Welcome to the Obsidian Fleet Joint Fleet Command Report for September!
First of all, apologies for the radio silence on the blog. It’s fair to say that all three members of the JFC have been slammed six ways to Sunday over the past six-eight weeks. I’ll not go into specifics but normal service should now be resumed for all of us.
In this rare collectors edition …
IFS2 Updates
The big update which really isn’t hard to miss is the redesign of the site. Our previous theme was a bit too big and cumbersome for the traffic profile we were receiving – mostly mobile nowadays. So the JFC took the decision to switch the theme to one which is more friendly on a phone. The positive benefits of the change also include a homepage which is 50% smaller in terms of code and makes far fewer requests.
The other big change we’ve made is to the database. It’s been migrated to within Toolset so it’s now running on the same code platform as the rest of IFS2. There’s still some substantial rebuilding to do in the database, adding things like specification tables and planetary info blocks, etc. to the system. but you’ll hopefully notice something less disjointed as we go forward with this one.
Operations
Fleet operations continue to focus on the quality of simulations, providing a stable foundation for COs and for players alike. The re-development of the Fleet Database will enhance the experience players will have, as we work to centralise the core data for the Fleet and our official canon story.
Task Force 29 is steady and each game seems to be going strong in their own right, applications for various ideas are being reviewed and more to come in that report next month.
Fleet Support
We’d like to remind everyone of the Golden Pumpkin competition, it is coming to an end and it is a fantastic opportunity to share your creativity with a wider audience, there is still time to enter! We are excited to see the entries and the hard work people have put into something they love doing.
CO’s Round Table
Following our feedback from Obsidian Day, we hosted our very first CO Round Table. This’ll be a regular event given it was so popular so expect the Community Team to shout more about this in the coming weeks.
Picard, the timeline and “OMGWTFWOFD”
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have realised that Star Trek: Picard is coming out next year. This’ll be the first Prime Timeline continuation since Nemesis. It does acknowledge Hobus exploded (sorry Talla & the crew of the Sarek), and takes place … in 2399, so three years after we’re currently at in OF’s lifetime. Expect some proper communications from us about it soon but our initial instinct is to merge the concepts into our existing universe; while it is Prime, it is Star Trek, the focus is looking like it’s going to be more on Picard and his adventures to save the girl and the Federation than about Starfleet and ships. To be quite honest it’ll be refreshing to see a Prime show about people rather than people on a ship doing ship things if that’s the way it does go. We will not be abandoning our 2 years worth of work to this point in developing our own canon unless it causes some significant shifts in the Prime timeline that we’ll be unable to reconcile. So watch this space.
And that’s about it for this month! We’ll see you next month!