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.

… but not so much if you pay attention to the twitter feed for my stuff. Since the last blog update, here’s an overview of what’s been done in regard to Sylverant:

• Added the ability to ban clients globally within the game for Global GMs.
• Tell users who were kicked/banned why they were kicked/banned.
• Fixed a nasty shipgate bug that prevented more than one ship from being available at a time.
• Added support for the EU version of PSOGC (50Hz only at this point), and the JP versions as well.
• Add a /list command for GMs to get a list of all clients in a lobby/block/ship.
• Challenge and battle ranks are implemented correctly and set to all clients in the lobby.
• Fix the text encoding for non-Japanese text.
• Let Gamecube users get and send guildcards from/to other versions.
• Added support for simple mail blacklists and autoreplies.

So, as you can see, I’ve been a bit busy with this stuff. Anyway, that’s the gist of what’s been going on, and I don’t really have anything else to say here for now…

Life/work has been keeping me rather busy the past few weeks, so unfortunately not much has gone on with Sylverant. I did get a few minutes to work on some stuff, and added in a /warpall command to the server (GM-only).

At this point, there’s really not all that much left that I wanted to get implemented before opening up to a more public test. Hopefully some of that stuff will get implemented in the next few weeks…

Heh, I just realized that its been two months since I’ve actually posted anything on here. No, the project isn’t dead it was just moving rather slowly due to classes at the university I attend. Things continue to improve rather nicely with the server. Also, if you’ve noticed the Twitter feed on the left side of the page, that’s been updated at least a few times since the last time I posted anything here.

Anyway, as for what’s new with the project:

• I’ve added support for PSOPC that seems to work fairly well.
• I’ve created a new online quest that will be available on Sylverant entitled “Global Warming”. Its fully compatible with all versions of PSO supported by the server (so, PSOv1, PSOv2 and PSOPC).
• I’ve been adding a few commands to the server that can be used by typing something starting with /. Some of the commands are usable by everyone, others only by GMs.
• Global (shipgate-wide) GMs are supported now, although they currently do not have any additional powers over what local (ship-level) GMs have. That will be changing sometime in the (hopefully near) future.

There’s still a few more things I would like to take care of before opening the server up to the public, but I’m really hoping that can happen soon. Thanks to anyone still following the project, even with my almost complete lack of updates.

So, you may have noticed the Server Status box to the left there (or maybe you will now), and you may have noticed that it seems to have sprung to life all of a sudden. You might even notice a Ship listed over there (most likely without anyone in it). Yes, the server is up and running sometimes, for some semi-private beta testing. I may look for some more testers that are able to play with PSO for the Dreamcast sometime soon, so feel free to comment on the article if you’d like to be informed when that happens (make sure to use a valid email address so that I have some way of getting in contact with you).

Just wanted to clear that up before anyone gets too confused about it.

As of a few hours ago, the site, along with the server itself, are now hosted on FreeBSD, instead of Linux. Why, you may ask, would I switch from a working Linux setup to FreeBSD? The answer to that is simple: the bug that I’ve been chasing that has thus far prevented me from putting up a working Sylverant server does not affect FreeBSD.

No, that doesn’t mean that the server is up for the general public just yet. I still want to do a lot more testing than I’ve done to make sure there aren’t any nasty memory leaks or anything else like that, so that when it is up for the general public, you all don’t bring my server here to its knees within minutes.

In related news, I’ve actually had a little bit of time to work on the code for the Sylverant server, and I’ve fixed a few bugs in the subversion repository. Also, I’ve set up a mailing list for those that might be interested in knowing about any further code commits to the repository. That list can be accessed here.

Its been a bit of a long journey, but I think I can finally see some sort of clearing up ahead.

I apologize for the lack of updates. Its been a busy month for me, as I start on my graduate studies in Computer Science. Life’s been playing tricks with my free time and making it disappear, and thus I’ve been a bit more silent than I would have liked to have been. I can’t guarantee when I’ll have the time to work more on Sylverant, but I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that I hadn’t abandoned the project.

Also, you might notice (if you click on any links on the site) that the site has a new address: http://sylverant.net. Its still hosted in the same place, but I decided to buy a domain name for it today.

That’s it for today, hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to work on stuff sometime soon.