So, you may have noticed the Server Status box to the left there (or maybe you will now), and you may have noticed that it seems to have sprung to life all of a sudden. You might even notice a Ship listed over there (most likely without anyone in it). Yes, the server is up and running sometimes, for some semi-private beta testing. I may look for some more testers that are able to play with PSO for the Dreamcast sometime soon, so feel free to comment on the article if you’d like to be informed when that happens (make sure to use a valid email address so that I have some way of getting in contact with you).
Just wanted to clear that up before anyone gets too confused about it.
Hi, just wanted to let you know I’m rooting behind you 100% of the way.
I was truly saddened at the loss of Sega in the console war and I’ve never really gotten over it. As an example, I just bought a Dreamcast two days ago for my gf when I learned she had one and sold it to pay for school and never finished Grandia II or Skies of Arcadia (a shame!), and also had PSO but was never able to get online (!!). If you need another tester I am available, I have both the 56k and BBA modems.
Also, just bought my brother a Dreamcast two days ago to inspire me to set up a Quake III Arena Dreamcast server (I have been lazy about it). I love Fuzziquer’s Gamecube server software, and currently have it setup on my box so my family and friends can play on it. I work at a telecom company so I pretty much have free colospace and bandwidth.
Despite having a nice Gamecube server I would absolutely love to get a DC version up and play with my gf lol.
If you need any help it is yours.
Ah… the fond memories of Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia. It would truly be a shame to have had a Dreamcast and not played those two games! I will contact you directly regarding testing the up and running server (probably later today).
As for running a server, you are of course, welcome to try to compile the code as it stands in the source code repository on the Google Code project any time you would like (of course at the moment, that’s probably more work than its worth). At some point, I will be allowing people to register for ship keys so that they can run their own ship server that will be able to connect to the Sylverant shipgate, and if you’d like to do that, you’re more than welcome, when that time comes (which I hope will be before the end of the year). Keep in mind, the server is only tested to work on Mac OS X and FreeBSD, and I know for a fact it will not run on Windows at the current time, and is broken on Linux.
Also, at some point, I see Sylverant supporting the Gamecube Version of PSO. When that will be, I don’t know, but sometime. 😉
BlueCrab:
Excellent work on the server. I have been following your wiki guides and have managed to compile it in cygwin and create the tables in mysql. It seems all ready to go. I just have a few questions. I hope this would be the appropriate place to ask, I couldn’t find anywhere else to do so.
The shipgate runs alright. But when I try to get the ship_server going it always has an error reading the quests file, of course stopping the ship_server from starting. This is my main question: what quest files can we use for sylverant server Dc and pc? Do you have a premade quests.xml we could use?
Just for testing the ship_server, I tried setting up the quests.xml with your example on the wiki for the ttf quest but it didn’t like that alone. I also saw that fuzziqer quests are the same file types, so I tried putting in the quest 118. But I imagine that wouldn’t work right either, and it didn’t. Just for an easy way to get it running can I do something so it will just bypass the quests file?
I’d greatly appreciate any help you can provide me with. This server seems great, I’m really anxious to get it running. You can contact me through email if you’d like.
Thanks,
rb_240
The Cygwin guide isn’t actually mine, they were written by someone else, although the rest of the stuff on the wiki was written by me. I don’t personally provide any Windows-specific support at the moment, unless its something general (like this question seems to be), mainly because I don’t run the server in Windows, and never intend to do so. Anyway… back to the question at hand.
If you simply leave out the tag entirely from the ship_config.xml file, it should “just work” without any sort of quests.
Also, you’re completely right in saying that the quests from fuzziqer’s server software are what is needed in Sylverant, but the ones for Sylverant follow a different naming scheme. Sylverant’s quests end in “v1” for PSOv1 quests, “v2” for PSOv2 quests, and “pc” for PSOPC quests, whereas Fuzziqer’s server has them end in “v6”, “v3”, and “v2” respectively down the line there (if I recall correctly).
Also, currently, there is one tool that’s missing from the available source code (which will be corrected sometime in the future), namely the tool for generating the required keys to connect a ship to a shipgate. There’s actually a twofold reason for this: first, I just haven’t gotten a chance to clean up the code to the tool I used for that purpose yet; and second, I really don’t want to splinter what little is left of the PSO community into little tiny groups only to have them disintegrate over the overall bugginess of the server (yes, there are still plenty of bugs that I need to fix in it).
Warning, the rest of the reply is a rant, related to the last sentence of the above paragraph…
I really don’t want to see a whole bunch of shipgates/login servers spring up with my code, but there’s nothing I can do to stop people from doing it, other than trying to ask people nicely not to publicly put up shipgates. I just hope that people realize that the purpose of this being an open-source project isn’t to spring up a million little PSO servers and to fragment the community — its to allow collaboration and to hopefully build the best PSO server out there. I certainly don’t mind people setting up tiny PSO servers for just their friends to play on, but I’d rather they play on the main server that I will have set up. PSO was meant to be played in a larger group, not just in a group of 10 people that migrate to one server. PSO is much more fun when you play with people from all over — people you know, and people you don’t. That’s how it always was before, and that’s how I feel it should be now and in the future.
Once the infrastructure has been adequately tested, I will be allowing people to register for ship keys to connect their ship servers to my shipgate. There are still a few infrastructure pieces that aren’t up to par yet, hence why my server isn’t open to the public just yet (and why you can’t apply for ship keys either).
Anyway, enough of my ranting…
I second your rant 😉 . There must be a explicit ruleset to allow and disallow ships to register with the shipgate . Theres no need for ships hosted on adsl lines or ships that go down after a short period of time.
One thing i missed on private servers, was the original feeling I had on the Sega Servers, we always played on the 2 same ships one european and one japanese/asian.
My Suggestion let everyone host a ship if they wan’t to but register thm under a sub menu (Private ships or whatever creative name we find ghat fits the game flavor)
Let only verified ships register to the main list and find apropiate names for it, hopefully region sorted like it was on the original sega servers Europe/America/Asia-Japan