Kyp

Hey folks, I wouldn't often do this as I don't want to generally ask anyone for money outside of the emulator's absolute needs to keep functioning, but some friends of mine run/work with an Animal Shelter in CA. They have a poor little puppy that's full of life but was born without front legs. They're trying to equip her with a little set of wheels so she can lead a normal(ish) doggy life. If you have a ❤️ for dogs and are willing, I would appreciate you joining their group to raise the funds. At the bare minimum, they need another 80 members in the group on Facebook before they can actually start a donation pool for it directly, but they do have a PayPal as well. Here is the FB group link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2166599110336683/?ref=group_header Here is the PayPal donation link: http://paypal.me/Flummadiddle?fbclid=IwAR1F5Mi_cxXgXRnrnok_Sxq1ph9BDU9fUUW0RvDZ3Bgfb4E2nDuijzY3gow Here is a video of the puppy trying to play: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2166599110336683/permalink/2194435157553078/ The puppy's name is Flummadiddle.. or Flummy. If everyone could at least join their group so they can start a pool I would appreciate it, if you can spare a 5 - 10 for their cause and want to, I encourage that as well. Please note that this is a personal request, and not necessarily a request from the emulator because it is me. Thanks guys and gals.

Thanks, everyone. Remember the more the merrier, all hours. The characters on the new server as Cipher pointed out won't be keepable, but we could put an end to this CTD once and for all if we get what we need. That said either Cipher or myself (or both) will send you a PM with details (if you haven't received already)

Yeah Yeah, I know, we've been out of beta for a long time. Well, if you're here you either came in from our facebook/twitter posts, and you're interested in trying it out or you're not. We need testers, it will be best if you experience(d) frequent crashing during/when you played regularly. We're going to ask you to essentially stress test our public test realm which has been brought back up for this scenario. Please note that your characters all start fully leveled and with a basic set of level 8/9 gear as appropriate to get you through. What we're looking to see is for you to stress it. If you're interested, please sign up below. The more the merrier folks, we need to try to load this thing to the gills if possible so we can capture some performance and behavior logging. At any rate, we look forward to testing with you if you're willing. Thanks to everyone that can/will make themselves available. -E&B Emulator Development Team

That downloads area relies on sources rather than ours, for people to host then place their hosts in our mirrors for it. We'll be happy to add some. I'm not aware of a current location it is being hosted but if none come up I can look at perhaps making an ISO of my game install discs.

There are a number of articles linked to the top of our tech support section here, and I believe also an FAQ at the net-7.org site that can help you out on the "Game Play and Issues" tab of that FAQ.

You point our launcher to your game client, but you have to have the original game client or enb_demo installed already and point our launcher to that path

It is absolutely possible, that's the point.

This is correct, the community numbers and logged in users dwindled so small for a period that it was easier for us to just talk with them directly. Of course, some of that is summer and whatnot because people wanna be outside. We're not against the player base choosing to do something like that again if it is desired but we'll need the nominees to be interested and engaged. Bringing us useful information about what you find to be pain or what you want to see improved. It may not always work in your way or be the fix you had in mind but it'll help draw our attention to what needs urgent care.

Yes, it is corrected now, we've replaced the certificate. Thanks for your patience. We don't recommend using the workaround long term and caution everyone to put that back if you disabled it in any sort of wider scope. We are looking at solutions to make sure it doesn't happen again in the future.

Probably not but if you can pm me their e-mail I can look in the e-mail system and check it out.

If you can share that with folks for now on the main thread i'd appreciate it. Please note that we don't recommend long term but it'll get people in to play for now until we get this cert sorted out. It was supposed to automatically swap and did not. I'm just surprised it didn't fail before I restarted anything.

Issue is the certificate, it has expired. This is the one the authentication for the game server is using. Trying to get it renewed. Follow the main thread in the net-7 news forum for that. Also check the facebook post for some details on the problem, someone linked a thread that discusses the same problem now that was being experienced at that point in time.

Yes thanks Jan, I noticed it at about the same time. I am trying to get that renewed, that is the problem.

The issue has been identified finally. It is the certificate the game server is using. I am working on getting it fixed now.

Haven't ever used most of these plugins really, what does Overwolf provide to a game? We're not against making it a possibility to do such if we can, but it's really going to depend on what it hooks to since we don't have the complete internals of the original game client.

And to add obviously needed clarification, we're not "updating our cipher suite", IETF deemed everything TLS 1.1 and below as vulnerable, most of them easily so, XP is NOT CAPABLE of doing TLS 1.2 or above without pirate patches that Microsoft doesn't offer. You are MORE than welcome to use such on your own but we provide no support whatsoever once you do. The IETF has just approved TLS 1.3 in the last year so I wouldn't expect even the current version to last long before it's going to be mandated with an end of life of its own as TLS 1.3 will be the first version that won't have most of the vulnerabilities that made this shake-up necessary. Now that being said, MOST businesses you work for and with are going through this sorta thing even now. But on the bright side, by staying up on this stuff and inconveniencing some people to upgrade when I test our services remotely I get results like this from business/professional grade systems for testing.

Have you ever heard of Heartbleed? XP Could not be fixed for that and that's not even the riskiest bug they couldn't fix for it so yeah, necessary. Absolutely, positively, necessary. "No one's going to hack or cheat on E&B" tell that to our game masters, there've been bans over time because people thought they were too cool for school and there's no way we'd notice. Estimate: I'd say in the 15-20 range that it might have knocked out from playing with the system they had. Most people were up to Windows 7 when we made that change (btw, it's going end of life this year, don't hang on to it either)

No, but I am looking into a feature that was added to the forums with the recent update that allows us to integrate with a number of big vendors for this space these days including Paypal, Venmo, Google Pay/Apple Pay etc.

Hello everyone, just a heads up. We're still a little short for this month's server costs. They are deducted in a few days (21st). We need about 100 more dollars to be donated if anyone can spare it right now. Please help us out!

I don't think my replies have been irrelevant, nor have I attempted to "hijack" this thread. It'd be one thing if I went off on a completely different topic, that's what a "thread hijack" is. There cannot be any item promotion or sales. If this is in any way a gray area to your understanding, that statement stands, we won't have anything to do with it, nor take anything from someone that isn't donated free of charge with no expectations of reward. You're not affecting me or hurting feelings or anything like that if that's what you're concerned about, you can press all you like, but you'll get the response that we're doing it as fast as we can with what we have. As it stands right now i"m probably going to have to pay the difference for the servers this month because we haven't received enough donations to cover it. Consider that for a minute. The facebook and twitter pages have plenty of followers, we just don't post on them all the time. You won't get us to revisit our closed dev system. You can act within the structure there is, or not.

2) Look at the Board Members group here on the forums. People that are members are in that group. 4) Our current tax setup is to protect the individual developers from being liable for taxes on the donations that keep the game up. That's the reason the company exists at all. 5) "Example Friend of e&B is created , independantly from the EMU , they have there own server and actualized tools access. they are able to hire employee and create content based on contract from the player or any entity requesting it. More of a independant pactching and content creating service that dont have to be limited by your US based requirement for taxation and current limitation." Are you going to develop that server? The reason we don't share source is to try to keep this alive for everyone. Diverting donations and funding that we need away could very well shut it down. We are plenty open to any developer that can offer. Unfortunately, the ability to communicate effectively in a written capacity is a requirement to develop content. We have the ability to hire an employee or create a contractor, I never implied that we did not. I stated that we cannot make huge sums in profit. With regard to the last, it's not me that's going to be freezing your family jewels in carbonite, it's going to be Electronic Arts, and they'll probably just shut us down as a result when us simply existing and creating it small scale doesn't threaten anything they are doing. "It's not negative." Then, please do tell, why do i keep seeing posts similar to this one from you decrying everything we are doing wrong? I don't want anyone to worship us, we're human just like everyone else and do have lives but we're trying to keep it up. Anyone can join us that has a skill or creativity to offer. We have developers that work in a number of trades, there aren't really any high requirements for most. The ability to write effectively in U.S. English is one of those things. Typos -- while present in the game -- aren't something we want to bring back tons of unless it's to give an effect of speech, e.g. MacKellan. Your little list of things to do is pretty much the 50,000 A.U. view of actually doing those things. It sounds like a simple to-do list to create a bit of content and move on with our day, but that's not reality. We have to create it, validate it works from end to end, run it a reasonable number of times to make sure for example loot isn't broken, any combat is balanced and that most classes that *can* do it can complete it, even if sometimes with a little bit of help. Presto, you've created one mission. Now, add about 50 more and you've got yourself a really nice content patch. Re: the burden of a trial, do you really want to talk about this in front of all? Because I'll say exactly that, as a former player advocate you met the requirements for that position. You applied to be a content developer afterward, I gave you some helpful constructive criticism that I told you I meant in no ill way and you appeared to take some offense to it. This could be related to language differences or even regional differences for all I know but unfortunately, the situation stood and still does given what I see written. I am not trying to give a blow to your ego or make you look bad, this is about producing the best of what we can with what we've got and that's what we do. I'm not really offering or discussing it anymore, I just kept wondering at the negative views you appeared to have afterward. If you've moved on, so have we. "People have gotten use to no GM": What exactly are you expecting, a 24-hour online presence? There aren't that many tickets and situations that they have reported to them (there's a ticket system, after all). Why should there be a minimum of 1 Game master (equivalently, a CSR in most online games) when nobody is being paid? (also, it's against the law to require specific set schedules when people volunteer their time, ask EA, they got sued for it some years ago for their Ultima Online Counselor program) When did I say we couldn't have employees? Can you point me to this? I don't think I've ever worded it quite that way if I did it was not meant that way. See above about being able to hire employees or contractors. I do not have 600 CDEVs today. I don't even think that many people have offered or asked to join in the decade that we've been doing this. I don't suggest anything is meaningless in your observations, but I do suggest like I often have in the past to other players that the view you are choosing to take is a limited one. Do you want to know the real reason no one is paid? Primarily because that keeps the cost low for keeping up the servers so everyone can play. The only time we raise money is typically for an upcoming charge that hits, for example, we just paid an annual fee for the company that is required to operate, so we build in just enough that we can pay those fees when they hit and the monthly cost for the co-located servers we're running our code on. Split/outsource: * No * No * No Electronic Arts have never given a price because some of the back end story/tie-ins for this game also tie into the C&C universe (surprise), since they ate Westwood, absorbed that, they're never going to release anything that they think may be detrimental to that franchise. Could we try to approach them now, a decade-plus later? Maybe. Would anything happen? Highly unlikely unless you had millions of dollars. The remaining team has focused on the tooling over the content. That's what I said. Some of them can't write tools, and some of them can't write content WITHOUT the tools. Hence it makes sense to improve those tools dramatically so that we can get more content created in less time. The tools we have were designed back at the beginning of this project and they needed (and some still do need) an overhaul, or at least fixes to make them more useful. re: agree to disagree, see above but look back at what you wrote here and tell me you made no mistakes. Simply throwing money at a problem doesn't always solve it, but it definitely sounds like the sort of thinking I'm used to dealing with in the professional world. In the last 5 years I've probably had about 8 people approach me about becoming a content developer and 4 of them succeeded, 2 of them joined and then disappeared when they realized there was actual work to it (our assumption, that or they were hit by a space rock), some have left over time to pursue other projects. "EA did not see.." Can't really help that. It is what it is, and is ultimately the same reason why we started this project. Other companies don't train you how to do their internal processes without you working for them, what exactly is different here? fear of taxes, conclusion et al: * we're not afraid of taxes, we don't want our personal incomes and our personal taxes and that of our families to be affected by taking the donations. * You can't cooperate with us unofficially. If you choose to go do this you do it on your own, we can't take anything from you, and you'll most likely draw the eye of Sauron because it looks like you're trying to profit from their idea. Btw. Copyright law for a work for hire = lifetime of the work + 95 years in the United States, we're not beyond any sort of silly grandfathered period for copyright. The trademark may have lapsed but the trademark doesn't mean very much in terms of control of the IP, the trademark was about the existing game and online service for EA and the name "Earth & Beyond". You can do whatever you wish ultimately, we can't stop you but know that we can't accept anything from the outside now, that includes "content you create" and so on. It includes "money and crowdfunding" and basically every other case I think you've suggested. I'm sorry this isn't what you want to hear, but it is what is. If the community wants to fund full-time employees to create content all day, I'm certain I can hire as much as necessary to work on it. That said, simply throwing dollars at the problem isn't an answer to everything. Now, your average content developer salary is somewhere between 50 and 70k, so even if we take the lowball number that's 24.03 an hour, we ask for 5 hours a week from every dev. There are currently about 8 of us. Some of us make more than that in our day jobs so we're not going to quit those to work for less money just because it's a game, so we have to look at bringing in people to replace those people. Even absent all these logistics: 5 * 4 * 24.03 = 480.60 per developer per month. Then the 230 dollars for the servers we have to run the systems that make the galaxy go. That's just dipping your toe in. Anyway, ultimately my answer is: do what you will, you can't promote it directly here as we're not associated. If you attempt to do so we'll remove your posts and warn you, if you did it again we'd have to ban you. That would include such posts linking to us on social media using the sites I showed. The rules exist for a reason, and we do follow them so as not to invoke either the wrath of EA, the wrath of the IRS or the wrath of anything else that will put an end to this little dream.

1) You missed the "and David" part I'm guessing. He has every bit of the access I do, you just don't hear from him much. 2) The existing board votes you into a reserve board member slot, if a board member leaves or resigns, we pull one of those up to the Board. This is generally a group of current and former developers. 3) There is no hostile takeover, there is only Zuul. 4) The board will not entertain a transfer of any property or money in any way other than direct charity donations from the player base. If that ever becomes insufficient we shut the servers down. The reason for this is part of the tax exemption agreement we have stipulates that under no circumstance can donations be rewarded by any sort of prize or improvement. If we paid taxes it would be a possibly different story to an extent. 5) That's probably a question for a lawyer, but what do you mean by "making content" for the game? If you want to do that just work on the things I've told you would help and come back to me and maybe we give it a try. I am sorry you take a negative view or think you see no progress, what i've been doing for the past six months along with several of our other developers is improving tool sets so we can start to roll out content more efficiently. This seemed like a better use of time than a monthly patch we struggled to meet again and again. What progress is it that you want to see? GMs have not indicated a need for more GMs. Woodstock would let me know as necessary for that. With regard to observation, I don't think you have a whole view of what you think you have a whole view of. We take a fair amount of donations to keep the servers up and keep the game going, it's at least a few thousand a year and it reflects on this organizations tax report, which I still have to do and report every cent that comes in. It's a little awkward to explain how a tax-exempt company appears to be profiting, it's one thing to build up a balance if we are going to make a known and planned purchase but growing it indefinitely would be something that would draw inspection. This is generally scrutinized pretty heavily and our purpose is to keep the game alive as indefinitely as possible while growing it as we can. What exactly is it you're hoping to accomplish? We'd like to see some more donations too but we can't accept them conditionally which most crowdfunding requires. This is the problem. The existing team can expand the game content, and any willing to learn, use our tools and communicate/write effectively are more than welcome to join us to help generate new missions and stories and other interactions for people to enjoy. I think like some others have suggested that if you do that, you are doing it of your own accord and you are risking the wrath of Electronic Arts as has been suggested. They are known to jealously protect their content. For the most part, I think they have ignored us precisely because we don't attempt to make any more than necessary to keep the game server running for everyone. As someone noted, if they see a profit on their idea/intellectual property they're going to take a more keen interest and it leads to being shut down which no one wants.

This game pre-dates things that are pretty standard today such as MP3s, the sound/audio is stored in a special format, so it's likely not going to be that easy for you, although you can certainly play it on a playlist in any other media player of your choice behind the game.

I'm not 100% clear on what you're asking but i'm going to answer what i think you're asking: Official communities: * Where you are now * net-7.org * https://www.facebook.com/enbemulator/ * https://twitter.com/Net7Ent Anything other than these are not run by the team but a fan somewhere perhaps. Anything dealing with money has to flow through the board and also myself and David since our names are tied in with the organization for legal purposes. Not really planning on offering gifts to play as that would violate some clauses of our tax exempt requirement, sorry.