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A NEW PLANET CHECKER IS ON THE WAY

by Hazed

Bella has resumed work on revamping the workbench tools that allow you to design your planets. The first thing she is working on is an enhanced version of the Tesla planet checker, which checks the files to make sure they are fit to be linked into the game. Right now, there are a whole bunch of things that the game doesn't want you to do, but which Tesla doesn't know about, so whenever you submit files I have to manually go through the maps to make sure they don't do any of the things that will upset the game.

The new version will check for all of the things we have thought of so far that might case a problem. However, there are bound to be new things that crop up in the future! Until somebody does something which causes a problem, we have no notion that it's something we need to check for - either we don't realize the game will have a problem with something, or it never occurs to us that a planet builder would actually do it! That's why we couldn't just build all the checks into the first version of Tesla.

Eventually, the Tesla program will have an upload function which will allow you to send your planet files directly to the game, rather than having to email them so we can link them in manually; but before we can implement that, we need to get the checking part of the program right. So don't hold your breath - it's going to be a while till you can send your own files to the game.

Expect to see the new version in the next couple of weeks.

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