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…