 |
WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate December 2003 |
|
WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate December 2003 |
 |
OFFICIAL
NEWS |
|
What was in December 2003's Official News:
|
|
Following the disaster at the end of November, where Fed and our web site vanished due to a dead disk drive, we reappeared in early December. Phew! See below for details about what happened. After that very nasty scare, we decided we could not put off any longer the task of rewriting Fed so it would run on a more modern computer. Bella started as soon as she got home from New York, with the goal of getting something up by Christmas - two weeks away - thus making the same promises that programmers have always, traditionally, made, that new programs will be finished in two weeks, or by Christmas! And she did it! On Christmas morning, Fed II opened its doors. At first, all we could do was sit in the Meeting Point and talk to each other, but later that day movement commands were added, and then it seemed that every day something new went in, until Fed II actually started to look like a game! Bella appeared at a special Meet & Greet to talk about her plans for Fed II; read the transcript at http://www.ibgames.net/federation/events/m&g2003/bella.html. The Chronicle took its annual Christmas two-week break, but Hazed stayed at the keyboard, sending out regular bulletins about the progress and development Fed II. Amongst all the panic and excitement, we made plans for Christmas festivities in Fed, with another fiendish puzzle planet centered around a New Year party on Ming's planet.
After a week of worrying and biting my fingernails, I was so relieved to be able to walk into Chez Diesel again on Wednesday afternoon and order my favorite frothy pink drink. They just don't make it like that anywhere else! I wasn't the first to show up in the newly re-opened Federation DataSpace. Cptmartin was in the game about 10 seconds after it fired up:
Either that was an amazing coincidence, or he had spent the past week at his computer, forlornly trying to log on over and over and over...
A diskdrive on the server which Fed and our web site both run on failed. Although the Fed code itself was on another drive, it needed to pull library routines off the failed drive, so it couldn't run. The Fed server is quite old - it's an HP server, and that particular model is not made any more; nor are spare parts for it. So it took us a while to find a replacement drive. Once we found one, Bella jumped onto a jetplane across the Atlantic to New York, to fit the new drive. But before doing that, she tried the old engineer's trick of using brute force on the old drive - blowing off the dust, then giving it a thump. That worked, the drive woke up, and Fed could run again! Of course, once a disk drive starts to go wrong, thumping it is probably only a temporary solution, as any of you who are hardware experts will know. But the spare drive that Bella had been going to fit has been left with the server, so if this happens again, it will be simple to fix it by swapping the drives.
THE PLAYERS' REACTION TO THE NEWS ABOUT FED II Most players have been delighted to hear about our plans, and are very excited by the prospect of the new version of Fed. There is a little scepticism, however, as this email shows:
Only 100 groats? What a cheapskate!
ON THE WEB: CHRISTMAS ROUND-UP A seasonal selection of web wonders for you to peruse... Christmas snowglobe Dave Barry's Gift Selection Ugly Christmas Lights Christmas Allergy
|
