FEDERATION 2 DESIGNER'S NOTES
by Alan Lenton
Coda: Christmas Day 2003
Well, it was indeed ready for Christmas, and within two weeks. It went live on Christmas morning with the command 'telinit q' - Linux-ese for 'start 'er up!', and a few moments later the following historic notice appeared in the log file:
09:13 -----------------------------------------
09:13 Starting Federation II
09:13 Version 0.15.00
09:13 Thu Dec 25 09:13:29 2003 (UTC/GMT)
09:13 PID is 6888
09:13 Maximum number of players is 250
09:13 There are 2 players in the database
09:13 Logged in to billing server
09:13 IPC started
09:13 -----------------------------------------
People were slipping in and out to try it out all day. Not that there was all that much visible to try out at that stage, but everyone wanted to be able to say they were there on the first day!
Even so, that didn't stop some idiot trying to crash the game by overflowing the input buffers. Remember earlier on I mentioned that I was going to add a smidgen of code to tell me if anyone was trying to overflow the buffers?
Well we'd been up for less than an hour when someone tried feeding the US Declaration of Independence into the game in an effort to crash it. The server handled the situation with no problems and threw all the text away. I guess some people just get their kicks from trying to mess up other people's work.
Later in the morning I added facilities for private conversations, and in the early evening code to allow players to move around went in, and it started to look like a real game! But that is, I guess, the start of another story :)
Have fun
Alan
