Well, you may have noticed over there in the ship list that a new ship has mysteriously appeared. The ship there named Vega is the ship server operated by Dreamcast-Talk. So, I guess that they’re the first full-time ship other than ones I run myself up and running on the Sylverant server in general. The same rules apply on Vega that apply on Iselia (although I don’t think I’ve ever actually formally written out any real rules). Its been a bit of a long road, but hopefully this will go a long way toward building up a community here. That takes care of the news portion of this post (and that was one of the bigger pieces of news I mentioned in the last news post).

Now, onto the request mentioned in the post title. Please do not register multiple accounts for yourself. There’s no reason to register multiple accounts, since you can register as many guildcards as you need to to one account. There’s at least one instance where it appears one person has registered multiple accounts, so, I will be contacting that person to try to find out why they appear to have registered multiple accounts. Also, there may be a few problems with some account usernames that have been registered (my fault for not checking things better in the php script), so some people may be contacted about changing their usernames a little bit.

Hard to believe that the year is almost over, but apparently it is. I was hoping to have something interesting news-wise for the server for today/tomorrow, but unfortunately it is not to be. That said, there should be two pieces of interesting news in the near future, so stay tuned! Oh, also, I set up Iselia to be running the Christmas event in game, so you might notice that if you’re online at all.

I guess I’ll use the rest of this post to give a recap of the past month in the Sylverant code… So, here’s what’s changed lately:

• Added a few GM commands: /makeitem, /teleport, /dumpinv
• Made it possible for Gamecube clients to join PSOPC/PSODC games (the game must have had /allowgc set and the GC client must have done /showdcpc)
• Started on code to track user’s inventories through the game. This is not finished, however, and is #if 0’ed out at the moment.
• Fix an issue with word select between PSOPC/PSODC and PSOGC where there would be no name attached to the chat bubble (word select is still not translated between versions though).
• Fix an issue where if you were the last person on a block and you pinged out, you wouldn’t be disconnected until someone else joined the block.
• Ran ship_server against Valgrind and fixed a bunch of issues.

That’s all for now… Hopefully there’ll be some interesting news soon though!

Another month gone by, and its time for the token monthly update… With a little extra treat for Thanksgiving (in the US anyway).

I’ve decided that its about time to finally open up the server to people that want to play on PSO for Windows or PSO Episodes I & II for Gamecube. The connection instructions page has been updated to account for those two versions. Note that both of these versions require for you to sign up for an account on the website, which is quick and easy (you can share an account with both versions, you don’t have to sign up for separate accounts). Also, I recommend that all users sign up for an account even if you just want to use PSO for the Dreamcast, as it will quite possibly be used for new features in the nearish future (I have some fun stuff in mind at the moment that will be tied to it).

So, here’s the boring part of what’s changed in the past month on Sylverant:

• When a user is already online, the login server will not let them log on again.
• Added a command for GMs to send other user’s guildcards to them without involving the other user.
• Fixed guild search replies on PSOPC when they come from the shipgate.
• Fixed simple mail on PSOPC when it goes out to the shipgate.
• Added a few really mean GM commands.
• Gave GMs the ability to /smite users.
• Fixed PSOPC connections that come in on the Gamecube port.

All in all, it was a pretty quiet month, as I’ve been rather busy with real life.

Its been a bit of a quiet month on the Sylverant front. I’ve been extremely busy with classes, and honestly haven’t had much time to work on things for about the past 2 weeks. Lets see… since the last blog post with updates (all the way back at the beginning of September!), what’s been changed…

• Fixed long game names from messing with things.
• Fixed item drops on PSOv1, since they just plain didn’t work at all (no idea when I introduced that bug).
• Made it so the shipgate can know what players are active on all ships as well as what lobbies they’re in.
• Added submenu support (“US Ship List” and the like) on the login server and shipgate.
• Added a friendlist feature to the ship server (backed by the shipgate and stored in the main database on the shipgate).
• Added support for kicking people that aren’t on the same block as the person doing the kick, as long as that person is a global GM.
• Added the ability to limit a game to Dreamcast only, PC only, or V1 only (V2 only is built-in to PSOv2 and already worked right on PSOPC, GC only is a given since GC users are kept separate in games anyway), based on a suggestion by TeamXlink at DCT (he suggested the Dreamcast only option, I added the rest since it was easy to do).

I expect to probably be fairly quiet in terms of updates for the next month and a half or so (due to classes and such). Just so nobody thinks I disappeared or something in that timeframe.

A forum has been set up for the Sylverant project, both its open-source project and this private server itself at DCEmulation.org. See the link in the navigation bar at the top of the page, or click this link to get to it.

You might find yourself asking why would I choose to make the forum for Sylverant at DCEmu? Well, the first and most obvious reason is that PSO is of course a Dreamcast game. Second of all, I’ve been a member of the staff there at DCEmu for a long while. Anyway, feel free to use that forum to discuss anything that you wish with regard to Sylverant, as long as it is within the rules posted there. Enjoy!

Gee, two posts in the same week, and this one is a doozy!

So, a year ago, I had said something silly to the effect of that there was only one bug preventing me from doing a public beta of the server. One year and several code revisions later, I’m finally making good on the promise of doing a public beta of the server. To celebrate the Dreamcast’s 11th “birthday” in the US, the 1st anniversary of me making Sylverant somewhat public, as well as r200 of the Sylverant SVN repository, I’ve finally opened up my server to the public.

Keep in mind, the server is still in the testing stages (so there may be bugs, including ones that could potentially cause FSODs and the like). Also if the widget on the left menu says its down, its probably actually down. You can find connection instructions from the navigation bar on the top (or by following this link). For the time being, I’m keeping things limited to PSO for the Dreamcast only (v1 US/EU and v2 EU). The other supported versions will come as I get the time to tidy up a bit of the website code that is needed to support them.

For the time being, assume that the ship Iselia is the public ship. If you see the ship Palmacosta spring up every once in a while, it is my testing ship. Things on Palmacosta probably will be much less stable than Iselia, so you should generally avoid it.

So, have fun testing things out (and hopefully help find any bugs that still exist)!

Update (September 10th):
I added Codebreaker codes for all Dreamcast versions supported for connecting to Sylverant with a Dial-Up connection (v1 EU/US and v2 EU). Let me know if there’s any issues in using them.

Its been more than a year since I started this project, and almost a year since I went public with it, yet it is still not open to the public… I really aught to do something about that sometime…

Anyway, there was quite a bit of stuff done in the past month or soon the server… Here’s a bit of a summary:

• Fixes/improvements to the legit checker, and much richer legit checking in the example list.
• Fixed the levels for joining/creating various difficulty games.
• Fix a long-standing bug with “Meet the User” on PC and Gamecube guildcard searches.
• Added a command to shut the local ship down in a controlled manner.
• Added support for 50hz Dreamcast clients.
• Made ship server attempt to reconnect to the shipgate if the connection is lost.
• Various bugfixes and attempts at bugfixes (some of which worked better than others).

And… that’s the update for the past month or so about what’s going on (in case you don’t pay attention to the twitter, but pay attention to this page for some reason).

So, I spent the better part of today trying to get the software on this server completely up-to-date. The machine is now running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE (it was on 7.2-RELEASE), hence why the site might have been down a couple of times throughout the day.

Other than that, in the past month, I haven’t had much time to work on Sylverant all that much. As for what has been updated, here’s a quick list:

• Added code to check things against a legit items list, both in ship server and login server.
• Made it so you can’t create v1-compatible Ultimate mode games on PSOPC.
• Added a legit items list contributed by K_I_R_E_E_K.
• Added a German translation of the login server messages contributed by kenws.
• Enforce the maximum connections option in patch server.
• A few other general code cleanups, bug fixes, etc.

All in all, its been fairly quiet on the Sylverant front for the past month. Hopefully I’ll get some time to figure out some of the nagging bugs soon…

As of today, Sylverant will be licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3, rather than the normal GNU GPL v3. This change is to protect the rights of all users of Sylverant servers, no matter where they happen to be hosted. Basically, the AGPL differs from the GPL in one simple area: the AGPL ensures that users that use the server software hosted on any machine can get access to the source code of the software. The standard GPL does not compel people who host networked software (like Sylverant) to provide an offer for the source to clients using the source, the AGPL does. Thus, the AGPL is actually a much more sane choice for network server software than is the normal GPL.

This is actually something I had been planning to do for a long while, and finally got around to doing today…

Well, the last month was really busy for me. I finished up with my first year of graduate school, so, I hadn’t had much time to work on things before that. Also, I got distracted with another little project for a little bit.

Anyway, I’ve implemented a few things that should hopefully be useful going forward in Sylverant in the past few weeks…

• Added internationalization support to login server, and started on it for ship server via mini18n.
• Added a Spanish and French translation of user messages in login server (so, if you connect with your language set to either of these, you’ll get the translated messages if you’re banned or something).
• Login server now gets character data from the client for a future feature.
• Added the ability to select a ship configuration file at runtime via a command line argument.

That last one there is probably the most interesting to me, actually. I’ll leave that up to anyone else reading to figure out for now.