So, today marks the 2nd anniversary of the public announcement of the Sylverant project. It certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been working on it for more than two years, but that’s the way it is. It’s times like this that I like to look back and see how things have changed over time.

This time, two years ago, we were at revision 3 of the SVN repository for the server. I had basically just hacked in support for PSOv2 PAL, and that wasn’t even done yet (there was no way to have v2-only quests, for instance). I made some silly suggestion that I was almost ready to open the server up to the general public (which of course didn’t happen for quite some time after that). Basically, at that point, I had what was the bare minimum to even possibly play the game. It was buggy, and a lot of things either didn’t work at all, or didn’t work right (and possibly would cause you to FSOD or things like that).

One year ago today was the day that I finally opened up the server to the general public. We were up to r200 of the SVN repository, and all of the versions up to PSO Episodes I & II for Gamecube at least had some support in the server. PSOv1 and PSOv2 (USv1, EUv1, and EUv2) support was in a state where it mostly worked, and I was fairly happy with how things were looking. The initial public opening of the server only supported PSO for Dreamcast, but that was mostly due to the website backend code (not the server itself — All other versions of the game required then (and still do require) that you register on the website).

Then we come to today… We’re currently up to r546 of the SVN repository. All of the versions of PSO up through Blue Burst have at least some support (with the exception of PSO for Xbox). In addition, in the past few months I’ve made the breakthrough of finally defeating the HL check, so all of the versions of PSO encumbered by it (JPv1, JPv2, and USv2) can play online by using either Codebreaker codes or the Sylverant PSO Loader. In addition, at the beginning of this year, the PSO communities from Dreamcast-Talk and PSO Palace joined up with me here at Sylverant to build up the community that we have now.

All in all, this has been a wild ride for me since I started the project over two years ago. It has been one of the most interesting programming experiences I’ve ever been a part of, and I thank everyone for their support all this time. I want to take this time to especially thank those of you who play here at Sylverant. You are what makes this place what it is. Without people playing on Sylverant, I certainly wouldn’t have kept up with this project all this time! Thanks also to Impulse and Aleron Ives for their support through everything that the server has been through, and for deciding to bring their respective communities into the Sylverant family.

I hope to have many more years of celebrating the anniversary of Sylverant with everyone here!

So, Sylverant PSO Patcher 1.0 was quite buggy, apparently. I apologize for not noticing the issues. I was under a bit of pressure to try to get it out before Hurricane Irene, so it wasn’t tested quite as much as I would have liked. Anyway, in order to remedy the issue I’m releasing version 1.1 today. We’ve done a bit more testing, and none of the random in-game issues that were reported with v1.0 seem to be occurring with v1.1, thankfully!

Please let me know any issues that you may discover with this version!

*Temporary edit by Aleron Ives*

Since BlueCrab seems to be dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane, I sadly must make this edit for him instead. A serious bug has been discovered in the loader disc which causes problems like those associated with the Utopia boot disc. You can’t target enemies with Rafoie, you can’t use Shifta and Deband on other players, and other things. Please don’t try to download it until a solution is devised. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news…

*The original post follows*

So, I had posted on my Twitter a few weeks back about a big announcement coming up with regard to PSO, and I’m finally ready to make that announcement. I probably would have waited a bit, since I really wanted to have the news available in Japanese as well, but various circumstances happened, and I’d rather get this out now than wait any more.

As you probably know (if you play PSO on the Dreamcast), several versions of the game (USv2, JPv1, and JPv2) are reliant on a specific Sega server that no longer exists called the Hunter’s License server. Well, long story short, with a lot of research and studying, I was finally able to defeat that check to get those versions back online. I’ll go further into details on this a bit later in the post, but there is more to the announcement before that.

You may have noticed (if you play PSO on the PC as well) that Sylverant’s patch server has been sending out updated versions of the PSO binaries that have a fix for some maps in Ultimate mode integrated. This fix, which enables a few maps in Ultimate mode that Sega seems to have forgotten in v2, was up until this point only available for PSO for PC. Well, now I can say that it is also available for the Dreamcast versions of PSOv2 as well (US, Japanese, and European), thanks again to Aleron Ives’ work (and some of my own).

Both of these patches, as well as a patch to force PSO to connect to sylverant.net directly (so you don’t need to use the DNS trick with a BBA or a nasty Codebreaker code with dialup) have been integrated into a program that I’ve written for the Dreamcast that I’m calling Sylverant PSO Patcher. Sylverant PSO Patcher effectively acts as a boot-disc for PSO (legitimate GD-ROMs only — it does not and will not ever work with CD-R copies), that will automatically patch the game and launch it.

The Connecting to Sylverant page (the “Connect” link in the menu) has been updated to reflect how to connect to the server with the newly supported versions, both using Codebreaker and using Sylverant PSO Patcher.

More details are available if you wish to continue reading…
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I’ll be away on vacation for the next week or so (I’ll be back late on August 7th), so I’ll be a bit slower to answer any comments/questions/etc directed at me for that time. I should have regular Internet access while I’m away (according to the place we’re staying), so I will still be around, just not as often.

For the course of the week, I’m granting more responsibility to some of the other GMs on the PSO server, in case things need to be taken care of. I don’t expect them to need to use said powers, but they will have them in case they are needed.

So, in an effort to make things better for everyone on Sylverant who’s native language isn’t English, I’m looking for people who will be willing to do some translations of various things for the server. I’m looking for people to translate not only the server messages, but also possibly quests as well. Right now, I’m looking for people to translate for the languages that PSO itself supports natively, but I may look for people who can translate for other languages at some point in the future (Portuguese is a language for which support has already been requested). The languages in question (for now) are:

• Japanese (I think I have this one taken care of already)
• German (I think I have someone to do this too)
• French
• Spanish (I probably have people who can take care of this one as well)
• Chinese – Simplified
• Chinese – Traditional
• Korean

Some of the languages will involve significantly more work than the others due to a lack of quests in the language in question. I don’t have an estimate exactly of how much work they’ll all be at the moment…

Anyway, anyone seriously interested should reply to this post with a comment, and I’ll try to get in touch with you. Also, even if it says I have someone to take care of a specific language, it never hurts to have a backup, right? 😉

EDIT: To anyone that’s looking to have some idea of how much work is involved in translating the server messages, I’ve actually put up all the translatable strings in the SVN repository. Take a look at ship-strings.txt and login-strings.txt to see what would need to be translated in the ship and login servers. Also, for examples of older translation files (that are missing things by now) for the login server, look at the .yts files listed here.

Well, there’s been quite a bit of work done on Sylverant since the update in June… Not the least of which is the addition of some initial support for Blue Burst. Anyway, here’s a more detailed list:

• Support PSO game connections over IPv6 in all parts of the server (not supported for Blue Burst at the moment).
• Fix a bug with guildcard searches that go to the shipgate pointing at the wrong port.
• Disable the MOTD on PSOGC since it doesn’t work right at all.
• Convert PSOGC/PSOBB’s extra character classes and costumes so that they don’t cause issues with PSOv1, v2, and PC.
• Don’t allow PSOGC clients to become leader on cross-platform play (for various compatibility reasons, and related to the above).
• Add the GM command /override
• Don’t allow PSOGC’s extended character classes into V1-compatible cross-platform games.
• Add the command /ver to see what version of the ship server is running.
• Fix team names in guild searches and choice searches that have Japanese characters.
• Treat Episodes 1 & 2 separately from Episode 3 when checking if various versions are allowed on a ship.
• Reorganized the code for choice replies, making it a bit more sane and easy to maintain.
• Initial work toward allowing the server to optionally control drops.
• Configure patches for the patch server with an XML file, much like pretty much everything else in Sylverant.
• Fix a bug with /list that could cause a segfault on the ship if a user was not in a lobby for some reason.
• Various cleanups and changes to the database.
• Make the /passwd command only accept ASCII characters, as the normal password input box does.
• Initial support for PSO Blue Burst.
• Fix a random bug with PSOPC and the /override command.
• Various documentation updates along the way.

Lots of stuff done in the past month or so, right? Anyway, this brings us to r502 of the SVN for Sylverant. I wouldn’t expect quite as much to get done in the next month, since I’ll be going on vacation in a few weeks. 🙂

So, I’ve pretty much got all the BB support I’m going to work on for a while done, and I want to make sure I haven’t screwed anything up with the other versions of the game. To that end, Iselia (and only Iselia at the moment) is now running the current version of the ship server (synchronized to my codebase, not the SVN), with BB support enabled.

Please, if you get a chance to try things out on it, play around and make sure I haven’t broken anything (in limited testing, we’ve found a few things I broke already, and fixed them). Leave a comment on this news story if you find anything broken, even if it seems minor.

Its much better to find out about broken stuff now than later on when it inevitably gets bigger and more annoying to deal with.

If all goes well over the next day or so, I’ll assume everything’s good, and commit this massive changeset up to the SVN. Also, I’ll enable people to set up their accounts for Blue Burst support sometime tomorrow if all goes well.

To those of you in the US, I guess I could say Happy Independence Day, but to everyone else, I hope you had a good 4th of July. I’ve been hard at work on Sylverant for a bit now (a week or two), and I have something that I’m just going to leave here for right now…

More to come later, once I finish up with testing…