Well, that’s what they say anyway (who are “they” anyway?)… If you’ve been following along on the forums or on twitter, you might know what this is about. Otherwise, this might involve a bit of head-scratching… Anyway, I’m just going to leave this here for now.

I’m doing a small test of some new functionality on Iselia. If you notice anything odd (specifically being disconnected when hitting/killing an enemy), please let me know. You can do so by commenting on this post with your guildcard number and the time you got disconnected (please either put the time as UTC or note your timezone in your post).

To anyone who celebrates it, Happy Easter. To anyone else Happy Zombie Jesus day? 😛

Anyway, here’s a brief “monthly” update, since I haven’t done a real one in a while. I’ve still not had a whole lot of time to work on Sylverant lately, but there have been a few revisions along the way since the last sorta-update. Here’s what’s changed since the last real monthly update, way back in January:

• Allow the ship configuration XML to specify the ship’s address and the shipgate’s address by a FQDN instead of an IP address.
• Add some configuration parameters to the ship configuration for Blue Burst parameter and map enemy data.
• Checked in a few changes to the PSO Patcher that for some reason slipped through the cracks (stuff that’s actually completely unrelated to PSO).
• Added parsing/use of the Blue Burst map enemy data, which makes killing enemies actually give experience. No drops are done yet.
• Fix an issue with the Word Select parsing when dealing with messages about Meseta and item quantities.
• Send blank C-Rank data about V1 and BB clients to V2/PC/GC, which fixes the odd issue with V1 players appearing to have a really high C-Rank.
• Fix an issue with the experience calculation on Blue Burst for players who hit an enemy, but don’t kill it.
• Fix an issue with the enemy hit subcommand on Blue Burst not being sent along to clients.
• Fix an issue with joining a game on Blue Burst.
• Cleaned up some issues reported by Valgrind’s memcheck tool.
• Fix the play timer on Blue Burst.

As you can see, its mostly a bunch of small things (and a few big things) regarding Blue Burst. This is kinda forcing me to actually implement some backend stuff for some of the features for other versions that I’d like to do at some point, so its definitely not a bad thing for everyone who can play on Sylverant. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing the fruits of some of that for V1/V2/PC sometime soon. 🙂

Oh, and before anyone asks, no, I’m not giving instructions on how to play Blue Burst on Sylverant just yet. Its still not really all that useful, since there’s still a LOT missing (enemy/box drops, rare enemies, quests, team support, etc), so I’d rather not open up that can of worms yet. I may look for some people to help test at some point (there have been a few people who have offered already), but right now I think I’m fine with what I have.

So, by now everyone probably noticed that I didn’t have a monthly update posted last month. Sadly, my time has been rather limited in the past two months, so I honestly have gotten pretty much nothing done on Sylverant. I did try to work on some of my other projects, however I don’t really have much to show for them either (at the moment, although hopefully at least one of them will have a release sometime in the near future).

Anyway, I probably won’t have much time for another couple of months, as I look to try to get my work on my thesis finished up. Once that’s all rolled up, I’ll probably have more time to devote to things.

Just wanted to make sure everyone knows that I haven’t abandoned Sylverant, even if it has been rather quiet lately. I’m going to try to get a bit of stuff done that I had started back in January… No promises on a timeline for that being done though.

Well, there have been at least a few changes since the last monthly update, so I suppose I should do one for this month too… So, here’s what’s changed since last month’s update.

• Fixed a segfault if you were to guildcard search for someone who’s changing lobbies or joining a game.
• Make locking in the ship server a bit more fine-grained. Not particularly helpful at the moment, but if a few other plans ever come to fruition, it’ll be useful.
• Hide games a client can’t join from their game list. This means, for instance, that v1 users won’t see v2-only or PSOPC only games in the game list.
• Fix a bug in the in-game bug report system (or rather, make it work under the one version that it didn’t work under before).
• Various other changes that nobody probably cares about at the moment since they don’t do anything that is that useful yet (including two new GM-only commands that were used to test that new code). 😛

This brings us up to r596 in the SVN repository. Iselia is currently completely up-to-date, by the way.

Just a quick shout out to wish everyone a safe and happy 2012. I look forward to another year of trying to find the time to actually work on the code to Sylverant, and I’ve resolved to try to actually get a chance to play every once in a while, beyond that.

As a quick note, the 21st Century/New Year’s event is active on Iselia right now. Not quite sure how long I’ll leave it up for. Oh yeah, and I’d appreciate it if you could try to play on Iselia a bit, as I’m testing a new locking scheme on it before pushing the code to the repository.

EDIT: New locking code is committed. Still, if you notice anything not working right that worked before, let me know.

To everyone that celebrates it, a Merry Christmas to all! If you happen to see me on the server today, don’t hesitate to say hello, I may just have a gift for you. 😛