Fed II Star - February 26, 2006

CHANGES TO DISPLAYS AVOID CONFUSION

Bella has made two changes to information displays, removing entries which were causing confusion.

The first change is to the list of planets in the Solar System. 'DI SYSTEMS SOL' lists all of the planets contained in that system, and previously that list included a couple of oddities: the planets Help and System. Yes, there really are planets with those names in the game, because they are needed as the mechanism whereby help messages and system messages are stored to be displayed on demand. There still are maps for those planets - just one-location maps that are nothing more than placeholders, and that can't actually be landed upon - but now they don't show up when you look at the system list.

The other change concerns the SpyNet Report displays for Bella, Freya and me. As far as the game is concerned, the three of us actually own all of the planets in the game. Yes, all your planets are belong to us! This is necessary because of the management tools we need to do our jobs. But it meant that the information displayed by SpyNet said that we owned whatever the first system in the list was: for example, Founder of the Addams system. Technically this information was absolutely correct, but it sure was misleading! So now SpyNet has been instructed to drop the reference to owning systems when it reports on one of us.