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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 28, 2016

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SENSOR CONFUSION

by Hazed

When last week’s code to let you buy sensors was put in, a player discovered a problem. We’d forgotten that there is a trading commodity called sensors – and the command to buy sensors for your ship was overwriting any attempt to buy sensors from an exchange.

Alan fixed the problem for Sunday’s reset, by making sure that the game would only think you wanted ship sensors if you were in a ship repair yard, and otherwise would default to assuming you wanted the commodity. So we thought everything was OK. But then Sanguine, who discovered the bug in the first place, told me she still couldn’t buy sensors from the exchange.

Well, that was annoying. At first I assumed Alan’s bug fix wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. To check, I asked to see a capture showing exactly what was going wrong.

When I looked at the capture, the groat dropped. The description of the location for the trading exchange said that it contained all the services. I looked at the map file for the planet, and sure enough, it was a planet with only two locations: and one of them had flags for all the properties, which included both the trading exchange and the ship repair yard!

So I asked Sanguine, who was being very helpful, to try another planet to see if it would work there. But would you believe it, the next planet she tried also had both property flags on the same location!

Finally, after she ran around various planets, and I searched through the Sol planets trying to find an exchange that was selling sensors, she landed on Magellan and proved that the command to buy sensors from an exchange was working now – providing the exchange didn’t double as a repair yard.

Alan says that fixing this would be very tricky, so we are going to leave it for the moment. I have no idea how many planets are affected by this – it may just be that we were unlucky that Sanguine hit two of them in a row when helping us with testing.

If anyone finds themselves inconvenienced by the loss of the ability to buy sensors from their favourite planet, you can email me at feedback@ibgames.com and I can ask the PO to change the properties on the exchange – or if the owner is no longer around, make the changes myself.

A postscript to this story: when the code for jammers went in, the original bug returned and once more you couldn’t buy the commodity jammers anywhere! Alan swiftly knocked it on the head again, and this time it should be gone for good. Fingers (or equivalent) crossed.

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