ALAN’S PROGRESS: TARGET ACQUIRED
by Hazed
The Fed2 Star returns after having a week off, and the newsdroids are keen to get back to work – or at least they are pretending to be. I really don’t care whether their enthusiasm is sincere or not, so long as they do the work!
While we were away, Alan spent the time on computer maintenance. He had to upgrade the version of Linux that he uses on his development workstation to Fedora 24. Before he could do that, he wanted to back up the whole machine just in case the upgrade didn’t go smoothly, but that caused problems because he turned out to have a dodgy cable connecting his portable hard drive to the computer, so some of the backup files got lost and/or corrupted. Sorting that out took a lot of time and effort!
Eventually, he finally got everything sorted, backed up and upgraded a few days ago, and could resume work on coding.
So I can now report a new command in the game: ‘TARGET’. This lets you specify who your weapons are going to be aimed at. On its own, this tells you who you are currently targeting, and – more importantly – who is targeting you. ‘TARGET playername’ will target that player. If they are in the game they will be told that you have targeted them. The target will last until the reset, or until you change it or turn it off with ‘CLEAR TARGET’.
Of course setting a target doesn’t have any use right now, but it’s one more piece of the fighting code.
Next, Alan is going to put in a way you can buy sensors and jammers, both to replace ones that have got shot up in a fight, and to add new ones, without having to buy a whole new ship.
I will keep you posted on his progress.
