So, as you may know today, June 8, 2011 is World IPv6 Day. A while back, I had posted that this site itself was accessible over IPv6. I also said in that same post that I was toying with the idea of allowing the shipgate to accept connections for ships over IPv6. Well, in honor of World IPv6 Day, I did just that early this morning. In fact, Iselia has been running this way pretty much since then (Altimira is not, just in case there were any issues that happened to come up). Like I said when I last talked about IPv6, this is limited to the ship to/from shipgate communications, as PSO itself does not support IPv6.

I guess I’ll use the rest of this post for the monthly update now… Here’s what was done since the last monthly update:

• Fix the message displayed if someone tries to display their friendlist at an unsupported offset.
• Fix a problem where if someone disconnects while bursting, the game would be screwed up.
• Detect duplicate percentages on weapons as non-legit.
• Workaround for a stupid PSOPC (maybe PSODC too) bug with shields and generating invalid EVP/DFP numbers (a modification of the legits.xml file).
• Initial work on allowing some actions in the ship server to be scriptable in Python.
• Allow a quest to be tied to multiple events, and allow quests to specify a min/max number of players to allow in the quest.
• Allow the legits list to be refreshed while the ship is running.
• Add a /logout command.
• Fix an issue where the ship server would silently exit if someone disconnected improperly (and some other conditions also happened).
• Store user options in the shipgate database (currently only the quest language).
• Removed the ability to run multiple ships in the same instance of the ship server (unused and probably very broken by now).
• Add IPv6 support for ship to/from shipgate communications.
• Cleanups and fixes for a few segfaults.

So, a bit more productive than the past few months have been. As of right now, the SVN is up to r458.

Well, almost nothing has happened in the past month (due to “real life” stuff), so this will be a very short post. As for what’s new in Sylverant:

• Added a command to send the friendlist, including friend status, to the client. This required changes in shipgate and ship_server, for obvious reasons.
• Added a global message command for global GMs that goes to all ships.

That’s actually everything that’s changed in the code (up to r423 in the SVN). Other than that, I did a badly needed update pass on the software running on the server, so everything’s relatively up-to-date there. Hopefully there’ll be a little bit more new in next month’s update, as the semester is winding down for me at school.

I’m starting a rather large update pass to try to bring the machine running Sylverant up-to-date. I’m aiming to not interrupt the server at all, but unfortunately with these types of things, sometimes its unavoidable (only thing that should affect the PSO server is if MySQL needs updating, which I suspect it will). I’m going to attempt to update anything that will not affect the PSO server now, while holding off on other things until nobody’s online.

If you see this, don’t let me interrupt your play time. I’m in no particular hurry to do this update pass. I just wanted to let people know, in the case that I screw it up and update something that breaks the server for a bit…

EDIT: Everything’s up-to-date now on the server. No problems seem to have crept up, as far as I can tell. 🙂

So, here’s the promised monthly update for what happened since the last one. Much like last month, there’s not that much new…

• Login server acts more like Sega’s did, with an initial menu presenting “Ship Select” and “Download”. Ships now have numbers, and are sorted based on their numbers. Also, align terminology for the ship select menus between ship server and login server (using Sega’s old terminology).
• Fix a memory leak in the login server.
• Don’t detect invisible PBs as hacked in the legit checker (since there are legit reasons for them).
• Further logging when hacked items are detected in the legit checker.

This brings things up to r419. Fair warning, don’t expect much next month. I have a lot of stuff to do between now and the middle of next month that will probably limit my time for working on Sylverant significantly. After that I should have plenty of time to do things… Hopefully.

So, its March, so its about time for the monthly post about what’s happened in the past month. Unfortunately, due to all kinds of circumstances, not much has happened. Here’s the relatively short list:

• Have all programs automatically daemonize themselves.
• Perform logging to a file by default, not to stdout/stderr.
• Added /cc command for doing colorized chat.
• Added /qlang command for setting the language to browse quests in for multi-lingual quest support (this isn’t turned on in any of the ships yet, since I’m missing all the quests in different languages other than for the DC — I’m missing some of the DC ones as well (special event ones is pretty much it), but I have most of them).

That’s pretty much all that’s happened in the past month. For reference, the SVN is up to r407 now (so only a total of 20 revisions since last month, a much slower pace than things were going before that).

So, here’s the monthly newspost to make sure everyone knows that things are still moving along. Right now, Iselia and Altimira are both running the Valentines Day event on the ships. Not that that is terribly important to know…

Anyway, as for what’s changed since the last one of these posts, lets see (wow, the last one of these list posts was in December?!):

• Added in full word select translation between DC, PC, and Episodes I & II.
• Allow linking of quests to the event running on the ship.
• Added support for .qst format quests in the ship server.
• Added nicknames on the friendlist.
• Initial support for multi-lingual quests on ship server.
• Added commands: /ll, /npc, /ignore, /unignore, /quit
• Added GM-Only commands: /stfu, /unstfu, /gameevent, /ban:d, /ban:w, /ban:m, /ban:p, /unban
• Made it so a ship can be set to disallow versions it doesn’t want to allow, as well as making it possible to set a ship to be accessible to Global GMs only.
• Initial support for PSO Episode III (note that you can’t actually battle yet).
• Translation of C-Mode grave data between PSODC and PSOPC.
• Switch from using libexpat to libxml2 for config parsing.
• Don’t allow lower privilege users to bully higher privilege ones (privileges are checked against each other on /kill, /gban:*, and /stfu commands).
• Various bugfixes (that I don’t necessarily remember).

Whew… That’s what I call an update list. For those counting, the last list of updates came after revision 287 to the SVN. We’re now up to revision 391. 😉

Anyway, that’s all for this month, I guess.

A second piece of large news for Sylverant in less than 7 days? Amazing, no?

I’d like to take this post to welcome Aleron Ives’ awesome PSOv1, PSOv2, and PSOPC website PSO Palace to the Sylverant family. Also, you may have noticed the new ship floating over there to the left named Altimira. That ship is the official ship of PSO Palace, and another welcome addition to the Sylverant family. I hope that anyone out there will welcome the members of PSO Palace to our community with open arms!

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.