Reporting bugs with the PSO server

[BlueCrab]

So, not that anyone probably cares or will notice, but I've gotten a hold of a copy of the Network Trial Edition of PSO for the Dreamcast. So, I've started adding support into Sylverant for it. Right now, only the login server works with it, but I'll be working on adding support to the ship server sometime soon hopefully.

For those who don't know what the Network Trial Edition was, basically it was a version of the game that Sega released in Japan before the initial version of PSOv1 came out there. It features no offline mode whatsoever, and seems like it was meant to be a public beta, effectively. I haven't actually gotten it online fully yet (as I said above, the ship server doesn't support it), so I can't tell for sure if everything we expect in PSO is present just yet. I'm keeping a log on a Sylverant forum topic of "interesting" observations about it, as well as my progress in getting it supported on Sylverant.

I'm curious to see if anyone else has a copy of the NTE, or if I'm effectively just adding support for it for myself.

[pcwzrd13]

Cool stuff BlueCrab! I didn't even know a trial version of PSO existed! Would the trial users be able to play with users of the full version? Could you make a video of it once you get it fully working online? I'd be curious to see what the differences are, if any.

[BlueCrab]

Cool stuff BlueCrab! I didn't even know a trial version of PSO existed! Would the trial users be able to play with users of the full version?

I won't know that until I can actually get it on the ship to try to play.

Could you make a video of it once you get it fully working online?

I was considering doing just that at some point.

I'd be curious to see what the differences are, if any.

Well, I've outlined a few that I've noticed already in the topic over at the Sylverant forum that I linked to in the last post.

[TacT]

HEY, we were just playing PSO fighting those evil demons and suddenly the game decided that im not good enough to use my weapon or my shield

Why did PSO Just randomly Unequip my weapon and shield and tell me my stats are not high enough? Right in the middle of battle. I've been using this stuff for a long time now

[BlueCrab]

HEY, we were just playing PSO fighting those evil demons and suddenly the game decided that im not good enough to use my weapon or my shield

Why did PSO Just randomly Unequip my weapon and shield and tell me my stats are not high enough? Right in the middle of battle. I've been using this stuff for a long time now

Well, the server has no way of doing that (un-equipping stuff, that is), especially not in the middle of fighting anything (in theory, the server could overwrite your character data (including your inventory and equipped items), but only in the lobby and only if you ask it to by using /restore or something like that).

On Blue Burst, that would be possible for the server to do (I think), but Sylverant doesn't really support Blue Burst, so that's obviously not the issue at hand here. Unless, of course, we're not talking about Sylverant in the first place.

So, to put it in succinct terms, there's no way that Sylverant could do that to you, and I doubt the game itself would unless in the course of a quest somehow.

[MikeStutzzzz]

Nah we were just out and about killing stuff (no quest involved) i think we were in forest and bam he cant use his gear.

[BlueCrab]

Well, I'll chalk that up to... I dunno wtf happened.

As stated, the server doesn't play any role in equipment other than ferrying packets between clients on the subject.

[Aleron Ives]

There are three possible ways I can think of to get a result like that. The first is that you can equip certain Canes, Rods, and Wands to boost your MST, and since MST boosts are applied to your base MST, your new MST value can allow you to equip a different weapon with a MST requirement that you don't normally meet. If that new weapon doesn't boost your MST, it will get greyed out when you equip it, because your MST dropped below the requirement when you removed the weapon that was boosting your MST. You'll still be able to use the new weapon temporarily, but the game will unequip it if you use an item. At that point, you'd have to re-equip the MST-boosting weapon and then re-equip the weapon you were using.

The second is if you were using the Enhancement Pack, many item statistics are changed to allow you to equip different items under different conditions. If you stop using the EP, your game will revert to the old statistics, and you may no longer be able to use the items you were using previously. You would need to use the EP again to restore your ability to equip those items.

The third is if you use the God of Equip cheat (which lets you equip anything at any level on any class) to equip items that you can't normally equip, and then you load the game again later without the code. Your equipment will be greyed out, and if you unequip any of the items, you won't be able to equip them again until you turn the code back on.

[TacT]

What about the shield i was using just suddenly said my level is not high enough, The required level changed up to 77.

So can i just write my own version of the game and hack the shit out of it and lower the requirements however i want and just call it an EP like you guys did? As long as I call it an EP its not hacking right? I can just change whatever i want! Awesome!

[BlueCrab]

So can i just write my own version of the game and hack the shit out of it and lower the requirements however i want and just call it an EP like you guys did? As long as I call it an EP its not hacking right? I can just change whatever i want! Awesome!

No, that's not how that works. The only "EP" that is considered legit is the one that Ives made -- as is stated in the rules for the server.

That, and tweaking all the files is a bit of a pain, especially if you don't know what you're doing. Take it from me, they aren't the easiest files in the world to figure out, and there aren't many good tools for working with them, especially for v1 and v2.