Federation Commander

[Jankomatic]

A group of friends and myself played SFB a lot 20 years ago. We are interested in starting to play SFB and/or Fedcom, but it would have to be done remotely since we are all over the place these days. I just bought about $600 dollars worth of Fedcom stuff and will be updating my SFB stuff next week, but think I may have jumped the gun.

I had an SFBOL sub in its infancy(1999) but never used it.
I see there is no VASSAL module, so I assume SFBOL is the only way to do this. We have no interest in 1v1 Tourney duels, so I hope we can do normal scenarios etc. I fired up the demo account and it looks exactly the same as what I remember 16 years ago, which is fine as long as it works I reckon. I see one AFK person in the Fedcom side and that same AFK person today, no other users. This is also fine since we will play amongst ourselves, but this makes me wonder how much the client is supported if no one uses it

Maybe it is just a fluke that the day I decide to look into this that the web page won't show the list of ships. It would be nice to know if there are a LOT of SFB and Fedcom ships or just a small subset.

None of this is meant to be any sort of criticism, just trying to further my knowledge on the future of the client.

[Andromedan]

The SFB Online client has been constantly under development. There are a lot of changes that have over the year from support for ESGs (i.e. range rings so that you can see where the ESGs are), to target arrows (that show what seeking weapon is targeted on what unit), added the pre-loading of fighter loads (vs. waiting until after they are launched).

Has the look and feel of the client drastically changed? No. There has been some minor tweaks like the "Add Piece" window staying open until closed instead of closing immediately after adding a piece. This makes adding multiple ships easier.

There are a lot of SFB ships available. (Sorry, I need to fix the link on the website to show what is available). The number of Fed Com ships are lower but the most popular ones are there.

[Jankomatic]

I resubbed again to check it out and will have a couple of friends doing so in the next week or so. What is the process to get new ships added to the FedCom side? Is this something a user could help with? Is there a better place to ask questions about the client than here?

When I am in a Fedcom game and I go to add a piece, under the Ships tab there are only 18 ships listed, but under the Library tab there are LOTS of ships(No Andromedans that I can see). Is this how it should be? Just wondering why all the ships aren't under the Ship tab. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks
Wes

[Andromedan]

Yup. I need to work on adding Andromedan support for the Fed Com side. The Ships tab are the ships that are included in the client itself and the library is the ones that are in the library itself

Probably should change that and not make the distinction because it just will cause confusion.

When it comes to adding more ships, I need to contact Steve Cole about this. Because:

1) He is the one that Emails me the background images that are used to create the ship definitions.

2) Need to ok the work on the Fed Com side of things. Since there is a huge push to convert the 2nd Gen SFB ships to 3rd Gen SFB ships. So I am not sure how open Steve Cole is to working on adding Fed Com ships.

I will send out the Email tonight.

[Sebastian380]

Some time ago I sent a list of Ship Cards that had been published but were not on the client. I'd be happy to resend if you need me to.

Also, I will help with the 3rd Gen SFB conversion--please direct me to the coordinator--hoping to speed up the process of getting ship cards on the client.

[Andromedan]

Sebastian,
Still have the spreadsheet. Thank for your work on that.

When it comes to 3rd Gen conversions. I will forward your Email to Les Leblanc. He is organizing things. Because I suck at that kind of things and trying my best to have other people help so that I am not doing everything and add to my stress level.