To celebrate the 16th anniversary of the creation of Obsidian Fleet, we held our first ever Obsidian Day on Saturday, July 29th. If you missed it, here’s a quick rundown of what you missed on the announcements side.
- We announced the Task Force Executive Officer role and the first people to fill those positions. Congratulations to Commodore Lancaster and Commodore Eriksen!
- Fleet Services announced that three new Community Engagement Champions have been selected. In Discord, you know two of them as Grengol CO of the SS Mary Rose and Bagheera and Commodore Erikkson aka Shatner’s Hair was selected as the Assistant Services Director!
- A new, easier, to use CO Reporting tool. So far, 18 sims have completed their reports using the new reporting tool. Well done!
- Innovation & Development announced a new class to join our fleet, the Vesta. We’ve allocated one ship per task force so keep an eye out for the USS Juno in 47 and the USS Ceres in 72!
- The winners of the Golden PADD competition were announced, SubjectHazard’s entry of “From the Cradle” was our winner, and you can read more here.
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Three unique, Out of Character, awards were created for Obsidian Day, and it is a pleasure to announce the winners (using their Discord Names);
- Social Vanguard: ShatnersHair
- Personality of the Year: Bagheera
- Volunteer of the Year: Berel Joon
- We’re inviting members from across the fleet to join in our new rules review team. The aim of which is to simplify and redraft the Obsidian Fleet Rules
- We announced our new website and logo. There’s a brief introduction to IFS2 here if you’ve not already read it. It’s this last one I’m going to talk about in some detail below.
Demystifying IFS2
So, what exactly is IFS2? It’s the codename for the platform we’re developing to replace IFS1 in its entirety. The key word there is developing. This system is still very much a work-in-progress. We took the decision to launch it on Obsidian Day because after two months of closed testing the Fleet Council could already see the benefits of using it. IFS2 is faster, responsive (i.e. it works on tablets and mobiles) and based on modern technology. We’re phasing it in over several releases, you’ll spot the naming pattern by the time we’re done. We’re currently on IFS2.1 – Pike which offers the Departmental and Task Force pages. IFS2.2 – Kirk – is on the way next which offers Online Academy. We started with Archer by the way …
What it currently offers (over and including bits of IFS1) is the following:
- Forums
- Integrated mailing lists for Fleet Council, CO’s, and Academy Instructors
- Wiki including ship specs
- Task Force/Departmental pages
- Awards Nominations
- Monthly Reports
- News Submissions
What it currently doesn’t offer compared to IFS1 is this:
- Manifests
- Character History
- Open Positions
- Stats on any of the above.
We’re working on the latter parts but we want to ensure we get it right so we’re releasing it in stages. The first stage will be arriving in our “Harriman” release. In this, you’ll be able to create, edit and store the characters you play in Obsidian Fleet via the new Player Hub. Following that will be the launch of the “Garrett” release where we bring the sims online. CO’s will be able to show their mission histories and it will make it easier to submit reports and news articles. Our final release, “Picard”, brings it all together. We will combine crew and sims into manifests and bring in the rest of the awards system.
We’re not planning on a “Shon” release at this point, but there’s still potential for one.
Sounds great! When?!
When it’s ready. We’re aiming to release Picard by November 2017 at the latest but time and resources will dictate this timescale. There’s two of us building this system on top of our fleet work and our real work, families, etc.
So, what can I do with it now then?
Well as of this release it supports all the awards, news and the integrated wiki and forums. The Yahoo!Groups portals for the CO’s list and Fleet Council are being shut down and replaced with IFS2 equivalents as of the time of writing this article. If you’re a CO and you’re wanting to receive everything by email you’ll need to ensure you’ve turned on your specific email preferences in the groups’ section (Community->Groups) by pressing “Get Email Updates”.
If you want to submit any News or a Database article, as a CO and Fleet Council staff, you will have this ability. You just need to click on New Post (for News) or New Knowledgebase for Database articles from your handy + menu at the top of this page. But if you are not in one of those roles, you’ll need to do two things to get into this area of the community.
- Take the short, self-paced Academy course: Database and News Editing
- Submit a Help Request once you’ve passed that course letting us know you need to be added to the right groups.
There are some brilliant examples already in the DB, so check them out!
We’ve also launched an FAQ to answer some of the more commonly asked questions so check it out. If there’s anything else you can submit a Help Request or ask in IFS2-Help on Discord!