Welcome to the JFC report for August & September!
Let’s kickoff with the good stuff …
Awards!
Rising Star Award
X-Men: Avalon
Having joined the sim very close to its inception, I’ve been impressed by the consistent standard in both mission design and quality of writing. The characters feel like a cohesive group and the writing team has worked hard to glue things together quickly so that this is a believable, immersive world full of rich creative potential. Leadership has ensured just the right mix of narrative direction and creative liberty, which isn’t always easy, and have been an inspiration both within our writing circle and out into the wider simming community.
An Avalon Player
JFC Recognition Award
The whole crew of USS Mercutio
Normally, this award is individual but we are very much impressed with the players on USS Mercutio for jumping on to IFS3. As you’ll now from our many, many, talks on it, IFS3 now offers a complete game experience. We’ve now got several games running via IFS3 and hope to have more in the future!
IFS Updates
Not a lot of big news, lots of backend changes you might never see though! To improve the user experience a bit and avoid the HCaptcha doom loop of being asked to identify the fruit in the picture, we’ve switched over to Cloudflare Turnstile. The good bit about Turnstile is you won’t see it if you’re already displaying signals of humanity. Yes, signals of humanity is an actual phrase in CAPTCHA world …
We’ve also upgraded the server infrastructure to run PHP8.2. This is a significant step up from PHP7.4 and, through improvements such as the Just-in-Time compiler, yields a 15% performance boost to code-heavy sites like IFS/Wordpress.
On the AI front, the mission creator and NPC creator now use gpt-3.5-turbo-16k so you can use more inputs and get longer outputs. Despite GPT4 being the headline-stealer, it’s still a bit raw and also 20x more expensive than 3.5, for not much more practical use in the cases we’re using AI for.
Lastly, the database has had some work done on it. The category archives are now fully online, and the front page has been simplified to show the category list – in alphabetical order. Neat freaks of the fleet, you may now rejoice. We’ve made some changes around contributions and want some people to test it – expect a news piece about that and some of the other changes in the DB shortly.
News Round-up
Games Night
We had our September games night on Saturday and played Richup.io. Nobody was harmed during the gameplay, though if you’d have seen Discord, you’d have thought Endy was going to get his teeth kicked in.
Administrative Changes
We’ve made a few tweaks to the OMA manual, rules, etc. to make sure our newest TF – Task Force 13 – is included. If you missed the announcement on Obsidian Day – a) where have you been? and b) where have you been? but more importantly we’ve added a new Task Force to encompass the civilian, “not normal StarFleet” and other side of Federation life. Think Fenris Rangers, civilian games, academy games, temporal investigations offices, West-Wing style politics in Paris, Romulan embassy on Vulcan (bet that’d be a laugh) … the possibilities are endless. So we’ve now got:
Task Force 13 – Exploring a different side of Trek (Prime Universe)
Task Force 29 – Different Times, Different Universes of Trek (Alternative times/universes)
Task Force 47 – Different Worlds (non-Trek games)
Task Force 72 – Traditional Trek Gaming (Prime Universe)
We’ve also updated the eligibility matrix as announced on Obsidian Day to include the new ship lineup we also announced on Obsidian Day.
Coming Up!
Our community team has got these awesome events happening in October.
Fleet Game Night – Halloween Quiz!
https://discord.com/events/196000485260525568/1139189570953543682
Live podcast on Halloween
https://discord.com/events/196000485260525568/1139217175618535436
That’s it for now folks!
And with that, we’re done! We’ll see you for the next one!