Last year, I started accepting donations in Dogecoins that would be put toward server events and whatnot. Today begins the first of these events! As of the time of the writing of this post, the donations wallet has just under 14,000 Dogecoins in it, so I’ll put 7,000 coins up for grabs in the event that starts today.
How the event will work is as follows, anyone who wishes to participate in this event (as well as any future events) must be logged into his or her account on the server (i.e, you have to have used the /login command in-game), and then must use the new /trackkills command. Once you do so, the server will keep track of the enemies you kill in-game and will automatically record them when you leave the team you’re in. Note: the new /trackkills command and enemy tracking now works on Iselia, Vega, Altimira, and Palmacosta.
For the current event running, your kill counts of certain Episode 1 enemies (no, I’m not telling you which ones, but feel free to try to figure it out 😉 ) will be totaled up across all free-play (non quest, non challenge, non battle) teams that you participate in for the next month. At the end of the month, the top three players by that count will receive a prize. It’s as simple as that. First place will take home 4,000 DOGE, second place will take home 2,000 DOGE, and third place will take home 1,000 DOGE. Winners will be contacted by me after the end of the month to figure out where to send their winnings (and if any winners wish to reinvest their winnings in the donations pool, they are more than welcome to do so).
Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys our first server-wide event and I hope everyone has a great new year.
Everyone probably knows by now that PSO itself doesn’t support voice chat (except for the Xbox version, which isn’t supported by any server anyway), which can get pretty annoying when you’re trying to discuss things with other people while you play, especially if you’re playing on the Dreamcast or Gamecube and don’t have a keyboard handy for the console. To this end, I’ve set up a Mumble server for anyone who wishes to use it to use while playing.
EDIT: Since it appears to be unclear to some… This does not allow you to use your Dreamcast or Gamecube microphone for voice chat in PSO. This functionality is not built in to the game and it would be inconceivable to add it to the game. This setup allows you to use your PC or smartphone to do voice chat with others who connect via their PC or smartphone while they’re playing on Sylverant.
It is also the 15th anniversary of the release of the Dreamcast in the US.
Over the past year, I’ve been pretty busy with real life. I earned a Master of Science in Computer Science degree in December of last year, and begun work toward a PhD in the same subject in January. Sylverant has seen a few bits and pieces of improvement over that time, however. Work has continued (albeit slowly) on server-side drops for all versions of the game, and has recently reached the point where server-side drops work even during quests. Ship administrators can specify whether quests allow drops of rare and semi-rare items on an enemy-by-enemy (or type of enemy by type of enemy) basis, overriding the game’s restriction that no rares ever drop in quests (only while server-side drops are on, of course). I also released the source code of a new DNS server for use with PSO, designed to prevent DNS amplification attacks from affecting the server in the future. Other than that, things have been relatively quiet, other than the small trickle of other bug fixes.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for playing here, and hopefully I will be able to continue to post these kinds of posts for many years to come.
… since the last time I posted, so I figured I’d make a post.
Not much has changed around here in the past few months, at least not until the other day when someone started trying to use the Sylverant DNS server (along with a few other PSO-related DNS servers out there) in another DNS amplification attack. If you were following along on my Twitter (or on Facebook), you might have noticed a few messages to that effect about a week ago. You also might have noticed that I’ve written a new DNS server to use here that should be a bit more resistant to such attacks in the future. I guess we shall see.
Much Dogecoin. Such donate. Wow.
I’ve been asked many times since I started Sylverant how to donate to support Sylverant or to show appreciation to me for writing/maintaining it. My answer has always been the same: I don’t want donations that aren’t actually needed for keeping things going. As Sylverant has been graciously hosted for free since I first set up the server back in 2009, there has never been any point to me accepting donations. That still hasn’t changed to this day, and hopefully won’t change any time soon.
That said, I thought it might be fun to allow people to donate with the idea that donations would go into a pool that would be used on the server in some way. I’ve toyed with a few ideas in my head such as special events rewarding hunters for killing certain enemies in-game (yes, Sylverant can actually track and store that data, although it doesn’t at this time). So, I think I’ve come up with a good way to make that happen in the future without having to deal with any real money.
So, some of you might know how much I’ve complained in the past about PHP and the account management (key registration, etc) stuff that I wrote in it for the Sylverant website. A while back, you might remember that I switched the ship status display over to being done in Python rather than in PHP. Well, when I started that little project, I also decided to rewrite all the rest of the account management stuff in Python as well. Now, several months later, I’ve finally gotten around to finishing all that up and pushing it out live to the website.
The new URL for the account management stuff is https://wsgi.sylverant.net/account.py, rather than the old http://sylverant.net/account/ . For the time being, both will be available, but at some point in the fairly near future, the old account management page will be taken down entirely. If you have any links/bookmarks on websites pointing to the old pages, please update them (I think I got all the links on this site, so if you see one that’s still pointing to the old stuff, let me know). Also, if you find any problems in the new account system, let me know.
So, to those who didn’t see it on the Twitter feed, I’m doing a bunch of updates to the OS on the server right now and the server will be down for a bit while I get things going.
EDIT: I’ve been at this for over 4 hours now, and I still don’t have everything back up yet. I’ll continue working on it when I get up in the morning.
EDIT 2: There’s still a lot of work for me to do, but I think that I can safely bring back up the PSO server. So, I’ve done that. I’ll still have to do a number of reboots along the way, probably, but I’ll time them when nobody’s online.
EDIT 3: So, I think the update is completely done now, save for rebooting one last time. So, once the server clears out, I’ll do that.
EDIT 4: Something screwed up… I’m working on resolving it now.
EDIT 5: Well, it’s still not quite right, but I suppose it’ll do until I figure out what’s actually wrong. At least everything is back up for now.
EDIT 6 (and hopefully the last one): I think I fixed the issue now. Weird voodoo bugs with files not being updated properly during the kernel upgrade are not cool.
To the idiots who thought it would be cute to use the Sylverant DNS resolver to launch DNS-related attacks, you really are not amusing. Thanks to you idiots, the DNS server I host is now locked to only provide the addresses for PSO-related hostnames. I’m also reconsidering whether I should host said DNS or not at this point, since it is obviously more trouble than it is worth. Not that I expect said idiots to ever read this post or anything else anyway.
To those who aren’t amongst the idiots, I guess this needs a bit of explaining… One of the options for connecting to Sylverant with certain versions of PSO for the Dreamcast (Network Trial Edition, USv1, EUv1, EUv2) and all versions of PSO for Gamecube was to use the Sylverant server as your DNS in your network configuration. This works because I host a DNS server that provides the IP addresses for certain PSO-related hostnames that the game uses to try to connect to a server. All of these addresses resolve to the same IP address as the Sylverant server itself. For convenience, the DNS server could also be used for general day-to-day use and with other online games, as it would recursively look up any hostnames it did not know about, and return the correct IP address for said servers by way of (primarily) Google’s Public DNS server. However, someone recently decided it would be a good idea to use this service that I provide (the DNS server) to launch a DNS query amplification attack (see here for more info on what that is). Thus I have had to stop allowing recursive lookups to prevent someone from performing such an attack. What that means is that the Sylverant DNS is now not usable for general day-to-day lookups (not that I expect many people were using their Dreamcasts for web browsing), nor can you use it in your network configuration for playing games like Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast any more (which was probably more commonly done).
I highly suggest that anyone playing PSO on the Dreamcast that does not already use the Sylverant PSO Patcher disc consider doing so in the near future. I may end up having to discontinue the DNS service if people continue to abuse it, so I’d like it if everyone was prepared for that possibility.