The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 15, 2006

Official News - page 3

HEY GIRL, DON'T FOLLOW ME

by Hazed

The 'FOLLOW' command that allows you to join a group of players and be towed around Fed DataSpace by a charismatic leader has been temporarily disabled. Last weekend, we discovered a bug which crashed the game when a group encountered a certain circumstances.

Here's an explanation of exactly what those circumstances are. If a group containing both insured and uninsured players - for example if a person who is not insured follows a person who is insured, or vice versa - walks into a room in which ha event checks whether the player is insured, the game gets itself into a muddle and crashes. There is an event that does this on the room outside the hospital ward on Earth, warning you if you leave the ward without re-insuring.

It would be easy to fix this particular bug, but it does open up the possibility that there are other problems with groups encountering events which check things. There are a whole bunch of things which events can check for, such as gender and rank - there are examples of these checks in various places in the Solar System. It's possible that these checks cause similar problems with mixed groups. If so, we may have found the cause for those periodic game crashes that have been annoying us all.

So we need to go through all of the possibilities and check them out, fixing any that look as if they might make the game fall over. Meanwhile, we have removed the facility to follow players until we can be sure it's not going to cause any further problems.


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