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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 12, 2016

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ALAN MAKES FEDTERM SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE

by Hazed

You can now download the source code for the new version of FedTerm, as well as the code for the Fed2 workbench editors.

I asked Alan to explain what this means, and here’s what he said:

All of the tools for writing Federation 2 planets and puzzles, together with FedTerm 3, are Open Source.

What does this mean? It means that the source code for these applications is freely available – you can dowload it and make whatever alterations you like. There is only one provisio... If you make alterations you must let other people get copies of your source code, and its license must be the same one under which our code is licensed to you (the GPL). If you just use the derived code for yourself, and don’t give it to anyone else, then there is no requirement to make the source available.

So why would you want the source code? Well... You might just be interested in seeing how it’s done! Alternatively, you might want, for instance, to tweak something like FedTerm so it fits in better with your personal style of play. You might want to use it as the basis of a terminal for a different game you are writing. The current version is for Windows, but you might want to port it to the Mac OS, chromium or even Android (good luck with the latter!). The possibilities are endless.

OK – here’s the techie stuff...

To compile the programs as they stand you will need Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2013 and the Qt 5.5 or Qt 5.6 windows open source libraries for (MSVC2013): http://www.qt.io/download/. I would suggest that you also get Qt’s Visual Studio plugin for Qt5: http://www.qt.io/download-open-source/#section-2. (Scroll down to the end of the page.) It makes things a lot easier!

The source code itself is available on the Bitbucket service. If you happen to use git as your source control, then Bitbucket has facilities for downloading straight into a git repository. All the programs are written in C++.

The URLs for the tools and FedTerm 3 source code are:

FedTerm 3: https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/fedterm
Map Editor: https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/loced
Message Editor: https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/msgeditor
Object Editor: https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/objeditor
Event Editor: https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/eveditor
Tesla (consistency checker): https://bitbucket.org/alan_lenton/tesla

The user manuals for the tools are available here: http://www.ibgames.com/fed2/manuals/index.html. Figuring out how code works is always easier when you know what it’s supposed to be doing!

If you have any problems you can write to Alan at alan@ibgames.com, but be warned that it sometimes takes a while to answer...

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