Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 27, 2013

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A REPORT FROM ALAN

by Hazed

A few weeks ago I told you that Alan was working on a rewrite of the message editor used as part of the Fed2 Workbench. At the time, I thought it would be released in about a week.

Since then, all has been quiet. Why? Well, here’s a report from Alan that explains why the message editor is proving to be trickier than expected, as well as talking about some of the other things he is working on.

Over to you, Alan:

Fed has two ongoing coding projects at the moment – updating FedTerm and all the tools you use to write planets; and making it possible to directly add stock planets to your system after the first one.

FedTerm and the tools have stood the test of time well, but they are starting to get somewhat long in the tooth. FedTerm in particular is over ten years old. Time for a makeover. The tools are being worked on at the moment using up to date libraries and compilers. When that's complete, FedTerm is the next in line, though that's a much bigger task.

The new look message editor is complete and ready to go, but we are having problems with building a distribution, because it needs the new Qt5 libraries and also the run time libraries for Visual Studio 2012. At the moment we seem to have the wrong version of one of the libraries, but we don't know which of the ten or so libraries is the wrong one. If we can't figure it out soon, we will drop back to QT4 which has a lot simpler library structure. (And for the benefit of the techies out there, yes, I do know all about DependencyWalker, and it isn't being helpful!)

The first stage of the project to allow you to put in all the stock planets – not just the first planet – is to decentralize the way in which Fed figures out what systems and planets need to be loaded, and where they are on disk. When we first started, way back in the 1980s (yes it was as long ago as that – Fed is the longest continuously running multiplayer game on the net) there were only the solar system planets in. Even when we were on GEnie there were only a handful of extra systems, and the way in which it was originally set up worked just fine.

There was one file which contained all the information needed to locate and load the planet. That was just right when we only had 20 or so systems, but we now have something in the region of 350 systems - and quite a few of them have multiple planets. In fact when I last checked, around June this year, the tally was 642 planets with 15,186 locations.

Things could well get out of control!

So, what I'm working on at the moment is breaking this file down and storing this information with the rest of the map information. This involves two things, writing the code to handle the changes in the game file structure, and then writing a little utility program break the big file down into its component parts, and add the information contained into the new files.

I'm not sure how long this will take - probably two weeks or by Christmas...

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