Marcia's back, and are the storm warnings up already? She and Emmi are pointedly NOT speaking to one another, and one wonders whether a certain seductive elf squeeze-in-common might prove more of a stumbling block than usual? Marcia's already's been busy, having a fraught encounter with Thalek, a *tender* introduction to Tellurian, and reunions with many of her old playmates. Are the rumors true that Zodiac and Menace are getting married - the wags suggest because they have to? One wonders where, since the subject's come up, his and Tyiez's daughter Twilight's been shunted off to. One ALSO wonders what Zodiac's current co-wife Ni will have to say about having Menace for a step-husband... Glurg didn't do anything this week. Granted, he was *gone* this week, but when discussing the Slimemeister himself, one never does know. Several people are, in the meanwhile, wondering what Glurg's reaction to the week's events will be... never mind his predictable reaction to the allegations of his sister's unhappiness. Speaking of which - it's just as well that Emmi *wasn't* in Diesel's to see her erstwhile lover Alt licking honey off of Ni's... off of Ni's... ummm... well, we'll go on to the *next* item of gossip, shan't we? Actually, Emmi seems to be fully occupied at the moment, re-introducing Maxwell to all his friends. Seems the poor boy has lost his memory completely. The amnesia was apparently caused by some strange ceremony on the altar in the Martian Ruins. **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES We are still waiting for two new planets: Florence's planet has a few problems being ironed out before it can go in, and once that's in Tellurian's will also be linked to the game. With Marcia's return, Roissy is back in the game, as an Independent world. Other than that there has been no change to the duchies. Jade has taken Dunnottar offline for the forseeable future. When we asked her why she had decided to abandon her planet, she just moaned about it being too much like hard work! Similarly, Condor will be absent for about three weeks, and while his planet will stick around for ten days without him, it will vanish after that until he returns. **>> BULLETIN ENDS