WHAT’S ON ALAN’S TO-DO LIST?
by Hazed
Having spent what seems like the last several years working on the rewrite of the Fed2 Workbench, now that the project is complete it’s time for Alan to turn his attention to something new.
He has two major items on his to-do list.
Task number one is the code which will allow POs to automatically link in second and subsequent planets. Right now, only the first planet that sets up a new star system can be auto-linked, which means that even players who have no interest in designing their own worlds have to dabble with the workbench to make the files for further planets (or ask me to do it for them).
Just as with brand new star systems, POs will use a command in the game to link a new planet into an existing star system, specifying the planet name and selecting from the stock planets. The new planet will then show up after the next reset.
The first part of the project is to change the way the game stores the information about which planets to load when it fires up. This is currently kept in one long (very long!) list that details each star system and the planets contain therein, but it needs to be split up so there is one list for star systems, and then separate lists for each system telling the game which planets to load. That will make it possible for the game to add a planet name to the list for a star system.
Once Alan has done the conversion he can write the code to let you auto-link your planets. And no, I have no idea how long all of this is going to take!
Task number two is to write a new version of the FedTerm front-end. This will be a front-end with a difference because the plan is to make it run from a browser. No more details available at this stage, but I will tell you more once Alan has decided what he’s going to do.
