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.

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.