The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 31, 2010

Official News page 2


WHAT BELLA HAS BEEN DOING

by Hazed

Bella is working on the Blish city code as and when she is able but she is hampered by the fact that in real life, her job keeps her busy. We asked her to explain to our readers just what this real life work consists of.

In response, she sent us a Chez Diesel beermat, on which she had scribbled in green crayon, the writing going round the edge in a circle and then spiraling into the center, getting crabbier and harder to read as it went. We were able to decipher it and reprint it, as follows:

Q. So what are you working on in real life that's causing delays in getting new code into Federation 2?

A. I work for a startup company called Green Man Gaming which is a digital PC game distribution network. Where we are different from other digital distributors is that we allow users, with the agreement of the publisher, to sell games back to us when they have finished with them. We then sell them on as second hand games.

Sounds simple, but as always it's more complex to achieve - for a start we have to track every box we sell, how many times we've sold it, and so on. That's all done on the servers. We also have a client which handles the nuts and bolts of downloading and installing the game and handles dealing with the business of removing the game when you sell it back to us.

At the moment I'm involved in a re-write/cleanup of the client which needs to be complete, tested, and bug-fixed before Christmas. It also has to be capable of patching the games we've sold as soon as the publishers provide patches. I'm frankly astonished at the number of patches that some publishers need to provide for their games.

Ideally, I would like to re-schedule Christmas, to give me more time, but the powers that be tell me it's not possible (spoilsports). Thus, I'm working long hours at the moment to get the new code out in the next week or so, so that it will be tested and ready before the middle of November.

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