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Kyp

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Posts posted by Kyp

  5. Posted

    On 4/13/2024 at 1:18 PM, Killerjd said:

    An update.

    After 3+ days of trouble shooting. Scouring the internet (googling lawl) of solutions, and people with similar issues.

    Soft reformatting. Debugging. Installing 3rd party programs. Safe mode. You name it, I did it. Having NOTHING work. No sign of the issue as no error codes popped up.

     

    I gave up. I checked it one last time and it was still offline. Defeated, I restarted my PC and went about to look for other games to play.

    Shutting off the PC last night, I felt like checking one more time "Just incase'. No downloads happened, no installations. Nothing changed since last I looked.

     

    To my surprise. It was installed and turned on.

    How?

    I have ZERO idea. None what so ever.

    Everything I did had zero immediate effect. Codes for Cmd prompt. Installations. Resets. Reformats. Everything had no success. 

    Yet, here we are.

     

    I guess.. when you give up. Things fix it self.

     

    That is the moral of the story I am going with.

    Enabling a feature as .NET is generally set up now typically requires a restart to reload the library. So if you followed something that had you enable the .NET 3.5 so it would work, then later restarted, that would have probably be your culprit.

  11. Posted

    6 hours ago, Codemonkeyx said:

    ded

     

    EDIT: false alarm, looks like it was on my end, but I can't explain what happened, lost connection on all my characters, got server not responding message, but forums and wiki were working fine (i.e. didn't seem like my connection)... then after I went and made a sandwich and came back it was able to connect again.  So it would seem my internet connection momentarily decided it didn't want to talk to the server?


    Unsure, but no evidence of an instability in our logs, everything appears to be running normally.

  12. Posted

    I think Altair is the only 'original' sector, created in response to the progen trader being introduced.

    The other quirk I guess I would mention is it has a little more to do with potential future content if we ever wrote it and to some extent making the planets (or other orbiting objects) and lighting look right sometimes it took some weird quirks like that.

    Lastly, at one point there were probably 25 sets of hands working on things too, and not everyone understood how every tool worked. However, it didn't (at the time, at least) negatively affect anything.

    Double lastly, there are occasionally objects in some of that dead space, but we sort of stuck those in for 'true' explorers (or just really, really, really, really bored) people. :)

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  13. Posted

    2 hours ago, fioraaeterna said:

    fwiw, at the most recent "login server" crash, the following happened to me:

     

    just before login server died: level 34 explore, 90% explore XP to the next level.

    i was still in game, so i figured i would warp around to a few asteroids and top off to level 35.

    i just barely reach level 35, then i get kicked off (presumably things were restarted)

    i log back in, to find myself at level 35 explore, with 98% explore towards the next level. in other words, the game gave me a whole free level. the only way this makes sense is if the "XP to next level" had been saved to the database separately from my actual level, so the two got out of sync on the server reboot.

     

    expected behavior: my character should be somewhere between level ~34.9 to 35 on login, not at level ~35.98.

     

    i dont know if this is enough information to do any useful debugging with, but i figured it would be worth a note.


    Interesting report, but I don't think related. At least unless you can crash the server on logging that character in now. :)

    In this person's case, it had to do with having executed a trade and at an almost identical tick the server crashed for another reason, saving your inventory is done on something of a cycle, albeit a very short one, so chances are your 'free level' simply came from the overall server software being forcefully terminated before that save can complete. I'll note it as a bug for us to look at and fix though. ;)

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    Posted

    2 minutes ago, Azguel said:

     

    server with an uptime over 16 hours now. Thanks @Kyp, think you nailed it


    It's more of a 'that player nailed it' but I'm not going to name them because while they were causing the issue, it wasn't directly their fault. Ultimately bad data stored in the database on one of their characters. The strange timings are because they themselves were testing it and not logging it in constantly. 

    Interesting thing is up to now nobody has ever made this condition occur, so it was definitely a new one in this project (something I don't get to say often anymore)

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  20. Posted

    1 hour ago, Kingdud said:

    Ah, and here I thought Shaddex had been forced out after the whole debacle over the line on the wiki homepage: "A word of caution to E&B Developers; Responding to information being included in the wiki by changing the E&B game content(drop locations, mission chains, etc) solely to make the wiki inaccurate will be treated the same as directly vandalizing the wiki. Do not fear fixing/modifying E&B game content as the wiki is flexible for a reason, but please do not be malicious."

     

    Things I do not regret:

    • Being the reason Byakhee quit being a dev.
      • Everyone who hates Agrippa. Who hates how hard the PP is. Those are all Byakhee. You are welcome.
      • Context: Byakhee viewed the Wiki as absolute evil. He wanted everyone to have to read and write down every word of quest text for themselves, figure out recipes/components/etc for themselves, and not have any (centralized) way to share that information. If the game allowed him to have random component requirements for Agrippa, I have little doubt he would have used that. When I put that quote ('a word of caution...') on the front page of the wiki, it was in direct response to him. He had threatened to just change the Agrippa quests randomly and frequently to stymie any attempts to document Agrippa content.
      • Shaddex, Kyp, and others spent weeks or months (I forget which) trying to change/remove that quote, but I kept putting it back. They attempted to threaten legal action against me for 'hacking'. lol. No hacking was needed; they just didn't understand the software they were running. Eventually they let it stay, and I quit being a pain in their asses.
        • It went so far as them threatening to delete the wiki entirely. I had backups and called their bluff. The wiki stands.
      • It was clear to me, at that point, that 'fun' was no longer a central pillar of this community. I did what Kyp so often suggests others do and 'got a life outside of the game'. It took over a year of constant pestering from the player base for them to include a link to the wiki on the main page menu, but eventually, they did. (well done!)
      • That's where I've been for the past 10 years. But now I'm hearing my name get mentioned, so I decided to come take a sniff. This will likely be my only post before I'm banned. Screenshot it, if you see it. :)
    • Getting the wiki setup* (see 'do regret' section below)
    • Coding the skills that made this emulator fun circa 2009. Shield Inversion? You're welcome. Shield Sap? You're welcome. Negotiate? Pretty sure that was me. And a bunch of others I no longer remember and don't have the SVN (yea, this predated git existing) commit history for.
    • Working on the source code for this emulator.* (see 'do regret' section below) It made me a better programmer and is a foundational reason why I was able to have a successful 10+ year career in IT. Where I am in life today can be attributed to seeing good code back then. The code I refer to is from when the server was open source, largely written by Tienbau (Teinbau? names were never my strength) and one other person whose name escapes me.

    Things I do regret:

    • Making Shaddex set up the wiki instead of doing it myself (that had more to do with dev/server access roles than actual desire to do the work). You burned social credit with people and shouldn't have had to.
    • In 2014, I was terrified of legal action by EA and didn't come back as a dev. We all grow as people. And this was an area I needed to grow.
    • Being an immature ass. Some of my 'ass' nature comes from an unwavering dedication to wanting to make things better and being driven in that direction to such an extreme that I am now paid 4x what I earned back in 2009. Other parts of that 'ass' nature came from my own sadist tendencies that I spent a lot of years containing.
    • "Who dares wins" / "Just do it": So many times in my career managers have told me "Don't develop <X>" and I went ahead and developed it anyway. Shockingly, everyone loved <X> once it existed. And the few duds that happened (I am, after all, the king of duds) were vastly outweighed by the good work.

    And, since this is likely the only post I'll get to make, here is some more history:

     

    1. Around 2010, the lead devs were found to be embezzling player donations (this was before Kyp was in charge; he was not involved AFAIK). This caused a pretty big blow up in the community and it is the reason I quit the first time. I wanted no part of that. The server was open source in those days, along with the database, drop tables, dev tools, etc.
    2. Once Kyp took over, things went closed source. I do not have an exact date for this because I basically didn't touch the emulator for another, oh, 5 years or so. The embezzlement stopped. Though, how it costs $5000/year to run this place when I was able to run the server for all 150 players on an machine with an i7-920 back in 2009 escapes my comprehension. Maybe they're paying for dedicated server space instead of VMs, and the budget is for replacement hardware. *shrug*
      1. My personal head canon says EA got involved, and it went closed source because Kyp became the martyr who signed the deal with the devil in order to keep the game online for everyone else. And his cynicism comes from the NDA he had to sign never allowing him to tell anyone that's the deal he had to make.
      2. While that is my head canon, I also don't think it's overly likely. But it is the only theory I've ever come up with that makes any amount of sense beyond "he likes being in power and protects it at all costs" which seems...unlikely?
    3. I came back around 2014 but was terrified of being caught in legal action, so I wanted no connection to anything that involved contracts or anything of the sort. I also wanted a wiki to exist, because nobody knew how to find things or where quests were supposed to happen, and in my RL career, I had used mediawiki to great effect (this was before Confluence became the standard) and knew how powerful it could be.
    4. After the fight detailed above, I left to 'get a life' for another 10 years. It was clear I was going to be unable to help any further.
    5. I keep seeing my name pop up in game, but seeing that Shaddex is still around and involved is weight off my shoulders. 10 years I've lived with regret I didn't need to. Glad you're still here buddy. And Karu, you're a solid dude. Nothing but love for you. You've done more for this community than I ever did. Woody, I still remember your 'voice'. I'm honestly amazed (and happy!) you're still around. ❤️

    As for me? If you want my help, I'm here, but transparency remains my constant that I do not abandon. I see no reason to copy-paste data into the wiki. I have very little doubt that my name is hated to such a degree that my presence would/will cause more harm than good.

     

    I'm loving that people like Codemonkey, Winlander, and so many others have made thousands of contributions to the wiki over the years. I love that Doctor is finally documenting all the ore fields. I love seeing those three collaborate on talk pages to get disagreements moved past and make things better. I love that we can all see that. And I can see there are so many more names who added so much content to that wiki over the years. Thank you all for keeping my dream alive. I got it set up, but you all made it worth it. (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ozons-salute)


    You won't get banned. A few corrections:
     

    • Things went closed source to a desire to keep content fresh and not have everyone copying the repos we had at the time and setting up individual servers when we needed the money to keep developing
    • In 2014 *we* were terrified still of legal actions from EA having only just founded Net-7 as an entity in 2012, I don't think I threatened you with any legal actions, but I may have declined something on the basis that we could be sued for precisely the kind of reasons throughout, I want the game to stay available. There is no deal with the devil (whether an NDA would prevent me from saying that or not). I would gladly work with EA if they wanted to license us similarly to some other games out there and provide the source but I am content with "game is available, don't rock the boat".
    • The budget I put up does leave some surplus but it is only ever used on the game or software needed to support the game. There is no embezzling.
    • More to the point, no embezzling I was ever personally aware of but perhaps that was before my time in "management" so to speak, I do know that the person previously handling donations before the formation of Net-7 expressed an interest in no longer having it in his personal Paypal account due to taxation concerns, that is why we founded Net-7 in the first place because the US-based devs felt the same.
    • *I* am responsible for the mandate not to put active content data out there, because part of that closed sourcing was giving you something to work toward, find, and document on your own. That policy extended to our services, specifically, i.e. I didn't want you to hit the portal to simply search for the item so I made them add hidden flags to prevent that, but still make the data available to higher privileged accounts and of course out on public sites and wikis to expand presence which was more common of most gaming at the time.
    • Shaddex was not forced out that I recall, in fact, the only folks in my tenure that could be conceivably thought of as "forced out" were a couple of folks that tried to fork the project to set up their own server, and try to confuse the player base on it. I won't name them, but they are 2, or maybe technically a 3rd, who worked here in one of the absent periods that you mentioned for yourself. I had pretty good reasons for all 3 cases. 2 being the fork/confusion, and the other being for constant conflict with the rest of the team.
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  25. Posted

    13 hours ago, Doctor said:

    Then let people help you. Give them access to the source, give them access to the servers, and let them actually, materially, help you. Many have offered over the years, and each seems to have been shot down for one reason or another. You are alone because you choose to be, not because you have to be. And I suspect that sentiment would be echoed by the broader playerbase, but maybe I'm wrong, so I'll let this post be my wind vain on that front.

     

    P.S. if you're still demanding an NDA be signed to help, drop it. On $5000/year of donations, there's no (practical) way to legally enforce it. It's an empty threat that puts a bad taste in the mouth of anyone with enough brain power to realize how pointless that threat and document are.


    Those things are partially required by what we set up and how we set it up. I'm not 100% alone, but to be fair the server doesn't usually have this constant downage problem. 

    Don't take this as me being rude, take it as the same thing Zack pushed earlier in this thread when he was subscribing. Quit just talking in it. Talk in another thread if you want to say more than "server down".

    I don't take anything at night because my phone disables alerting after a certain hour and there's no one available to work overnight on bringing it back up.

    While I understand your point of view, what you think you see is not what is happening.

    My main reasons for shooting anyone down generally had more to do with behavior and attitude than anything else, mostly because the team once faced a lot of drama and it caused issues getting things moving forward. This is one of the main things the team, such as it is, does not want to see back because we all get along fine now and there's little if any drama/bs ever.

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