Official News page 2

WHEN AUTOMATION GETS YOU INTO TROUBLE

by Hazed

Hot-keys, f-keys, automatic triggers... all these things can make it a lot easier to play Fed2. They can certainly save on the typing! My favorite pink frothy drink with all those trimmings lives on an f-key, to save me from having to type it out each time - otherwise, when I buy a round, the resulting concoction would be a lot briefer!

But any time you automate the way commands are sent to Fed2, or take this kind of short-cut, you risk getting into trouble. Recently I heard about two players who came to grief when their front-end programs sent an unexpected command when they hit the wrong key!

First, a PO was doing some builds to improve her planetary economy. She wanted to build 3 more coal power plants, which would bring her up to the maximum that would be effective, so she typed the command in once, and then used a really handy feature in her front-end which let her repeat the previous command by pressing one key. Unfortunately, as she did it for the second time - thus issuing the command for the third time - she sneezed, and her hand made an involuntary movement, tapping the key more times than she expected. Result: she built 5 coal builds instead of 3, wasting 20 meg on two useless facilities. Since there's no way to demolish an unwanted build, and since the builds on a planet are visible to anyone who cares to look, she was stuck with a permanent display of her accident. So we see the dangers of commands that can be sent at the press of a key!

Then there was the PO who was fiddling with his stockpiles. He wanted to set the maximum level for different commodities to a variety of values, so was using the command that let him specify both an amount and a commodity. Since he was issuing the same command, with minor variations, he was using cut n paste to put 'SET STOCKPILE MAX ' into his output buffer, so he could then add on the amount and the commodity, before pressing return to issue the command. This saved him having to type out the whole command each time.

Unfortunately, he lost track of what he was doing and accidentally pressed return after pasting the basic command into the buffer, and before adding the parameters. Result: the game saw he hadn't included a commodity, so assumed he wanted to set the stockpile for the whole exchange, and it saw he hadn't given an amount, so assumed he that meant the amount should be zero. All the commodities therefore had their max stockpiles set to zero - which would have had a very strange effect on his economy if he hadn't noticed what he had done!

The moral of both these little stories is that by all means avail yourself of all the short-cuts and labor-saving devices that you can, but be aware that they can go wrong and land you in a whole heap of trouble!

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page