Well, even if it is a few hours early for me, officially by the server’s time (UTC), it’s the new year. So, it’s time to unveil a new feature of the server that hopefully some people will find enjoyable. 🙂

Last year, I started accepting donations in Dogecoins that would be put toward server events and whatnot. Today begins the first of these events! As of the time of the writing of this post, the donations wallet has just under 14,000 Dogecoins in it, so I’ll put 7,000 coins up for grabs in the event that starts today.

How the event will work is as follows, anyone who wishes to participate in this event (as well as any future events) must be logged into his or her account on the server (i.e, you have to have used the /login command in-game), and then must use the new /trackkills command. Once you do so, the server will keep track of the enemies you kill in-game and will automatically record them when you leave the team you’re in. Note: the new /trackkills command and enemy tracking now works on Iselia, Vega, Altimira, and Palmacosta.

For the current event running, your kill counts of certain Episode 1 enemies (no, I’m not telling you which ones, but feel free to try to figure it out 😉 ) will be totaled up across all free-play (non quest, non challenge, non battle) teams that you participate in for the next month. At the end of the month, the top three players by that count will receive a prize. It’s as simple as that. First place will take home 4,000 DOGE, second place will take home 2,000 DOGE, and third place will take home 1,000 DOGE. Winners will be contacted by me after the end of the month to figure out where to send their winnings (and if any winners wish to reinvest their winnings in the donations pool, they are more than welcome to do so).

Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys our first server-wide event and I hope everyone has a great new year.

PS: Continue reading for answers to a few questions you might have…
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Everyone probably knows by now that PSO itself doesn’t support voice chat (except for the Xbox version, which isn’t supported by any server anyway), which can get pretty annoying when you’re trying to discuss things with other people while you play, especially if you’re playing on the Dreamcast or Gamecube and don’t have a keyboard handy for the console. To this end, I’ve set up a Mumble server for anyone who wishes to use it to use while playing.

EDIT: Since it appears to be unclear to some… This does not allow you to use your Dreamcast or Gamecube microphone for voice chat in PSO. This functionality is not built in to the game and it would be inconceivable to add it to the game. This setup allows you to use your PC or smartphone to do voice chat with others who connect via their PC or smartphone while they’re playing on Sylverant.

Mumble is an open-source, multi-platform Voice-over-IP (VoIP) client and server, designed for low-latency voice communications, such as would be useful for online gaming. You can get a Mumble client for pretty much any OS out there (OS X, Linux, Windows — even for iOS or Android too) for free and use it to connect to a variety of Mumble servers. For more information on how to connect to the server that I’ve set up, continue reading…

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I’ve been asked many times since I started Sylverant how to donate to support Sylverant or to show appreciation to me for writing/maintaining it. My answer has always been the same: I don’t want donations that aren’t actually needed for keeping things going. As Sylverant has been graciously hosted for free since I first set up the server back in 2009, there has never been any point to me accepting donations. That still hasn’t changed to this day, and hopefully won’t change any time soon.

That said, I thought it might be fun to allow people to donate with the idea that donations would go into a pool that would be used on the server in some way. I’ve toyed with a few ideas in my head such as special events rewarding hunters for killing certain enemies in-game (yes, Sylverant can actually track and store that data, although it doesn’t at this time). So, I think I’ve come up with a good way to make that happen in the future without having to deal with any real money.

Starting today (well, last night really, but I doubt anyone noticed it), I’m accepting donations in the form of Dogecoins. Dogecoins are a crypto-currency, much like Bitcoin or Litecoin (it is actually derived from Litecoin). They are commonly used for tipping people on Reddit these days, so this seemed like a logical choice. It doesn’t cost anything to get started with Dogecoin other than potentially a bit of your time (you can even find sites that give away free Dogecoins), and it is all open-source too. So, to that end, there’s a new donation button on the site underneath the .beat time widget. Once we get a bit of a stash built up, I’ll start thinking of how to actually put them to use — after all, it doesn’t do me much good to spend time working on a feature that people aren’t going to use. 😉

So, some of you might know how much I’ve complained in the past about PHP and the account management (key registration, etc) stuff that I wrote in it for the Sylverant website. A while back, you might remember that I switched the ship status display over to being done in Python rather than in PHP. Well, when I started that little project, I also decided to rewrite all the rest of the account management stuff in Python as well. Now, several months later, I’ve finally gotten around to finishing all that up and pushing it out live to the website.

The new URL for the account management stuff is https://wsgi.sylverant.net/account.py, rather than the old http://sylverant.net/account/ . For the time being, both will be available, but at some point in the fairly near future, the old account management page will be taken down entirely. If you have any links/bookmarks on websites pointing to the old pages, please update them (I think I got all the links on this site, so if you see one that’s still pointing to the old stuff, let me know). Also, if you find any problems in the new account system, let me know.

To the idiots who thought it would be cute to use the Sylverant DNS resolver to launch DNS-related attacks, you really are not amusing. Thanks to you idiots, the DNS server I host is now locked to only provide the addresses for PSO-related hostnames. I’m also reconsidering whether I should host said DNS or not at this point, since it is obviously more trouble than it is worth. Not that I expect said idiots to ever read this post or anything else anyway.

To those who aren’t amongst the idiots, I guess this needs a bit of explaining… One of the options for connecting to Sylverant with certain versions of PSO for the Dreamcast (Network Trial Edition, USv1, EUv1, EUv2) and all versions of PSO for Gamecube was to use the Sylverant server as your DNS in your network configuration. This works because I host a DNS server that provides the IP addresses for certain PSO-related hostnames that the game uses to try to connect to a server. All of these addresses resolve to the same IP address as the Sylverant server itself. For convenience, the DNS server could also be used for general day-to-day use and with other online games, as it would recursively look up any hostnames it did not know about, and return the correct IP address for said servers by way of (primarily) Google’s Public DNS server. However, someone recently decided it would be a good idea to use this service that I provide (the DNS server) to launch a DNS query amplification attack (see here for more info on what that is). Thus I have had to stop allowing recursive lookups to prevent someone from performing such an attack. What that means is that the Sylverant DNS is now not usable for general day-to-day lookups (not that I expect many people were using their Dreamcasts for web browsing), nor can you use it in your network configuration for playing games like Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast any more (which was probably more commonly done).

I highly suggest that anyone playing PSO on the Dreamcast that does not already use the Sylverant PSO Patcher disc consider doing so in the near future. I may end up having to discontinue the DNS service if people continue to abuse it, so I’d like it if everyone was prepared for that possibility.