The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 15, 2012

Official News page 1


WE WERE WRONG

by Hazed

We announced a few months back that we were going to stop work on the existing version of the game in order to develop a shiny new web-based in-the-cloud Fed.

Well, we admit that was a dumb decision. We were wrong. We had no intention of making you, our loyal players, think we planned to abandon you, but that's how our announcement came across.

So we've done a reversal and revised our plans - and as part of that we've resumed work on Fed2. There are details of a major new feature Alan has just added to the game later in the Star.

What we now plan to do is to come up with a web-based front-end for the existing version of Fed, that can be used as an alternative to FedTerm (or other generic gaming front-ends).

We still plan to move the game off its dedicated servers and into the cloud, which will reduce the running costs, but that will take a bit of work on the existing code to ensure it will work on this new platform. Initially Alan thought it wasn't going to be possible, which is what prompted our original decision, but he has now had a rethink and come up with ways to make it work. Much of what he has to do to the code won't be visible to you, but when you will notice something, we'll tell you about it in a future news bulletin.

I suppose we can count ourselves in the same class as Coca Cola, who made a similar mistake when they withdrew their Classic Coke from sale and introduced New Coke. They had to change their plans and bring back the original product after a backlash from consumers.

Like them, we've changed our plans. We have performed a U-turn - to use the American political phrase, we have flip-flopped, and to use a British journalistic term, we've performed a reverse ferret (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_ferret) .


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