Official News - page 4

LOOKING FORWARD TO EVENTS

by Hazed

I don't want anyone to get excited. Don't hold your breath, or expect to see anything real soon. But... Bella is starting to think about how to give players access to events on your planets.

The plan for how and when you can use events has been simplified considerably from the original. We had planned to split the things you could do into two and give you access to the first tranche at Engineer, and the rest at Technocrat. But after contemplating the complexity, Bella has decided that instead, you will just be allowed to use all of the features in one go.

Having said that, you are at the cutting edge of the Fed2 programming here, so Bella will be releasing stuff bit by bit so it can be properly tested. The first release of the event editor will let you do some of the simple stuff, such as:

• Send messages to players.
• Move them around your planet.
• Check their gender to provide different results for boys, girls and others.

Then the next release of the editor will give you access to another batch of functions, and so on, until finally you'll get to play with the whole lot (barring the functions that are reserved for use in Sol).

To accompany each release, I will publish a detailed tutorial that will walk you through the process of creating events in a series of step-by-step lessons. In other words, another manual for you to fail to read - although if you do try to write events without reading the manual I don't think you will get very far!

You may wonder why there's no mention of objects here. Well, that's because in Fed2 objects don't do anything at all unless they are powered by events, which you have to write. So there's no point us letting you add objects to your planet without being able to make them do something interesting, or allow players to manipulate them. So you'll get access to objects in one of the event editor releases.

The rank at which you can add events and objects to your planet will be Technocrat. So that makes the ranks at which you get various capabilities look like this:

• Founder - you get your first planet.
• Engineer - you have to learn to cope with disaffection.
• Mogul - you can add a second planet.
• Technocrat - you can add events and objects to your planets
• Gengineer - you get a bio planet added to your system

But, please, don't hold your breath. I don't want to see anyone pass out from oxygen deficiency!

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