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FEDERATION 2 DESIGNER'S NOTESby Alan Lenton
At the end of November 2003, disaster struck when a disk drive failed on the Federation server. The game and the ibgames web site went down. Because the server was old, replacement parts are not easy to come by. It took a while to find a disk drive to replace the dodgy one, but eventually one turned up and Alan jumped on a plane to New York to sort out the problem. Relief all round when he was able to get everything running again. But this was a wake-up call. We had known for several years that we needed to do a complete re-write of Federation, from scratch, but now it was clear it couldn't be put off any longer. So in December, Alan started work on Fed2. While he coded, he kept notes on what he was doing, and once Fed2 actually went live, I twisted his arm and persuaded him to write up those notes in the form of a diary. The following pages document his progress as he works on the code, and go into some of the technical decisions he had to make.
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