Please Read: Time For A Change

Didn't know you intended BB support one day, Bluecrab. While I don't care for it, if/when you ever support it, I may give it another go. Just to see if it is as bad as I remember. Then again most of my BB experince was on SCHThack servers, so a different server might make it better. I'll always be a V2 guy at heart though.

Yeah Doctor N I got all three seasons subbed on my PC. I watched the DVDs of season 1 first then hunted down the other 2 on torrent. Found out there is a novel series too...pity that won't get realeased here. Still good anime series. ^_^

blue burst is a horrible plague and should never be mentioned from this day foward. scthacks other servers were dead cause of bb.

DoctorN wrote:blue burst is a horrible plague and should never be mentioned from this day foward. scthacks other servers were dead cause of bb.

Seems a bit harsh, lol. Not to mention, if they like BB more than v2, they are gonna play it anyway. The only reason they didn't before is because they either didn't know about it, or had never played it prior. v2 is a dead game, but BB isnt the only reason why it is dead.

That being said, even if there were more people on v2 than BB here, you probably wouldn't want them based off of how much you are against the game because they have the BB mentality about them already. People play the way they want, and if they want to move to BB they will regardless of being this server or not.

Rylin wrote:Didn't know you intended BB support one day, Bluecrab. While I don't care for it, if/when you ever support it, I may give it another go. Just to see if it is as bad as I remember. Then again most of my BB experince was on SCHThack servers, so a different server might make it better. I'll always be a V2 guy at heart though.

There's no good reason that I can think of to discriminate against one version of PSO. Also, like I said, Sylverant originally ONLY supported Blue Burst, when the project first started.

To me, I just want to create the most complete Open Source PSO server out there. Blue Burst would obviously be needed to try to claim that the server was "complete".

Also, don't think that I'd stop support for v2 just because I was supporting Blue Burst. In fact, quite the contrary, many of the features I've been working on only work reliably on V1/V2: they don't even support Gamecube at the moment (for instance, the legit checker has a few v1/v2 dependencies still, specifically with mags -- hence why everything in the checker is forced to only be checked for v1/v2 at the moment). I still respect my origins with PSO. I want to make the best server for anyone who wants to play PSO, regardless of the version they choose to play, and I want to try my best to make it so everyone can play together in harmony, if at all possible.

That's the way it should've been on Sega's server, and that's the way I want it to be on Sylverant.

All of that said, I still don't see why people say that BB killed V2. Sure, before schtserv supported BB, the only easy way to play PSO "for free" was to download PSOPC and play that. Those that migrated away from PSOPC to exclusively play BB obviously don't care about the origins of the game to start with. BB can't really be blamed for people migrating away from V1/V2/PSOPC, as those people would have eventually done so anyway.

All of this said, I don't foresee BB support on Sylverant for quite a while. I just don't have the time to do it right now, and I have other versions to support more fully first.

BlueCrab wrote:I want to try my best to make it so everyone can play together in harmony, if at all possible.

probably the only way everyone should think about pso and it's different versions.

Honestly, every version had its goods and bads, but I guess haters went around and did their job (Yes, it's their job to hate, dur ) to well while they pointed out the bads more than the goods. I love pso (to an extent of course) to never hate on which version i would play on, whether it'd be GC, or v1, it's still amazing!

dont get me wrong i do like blue burst. but the problem with schtack was all the servers (in a way) were clumped together so %99 of all people used blue burst cause it was the free way to access. thats a "other version killer". i can see the gamecube version being the most unpopulated because of how expensive pso is (luckily i bought plus from a kid for $30 the other week) and the rarity of (even though cheaper than dreamcast's) broadband adapters. lol. bluecrab, i recommend you have a donation thingy set in order to play blue burst (when/if you add it). think about it

I dont see where you are going DoctorN, BB was never clumped imo, since you could always play alone, or even with some friends, but it was never clumped in a way that there was a lot of lag or there wasn't enough space on the ships. Though I do understand about the rarity, for GC. And lastly, I don't think taking donations would be a good idea, seemingly enough, it is counted for as illegal to make money unauthorized, Even if it IS Donations, it's still accounted for as making money off of sega's work. Well yeah, it still is illegal to do this sort of stuff (don't get me wrong bluecrab, your work is just awesome ) But getting caught without donations is still less worse than what it would be.

tl:dr = bb not clumped, agreed on rarity, donation =/= bad while nonprofit =/= good O:

DoctorN wrote:dont get me wrong i do like blue burst. but the problem with schtack was all the servers (in a way) were clumped together so %99 of all people used blue burst cause it was the free way to access. thats a "other version killer". i can see the gamecube version being the most unpopulated because of how expensive pso is (luckily i bought plus from a kid for $30 the other week) and the rarity of (even though cheaper than dreamcast's) broadband adapters. lol. bluecrab, i recommend you have a donation thingy set in order to play blue burst (when/if you add it). think about it

The thing is, if people are just looking for the free way to play things, they're going to do that no matter what versions I support. These are people that have no respect for the game, in my opinion, and thus they're people that I don't really particularly care about in the end.

Requiring donations for Blue Burst support wouldn't really do anything in the end, at least not that would make sense to me. I mean, as it is right now, many people around probably didn't pay for their version of PSO. I mean, how many people play with a version of PSOPC that they ACTUALLY bought? I'd venture to guess, the number is very close to 0. Heck, with the people playing on the DC, how many people are playing v2 with a legit PAL v2 disc? I'd guess that's pretty close to 0 as well. Requiring donations for Blue Burst support would mean that I should be requiring donations from everyone else that is playing a version of the game they didn't pay for. That'd just be annoying to start with.

Plus, I have no intention to make money off of my work on Sylverant. I do it for fun, not for any sort of profit.

Also, it is, to my understanding, entirely legal for me to write this server software. I've not incorporated any Sega-copyrighted code into it (obviously), and thus I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear with regard to that. I don't think there's any reason that they could come after me, even if I was making money off of the server software itself. Believe me, if I thought it was illegal to be writing Sylverant, I wouldn't be doing it.

In any case it will be awhile before Sylverant supports Blueburst. And when it does, even iif I play it again and decide I hate it (blueburst). I don't see how it will affect me as a v2 player. Ives has within reason full regin of Altimira, and Bluecrab seems to honestly care about all PSO players, no matter their version or playstyle.

While I have ZERO say on how the server is run I would set it up where there are ships for each Major version of PSO, that is a v1/v2/PC ship, then a GC ship and finally a BB ship. And of course the DLC servers for DC, PC, and GC.

I don't know much about the PSO code..but with the fairly major differences between v2, GC, and BB, Giving them each their own ship would allow each version to keep its own play style. And from what I understand setting up cross compatablity between the three major versions, v2, GC, BB seems to be a pain.

Reverse engineering is legal in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Other versions had healthy populations on SCHTServ because SCHTServ was the first and only alternative for playing PSO. All other servers are derived from it to various degrees. I believe Kohle acquired most of his packet information from Schthack's software, Sodaboy coded much of Tethealla based on the leaked version of Schthack's full software, and BlueCrab coded Sylverant through a combination of examining the Tethealla source code, Kohle's packet log information, and direct SCHTServ packet logs. This isn't to demean the work any of the other people have accomplished; it is merely to say that none of them could have done what they did if Schthack hadn't done it first. BlueCrab freely admits this, and I don't think the others were pretending to have done it all on their own, either. Of course, BlueCrab has also done plenty of his own work documenting PSO's network protocol, and as such, Sylverant now supports things that no other server does, like global Word Select. He was just able to benefit from the stuff that was already documented.

The point is that since Schthack was the first one to do everything in private PSO servers, unless his software supported something, it was impossible. Since originally only Ver.1/2 were supported, people were forced to either play Ver.1/2 or not play PSO at all. Once GC support was opened, the people who were only using Ver.2 as a stopgap measure jumped ship, and the same thing happened again once BB support was opened. A lot of people were using GC as a stopgap measure, too, and GC also took a population hit when BB support was opened.

If BlueCrab did add BB support, we wouldn't see a huge change in the number of players we have now, because it's already possible to play BB on a private server. Adding one more option wouldn't suddenly make any of us switch. We could already be playing BB if we wanted. The only difference would be that the overall number of users on Sylverant would increase, as people who don't like SCHTServ (or the plethora of other BB servers) would come here.

To be honest, if/when BlueCrab does add BB support, he won't be able to continue running Sylverant without either charging people, taking a lot of money out of his own pocket, or leaving BB disabled on Iselia while leaving BB support in the source code for other people who might want to run their own servers with BB support. SCHTServ used to be run on people's home Internet connections, too, and that became impossible when BB support was made public. The combination of the patch server, the fact that BB sends so much more data than the other versions, and the sheer number of players made professional hosting a necessity to keep SCHTServ running. It's doubtful that his current host would be willing to continue hosting if the bandwidth increased as much as it would if Sylverant had a hundred BB players on it. As such, I don't think we have much to worry about in the near future. There's still work to be done on Ver.2, Ver.3, Episode III, Ver.1/2 cross platform, and even possibly Ver.2/3 cross platform, and that will take a long time to finish.

BlueCrab wrote:
I mean, as it is right now, many people around probably didn't pay for their version of PSO. I mean, how many people play with a version of PSOPC that they ACTUALLY bought? I'd venture to guess, the number is very close to 0. Heck, with the people playing on the DC, how many people are playing v2 with a legit PAL v2 disc? I'd guess that's pretty close to 0 as well.

Just for the record, as far as I know, 2 or 3 people have legit pso pc discs, and quite a few people I've seen online have legit EUv2 GD-ROMs, myself included (I can count 5, maybe even 6 people).

people writing about points of view wrote:-Snip-

So, I have a question about all this. Why are we worrying about BB support at this point in Sylverant's history?

It's not going to come for a long time, especially if it comes after v2/GC cross-platform compatibility. We should just focus on being happy with what we have now. I think we should just let BlueCrab do what he plans to do--it's his server, after all.

I know this guy who has a full functioning episode III private server, problem is:
*he lives in his moms basement
*theres no way to access it online (its a lan server, but even then, hes got four gamecubes plugged into a server he made)

Noone problably even has pso pc seeing as though it was in asian markets XD. im sure british people have pal v2 legit copy. and i have a legit v1 ntsc copy.

its all cool, im just saying from my past experience from what ive seen blue brust can do. i do play blue burst though, technically its more of a thing i set up on my school computers and kids borrow usb sticks i bring and that specific bb connects to the one i set up on a computer in the computer lab. lol.

and moop is right no more of these shenanigans. although i cna try and convince the guy to get a small part of his server if youd like. probably impossible though.

DoctorN wrote:
Noone problably even has pso pc seeing as though it was in asian markets XD. im sure british people have pal v2 legit copy. and i have a legit v1 ntsc copy.

wait, pso pc of v1? has this ever existed? or are you referring to literally the DC version.. Anyway, i'm sure someone here can testify on having pso pc in their hands, Cough cough Ives cough.


Hmm I guess it's time I reinstall pso (around 7 windows partitions all switching between x86/x64), So, hope to see you guys on soon!

Aleron Ives wrote:To be honest, if/when BlueCrab does add BB support, he won't be able to continue running Sylverant without either charging people, taking a lot of money out of his own pocket, or leaving BB disabled on Iselia while leaving BB support in the source code for other people who might want to run their own servers with BB support. SCHTServ used to be run on people's home Internet connections, too, and that became impossible when BB support was made public. The combination of the patch server, the fact that BB sends so much more data than the other versions, and the sheer number of players made professional hosting a necessity to keep SCHTServ running. It's doubtful that his current host would be willing to continue hosting if the bandwidth increased as much as it would if Sylverant had a hundred BB players on it. As such, I don't think we have much to worry about in the near future. There's still work to be done on Ver.2, Ver.3, Episode III, Ver.1/2 cross platform, and even possibly Ver.2/3 cross platform, and that will take a long time to finish.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that BB sends a lot of extra data... If the community didn't change in size drastically, the amount of "extra" data that BB sends doesn't seem to be all that large (from what I saw when Sylverant supported BB in the beginning). In fact, once in-game, there's actually LESS data sent, since the server takes over the leader duty (so, it doesn't transmit packets to the leader for data nor receive the packets that the leader would reply with, cutting out two packets for anything that the leader has to deal with). Granted, most of those packets are quite small, but they happen so often that it would add up.

I'm not so sure that as long as the community didn't explode in size that there'd be any reason that I couldn't run BB stuff on the server. That said, if the community were to suddenly explode in size, I doubt BB support or not would make much difference -- either way we might have problems with too much bandwidth.

Although, as you said... There's many more pressing issues than BB support, so it doesn't really matter anyway at the moment.

can you incorporate a ventrilo server built into the game for pc players so they can use their mics?

DoctorN wrote:can you incorporate a ventrilo server built into the game for pc players so they can use their mics?

Funny you mention that, there are a lot of teamspeak servers for BB teams on schtserv, its almost not really necessary to build it into the game, if an option like that is even possible lol.

Another close runner up is to use a client like Xfire that has a voice chat capability in it or Teamspeak as well, both are pretty viable programs. Push comes to shove you turn on voice chat and go fullscreen or windowed, works about the same.

I've never heard of Ventrillo before today, but there's pretty much no chance you'll see me adding stuff to the client. Client modifications are all annoying and hacky anyway, and they really aren't my thing...

That said, Xfire is a neat little client on Windows that has some support for doing stuff inside games. I know it claims that it works with Blue Burst, but I don't know that there's any support for PSOPC.

Teamspeak would be a nice one...

I sometimes use skype for voice-chat on my pc while playing pso on my DC.

I once made a website for a gamoing clan which had a teamspeak panel on it, i could have a look on my old data if i find the binaries. its a pretty neat tool i used and it works nicely (actually shows the curent users and if they are talking, letting you fast-join by clicking.

On the BB side, there should be no need to worry. Ives has his DC/PC ship, BlueCrab wants to have cross platforming of curent versions done before enabling epi4 and like he said, on his server software there is not that much traffic for BB.

Well, when the time comes, it would be nice to have at least one (free4all) ship were all can chat (or even better play) together and others designated for episode 1 / 2 / 4 and maybe episode 3?

I am sorry i am not good im programming and have nearly no time for private projects. I really would love to help out, well i dont even find the time to finish the translations...


But if a dream i keep getting regularly (like every 2-4 days) since about 1 month becomes true.....

Well i was dreaming about the day i bought PSO 2 and first went online. I found myself in a neat online lobby which pretty much looked like the old pso online lobby, were able to change ships and blocks and arrange teams. On the information tab i saw a note:

"It's the 10th anniversary of Phantasy Star Online and time to give a Birthday present to all the players who kept the game alive for such a long time. Thats why we brought back online all old shipgates leading to this server making it possible for every PSO version to logon again and play on this server. To avoid compatibility issues, you select the desired episode when opening a team. A compatibility checker marks all items not compatible which the selected episode and blocks dropping.


I then made a game and tried out episode one which was original pso dreamcast like but HQ music and HQ graphics. It was like playing on crack *g*. I then took my DC, removed the sylverant BBA entry and started a game....

It actually connected and i saw the shipgate of the PSO 2 server, went online, saw my pso 2 and DC chars standing side by side and had a nice chat online. Would be soooooo cool to see the old shipgates work again (so all pso players can play again out of the box) and having a server were everyone can play together.

Hope it comes true, there has to be something important why i get this dream over and over again...

Little Vamp wrote:On the BB side, there should be no need to worry. Ives has his DC/PC ship, BlueCrab wants to have cross platforming of curent versions done before enabling epi4 and like he said, on his server software there is not that much traffic for BB.

Well, when the time comes, it would be nice to have at least one (free4all) ship were all can chat (or even better play) together and others designated for episode 1 / 2 / 4 and maybe episode 3?

In my opinion, there's little reason to be running multiple ships for different versions. Assuming all the cross-compatibility stuff works, running multiple ships only needlessly segregates the population.

it would be cool to be in a team with every other using playing a different version than you

BlueCrab wrote:In my opinion, there's little reason to be running multiple ships for different versions. Assuming all the cross-compatibility stuff works, running multiple ships only needlessly segregates the population.

I wouldn't say that it's needless. There's animosity between the different versions, and as you've said before, many people who play BB have no respect for the original game. Segregation became necessary on SCHTServ, because Ver.2 players, and even Ver.3 players, got sick of being ridiculed for playing old and "inferior" versions of the game. Furthermore, I really don't want to enter the lobby and have the first thing I hear be BB users bickering about how much Hit is necessary for a Snow Queen to be useful on a RAcast, nor do I want to listen to debates on which quest is best to spam to get a certain item. Different versions have fostered different mentalities, and one of the best things about Sylverant is finally being on a server where we can get some peace.

amen

DoctorN wrote:amen

No u amen

I dunno. A lot of the stuff on SCHTserv think was and still is the current admin's (chrono I think?) total laziness with regards to actually doing or running anything on the SCHTserv. Its cliché but without leadership the people perish.

A lot of BB players were jerks because they were allowed to be so, and it was the attitude the leadership fostered. If the leadership and admin didn't care about v1-3 why should the players? If the leadership looks down on v1-3 players and treats them like crap, why would the majority do anything different? At best nothing was done about the harassment of older version players because Chrono's answer was mostly likely deal with it or get BB because Chrono didn't care about v1-3 or its players at all.

I think a lot of the BB problems that were on SCHTserv won't be an issue on Sylverant simply because Bluecrab seems to care about and support all PSO players regardless of version. And just as important Bluecrab takes an active hand in running his server.

That said my main augment for different ships for the different versions is to keep the play style and feel of the version we are choosing to play. If I am choosing to play v2, that means I like the balance and mechanics of that version. I don't want the newer classes, newer mags/weapons/items, or casts using magic. It kinda ruins the feel and balance if suddenly a HUcaseal or RAmarl comes in and starts busting out a ton of of BB weapons which were not meant to be in v1-3.

Rylin wrote:I dunno. A lot of the stuff on SCHTserv think was and still is the current admin's (chrono I think?) total laziness with regards to actually doing or running anything on the SCHTserv. Its cliché but without leadership the people perish.

A lot of BB players were jerks because they were allowed to be so, and it was the attitude the leadership fostered. If the leadership and admin didn't care about v1-3 why should the players? If the leadership looks down on v1-3 players and treats them like crap, why would the majority do anything different? At best nothing was done about the harassment of older version players because Chrono's answer was mostly likely deal with it or get BB because Chrono didn't care about v1-3 or its players at all.

I think a lot of the BB problems that were on SCHTserv won't be an issue on Sylverant simply because Bluecrab seems to care about and support all PSO players regardless of version. And just as important Bluecrab takes an active hand in running his server.

I think that's a valid point, and it definitely contributed to the problem. I don't think it can be considered the sole reason, though. The games themselves have fostered different attitudes, and the self-centered, item-hoarding, efficiency-crazed mindset has contributed to BB players' disdain of others. Even GC users, who are closer to that mentality than Ver.2 users, have found BB players' obsessions to be a bit extreme. Forces aren't even allowed to cast Jellen on BB, because it "causes damage cancel" and "slows down the team". Even if Crono wasn't ignoring the older versions, I don't think he's responsible for the way BB has twisted a game that's supposed to be about teamwork into a grotesque competition.

Rylin wrote:That said my main augment for different ships for the different versions is to keep the play style and feel of the version we are choosing to play. If I am choosing to play v2, that means I like the balance and mechanics of that version. I don't want the newer classes, newer mags/weapons/items, or casts using magic. It kinda ruins the feel and balance if suddenly a HUcaseal or RAmarl comes in and starts busting out a ton of of BB weapons which were not meant to be in v1-3.

You'd never have to worry about that, anyway. Just like Ver.1 can't see you using Ver.2 weapons that don't exist, Ver.2 couldn't see GC users using weapons that only exist in GC, and the same goes for BB. Support for Ver.2/3 cross platform would, at best, be about the same as EP and non-EP users playing together. There's no way for BB to play with other platforms at all, unless BlueCrab goes all out and starts making the server take control of things that the client is supposed to handle, such as drops. I don't think people would like that, since one of the main problems with BB, even on SCHTServ, is that the drops in Episode I / II still don't quite match the GC version, and in things like Challenge mode, drop accuracy is very important. It really isn't even worth trying to implement BB compatibility with other versions. For one thing, it completely defeats the purpose of having BB do everything server side if you can just play with people who can hack their equipment at will.