It is also the 15th anniversary of the release of the Dreamcast in the US.
I’d like to thank everyone who plays PSO on Sylverant for making my work on it worthwhile. It always makes me smile to see people use the software that I write. 🙂
Over the past year, I’ve been pretty busy with real life. I earned a Master of Science in Computer Science degree in December of last year, and begun work toward a PhD in the same subject in January. Sylverant has seen a few bits and pieces of improvement over that time, however. Work has continued (albeit slowly) on server-side drops for all versions of the game, and has recently reached the point where server-side drops work even during quests. Ship administrators can specify whether quests allow drops of rare and semi-rare items on an enemy-by-enemy (or type of enemy by type of enemy) basis, overriding the game’s restriction that no rares ever drop in quests (only while server-side drops are on, of course). I also released the source code of a new DNS server for use with PSO, designed to prevent DNS amplification attacks from affecting the server in the future. Other than that, things have been relatively quiet, other than the small trickle of other bug fixes.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for playing here, and hopefully I will be able to continue to post these kinds of posts for many years to come.
*that no rares ever drop in quests (small mistake)
Finnaly players can mass hunt the items they could never get, now they can hunt brute forced rare enemies and obtain rares that only a few players had in these many years.
Sadly such item findings are…….you know.
Really hope this is advertised correctly, least i want is someone comming in with rare stuff that “they found on quests” and then having to explain to users that rares do not drop in quests. (worst case cenario in an open game, game is dissolved and a locked one is started afterwards)
Still not a big deal, even if rares in quests is triggered without warning, items can easily be dropped on the ground.
Cool update for those that like new things or that want to hunt items at the same time they level up and follow a minor quest story. I must admit, quests that had little story, had enemies but not in a worthwhile ammount and didn’t drop any rares, were boring quests.
Yep there is indeed a typo there, looks like my laptop decided to autocorrect me. I’ve fixed that typo, and clarified one statement in the post as well.
The beauty of how it is implemented, however, is that it allows you to specify that certain enemies or enemy types will never drop rares. That way, you can set all those forced rare enemies to not drop any sort of rares and not have to worry about people farming from those enemies (which is exactly why this part of the feature was developed in the first place). That all said, this is only just one option for consideration, and it is enabled on a per-ship (and also per-quest basis) in the end. I don’t foresee this causing any sort of huge stir, considering if people wanted rare items they have had ample opportunities to hack them into their save files since long before Sylverant existed (the Bankmod for PSOPC and various CodeBreaker cheats for those on PSODC). This just gives more options to those who want to play the game a bit differently, which I really don’t see as a problem.
Plus, this only affects things if the /sdrops command is used before the game is started. Just as it was before, I suspect that those that are that sensitive to the issue will simply not play in games that have server-side drops enabled. It just provides another option, as you (and I) have already said.
H-birthday Sylverant/ Dreamcast 😀
Long live this awesome server and it’s genius creator.
Thanks for all the support and additional features you keep bringing us.
I seen lately more people buying BBAs to play PSO here. I believe this is a good sign. PSO will never die in our hearts. The dream will live on forever.
Regarding the side drops on quests, that truly is a great achievement!!
Btw, is there a way to enable offline quests for online play and use server side drops on them?
I have no plans to do anything with the offline quests, as there’s no real reason to since most (all?) of them really aren’t playable by multiple people at a time due to the use of NPCs and such. That’s more of Aleron Ives’ domain of things anyway. 😉
Yeah right. Ives, if you’re reading this, just for curiosity, would it be possible to upload the offline quests for online play in a ship and use a server command to enable them for one-person mode play?
I have no plans for such a thing, since a) it would require adding more code to the server (or rewriting all the quests), since the quests assume you’ll be using the red gem, but online you use the green gem, so all the NPCs would try to spawn on top of you and NOL your character, b) pflags don’t work online, so you’d be able to do things like getting multiple Soul Eater or Orochi-Agito weapons on the same difficulty, and c) nobody likes the offline quests, anyway, since the NPC partners are a stupid and annoying burden to have around. 😛
c) I lole’d.
Hi H-birthday Sylverant, im new in play online and i need help, i dont understand and dont have friend to play. How to play on altamira?… i dont have altamira