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. 😛

Just a quick heads up that I’ve decided to transfer my domain name registrar for sylverant.net to Namecheap (instead of Go Daddy). While I don’t suspect this will cause any issues, I just wanted to make people aware in case there is any downtime because of it. I believe I’ve taken all appropriate precautions to prevent any downtime, but I obviously cannot guarantee it. If anyone cares to know my reasoning, feel free to read the rest of the post after the fold.
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It may be a bit early, but I wanted to wish everyone in the Sylverant community a happy and safe holiday season. Both Iselia and Altimira have been running the holiday-themed event on the ships for a little bit now (since the beginning of the month), and Vega will be following suit soon, I think.

Anyway, I guess I can take this space to also make the monthly status update post. I haven’t had much time to work on things this past month, but I did get at least one new feature implemented in that time. Here’s what little has changed:

• Compress stored character data when saved with /save.
• Fix a silly mistake with the word select translation.
• Prioritize /qlang over the language code set in the character data. Also, fallback on English if a quest can’t be found in a desired language.
• Add support for automatic character data backups, for those that have logged in (with their Sylverant account) and opted-in with the appropriate commands.

That brings us up to r576 of the SVN repository.

Of all these updates, only the last one really needs any explanation… Basically, I figured it would be a nice feature if the server could back up your character data on a regular basis, in case anything were to happen and your file were to get corrupted. Basically think of it as the server doing /save on a regular basis for your character automatically (right before you join a game). If you opt-in to the automatic character backup, the server will store one backup copy of each of your characters (where a unique character is determined by the combination of a guildcard number and its name). This backup will be overwritten on the server each time you join a game. You can restore your backup by using the new /restorebk command.

In order to use the automatic character backup feature, you must have registered for an account on the server, and registered your guildcard with that account. If you are using PSO for PC or PSO for Gamecube, you already have to have registered (PSO for Dreamcast users don’t have to register to play, but if they want to use the character backup feature they do). Once you have an account and have linked your guildcard to it, log on in game, and type
“/login username password” filling in username and password with the username and password you registered for your account with. To opt-in to the automatic character backups feature, type “/enablebk” once you’re logged in. To opt-out at a later time, type “/disablebk”. Once you’ve done that, you don’t need to be logged in in order to have your data backed up or even to restore it (you only need to be logged in to enable or disable it).

Note that this feature is still in testing and shouldn’t be counted on as the sole way to protect your character data. Also note that just like /save, this will NOT backup your bank data. Let me know if you run into any issues with the new feature. Finally, PSO for Dreamcast users must have a unique serial number/access key in order to register for an account. You are not allowed to use a shared-serial in order to register for an account, and if you do try it is grounds for being banned from the server.

So, I’m testing out the newer quest handling code on Iselia for a bit. This should enable multi-lingual quests for all the ones that I actually have the various languages for. Note that there are quests that are missing (and a bunch that will end up defaulting to English), so keep that in mind.

Anyway, if any problems creep up with quests, comment on this article so that I can take a look. Note that I’m only testing this on Iselia at the moment. No other ships will be running this for a while yet, most likely.

Wow. I managed to remember to do this exactly a month after the last one… Anyway, not much has changed in the past month, as I’ve been extremely busy with “real life”. Here’s the rather short list:

• Removed compatibility code from the shipgate. All ships must now use TLS to connect (and be using protocol v10+).
• Removed the shipkey_gen program from shipgate. Its not used anymore.
• Require a valid DTD for patch_server’s configuration.
• Fixed a possible issue in the shipgate that would cause phantom ship entries on ships.
• Fixed a crash in shipgate if someone tried to use /login but didn’t have an account.
• Added the /maps and /showmaps commands (/maps being GM only, /showmaps is able to be used by anyone).
• Set timeouts on select() calls in ship_server to 30 seconds.
• Modified how ships ping out so that they don’t ping out if they haven’t had at least one ping packet sent to them.
• Updated some documentation along the way.

That brings us to r565 of the SVN repository. Expect the next month to be equally slow as the semester finishes up for me.

So, I haven’t really done one of these monthly post deals for a few months now… I guess its time to knock it out for this month. So, here’s what’s been done since the last “monthly” post, which was all the way back in July…

• Make it so you can disable IPv6 on ship servers, if you want to.
• Add a /restart command for root users.
• Create iconv contexts at startup rather than when they’re used.
• Make PSOPC patch welcome messages have the correct line endings.
• Give the language set with /qlang priority.
• Add a /search command.
• Add an “Information Desk” feature for PSOGC on the login server.
• Fix password-protected games (was broken in r500).
• Make PSO Episode I & II Plus (Japanese) work properly for connecting.
• Add functionality to the GM menu on the login server.
• Fix team names to be UTF-8 everywhere.
• Fix the iconv()ing of guild replies from the shipgate.
• Conditionally apply patches on patch server.
• Add functionality to define a calendar of events on the ship server.
• Various code cleanups.
• Segfault fix (if someone tries to join a ship while its shutting down).
• Fix the current progress box on challenge mode games with PC and DC clients in them.
• Add a GM menu to the ship.
• Add support for PSOv1 Japanese (which has its own odd set of quirks/bugs).
• Allow infodesk entries to be limited to a set of languages.
• Add MOTD on PSO Episodes I & II and Episode III (on the login server, rather than ship servers).
• Fix downloading quests on Episode I & II.
• Make /override work on game creation.
• Add in Sylverant PSO Patcher (to allow all Dreamcast versions of PSO online again), and fix various bugs in it.
• Make it so that quest NPCs using items online won’t disconnect you.
• Fix the broken lobby issue if someone disconnects while bursting (hopefully).
• Allow Ship server to shipgate connections over TLS.

With that, we’re up to r552 in the SVN. Things have slowed down a little bit, mainly because I’ve been so busy. Don’t expect anything to majorly pick up before Christmas time…