Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 26, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
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NEW VERSION OF THE TESLA PLANET CHECKER

A new version of the Tesla planet checker has been published on the web site. This is the program that will eventually give your planet files a thorough going over and flag up any errors it finds, and which you will use to upload your planet to the game. Right now, Tesla is still in development, but it's still an important tool that all planet designers need to use.

The new version of the programs adds to the checks that Tesla makes on your planet files. It examines the information about orbit and launch locations, and the map title, and subjects that info to some very stiff testing. The game is very picky about this data and if it's not in absolutely the right format, it won't load your planet. So Tesla is now just as picky as the game would be.

Last week I listed some of the common mistakes players make with their planets, and of the things I mentioned, problems with this information are the most frequent.

From now on, you MUST run your planet files through Tesla before submitting them to Bella. That's in capital letters, bold, italics and underlined - if I didn't have respect for your eyeballs (or equivalent) I would have colored the text red and made it blink on and off, too. When Bella receives a new planet to be added to the game, she's going to test it with Tesla herself, and if it fails she'll just chuck the planet back at you to fix the errors.

Tesla only runs on Windows - we don't have a Mac version yet - but those who are using the Mac Workbench to build your planet should ask a Windows-using friend to use Tesla and check your planet for you.

Oh, and one more new feature in Tesla: the display has a picture on it now, which makes the whole thing look everso much more attractive!

You can download the new version from the Tesla web page.


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