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On 12/20/2018 at 1:59 PM, Kyp said:

 

I should imagine the population count probably ties to the relatively dry atmosphere when it comes to the rains of content. Although, I'm setting up a bunch of changes to tools and we've been working on some other things that should go through in January sometime. We're breaking backs to get there, but I think it'll probably help to bring some life back.

 

Looking forward  to  it  !!

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you read it all? I scrolled thru the posts more than 10 lines long, means a bitch session if more that 10 lines and of no interest to me. Good to see new content coming, should be interesting.

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Seeing it is mostly down to microsoft on what they support these days.

U can't argue with any of the Dev;s or gm's about it.

Iff u don't like it send microsoft a letter and ask them to support stuff again..

 

People will come back with time. some people are just bored atm.

 

Keep up the good work Zackman and rest of the crew.

 

Oooh and have a nice Christmas.

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Well I, for one, am still here.  You'll find me joining public raids, or in down times, camping for a rare glimpse of the Celestial Warder.

 

But on the subject of OS upgrades, has anyone tried EnB on Linux lately?  There's setup information elsewhere in the forums, so it at least worked in the past ...

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On 12/22/2018 at 9:19 AM, Zarg said:

But on the subject of OS upgrades, has anyone tried EnB on Linux lately?  There's setup information elsewhere in the forums, so it at least worked in the past ...

 

Kind of getting off subject here, but I've been thinking of following that post you're referencing too and seeing how it goes. Send me a PM if you've already given it a whirl. It'd be nice to update/confirm it works and maybe put it on the wiki.

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It can be done in Linux if you want to run an emulator for Windows services like Wine etc. We have a fork in our code base where we started to see about retrofitting toward a Linux server but ultimately there are parts of it we weren't for sure how to translate and the effort would only provide minimal improvement at best. Linux makes a hell of a web server and even some other things, but it's not the tool for every job.

That being said much like another post I made, we may provide thoughts, you might pique our curiosity and otherwise but when it comes to issues most of such would be on the person looking to toy with Linux since we've not tried it a huge amount ourselves from a play point of view.

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Answer to Gunney's original question.  Life getting in the way, busy at work (coincidentally I work for the company in discussion thru this topic ;) ) and content.  Can only do the same stuff over and over so many times.  This isn't a dig at the DEVs (used to be one once upon a time here).  Games can get stale after while, so sometimes breaks are necessary.  I took a break came back to some new (old) stuff was finally added in and I played through that, did some raiding, hanging with people and once repetition kicked in again, kinda got dull so took a breather.  But mostly work life is the main reason I don't get on hardly ever.  I travel Sun-Thurs every week, and super busy road warrior.

 

Heck I even contemplated taking Kyp's offer and rejoining the DEV ranks.  But alas I'm not able to devote the time I'd want to.  I do hope others take up the offer and create new stuff.  Maybe little more down the road.

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Hey folks, I took a bit of a leave of absence due to the destructive fires we had here in California. My in-laws lost their home and were staying in my game room/office for the past couple months, and only recently found a hotel to stay in until an apartment opens up. My wife also is 6 weeks pregnant! 

 

Anyways, you all will see my Beerdefender squad showing up again this week now that life is calmed down.

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the game is nearly 20 years old and mostly made up of people that have been playing it from the beginning so of course activity is gonna drop. of course it also tends to pick up at times but without new content (basically impossible) people are gonna get bored and take off for a while

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<whew>  too much up there to really track.

 

There is and always has been competition from game creators for the attention of the game playing public.  This tends to siphon off a few existing players each quarter.

 

That said, Earth And Beyond emulator grows by offering something people want.

 

***

Elsewhere, I've been somewhat critical of the fundamental net-7.org website ... it lacks clear and obvious "how to get started" material -- a HUGE turnoff for newcomers.  Such a "getting started" page is where content/links to the basics should all be gathered together.  And that includes player generated content such as Magoo's technical post on how to set up your screen for easy multi-boxing, or a possible how to for running EnB under a Windows emulator on a Mac machine [and/or Linux machine] {along with the notice that this is NOT supported by the DEV team}.  {And a notice that Windows before version 7 is not supported because there is no required Secure Socket Layer update for such Windows versions as MicroSoft hasn't and won't be releasing any while SSL is required for safety reasons to access the servers.}

 

Lord knows that I'm not a webhead ... I'm decades out of date with web design tools.  So this will have to be for someone else to do -- and thank you in advance to the volunteer who does it.

 

I hope there's someone who does volunteer to do it ... the Net-7.org annual budget sure looks like (from the outside -- I'm not part of the DEV team) it is less than three thousand USD ... that doesn't allow paying for much beyond the basic server costs.

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If someone wants to write up that clear concise guide for current operating systems, we'll put it up there. It's pretty easy. We rely on the pinned threads in tech support so we can post back if there are questions (and of course when we're available)

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Zarg,

 

The "Supposed Influx" is not what you think according to my inside source they a ghost or undropped connections by the server login/connection system and this appears to have been getting more frequent since before Christmas from what I've seen.

 

I'm sure Zackerman or Kyp could confirm this.

Edited by YetiGBR1
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13 hours ago, YetiGBR1 said:

The "Supposed Influx" is not what you think according to my inside source they a ghost or undropped connections by the server login/connection system and this appears to have been getting more frequent since before Christmas from what I've seen.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/10/2018 at 1:24 AM, Zackman said:

You were really still on XP?!

 

And i wonder why so many private computers are infected lately, becoming a part of botnets....I can see it in the logs of the mail servers i am running for customers.

Private computers silently sending thousands of mails in the background.

 

Seriously guys, please get rid of any OS not supported since more than  4 years anymore. Please update to a still-supported OS and have (at least) the Windows Defender running.

It is NOT  your very private problem anymore becoming infected - in fact you guys become MY  (and million of other adminitrators) problem too, when your infected hell-spam-boxes are shooting constantly at our servers.

 

:P I still have an XP desktop, p4, 768mb RDRAM 2ghz, GeForce Ti4400 32mb, and it ran EnB really well at the time, and there's nothing wrong with XP.  Micro$oft just wanted to sell more OS and find a way to force people to keep paying them money for an OS that should be free at this point (like Linux OSs).  I run 2 virus scanners and a firewall software on it, and it is quite safe and secure.

 

It's quite sad that devs took away the ability to run EnB on XP. I would like to still play on my desktop, and get better fps than my i3-2330 laptop with win7, or even get my kids to play with me, with both comps running.

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On 12/10/2018 at 8:08 PM, Kyp said:

Because of a change in the SSL protocol, the cipher suite is no longer capable of encrypting/decrypting packets without 3rd party, hacky solutions for your operating system. If you choose to support something past EOSL, you inherit the difficulties.

 

What exactly is forcing Net-7 devs to update your cipher suite to keep the newest SSL?  Why not keep/support the older SSL protocols, and thus allow WinXP users back in?  I know there's probably some .Net dev tools or software you're using for the Net-7 launcher, but original EnB didn't need "new" SSL.  Other than being prim and proper with the latest windows developer environments, why would it be "required" to stay current on our SSL?  No one is going to hack/cheat on EnB :/

 

Can we get an estimate of how many XP users we've lost that have never upgraded to Win7 or newer?  Maybe it doesn't even matter, but it could be a lot of players.  I'm not asking for steam-like metrics, but do devs keep any metrics at all?

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On 12/22/2018 at 11:19 AM, Zarg said:

Well I, for one, am still here.  You'll find me joining public raids, or in down times, camping for a rare glimpse of the Celestial Warder.

 

But on the subject of OS upgrades, has anyone tried EnB on Linux lately?  There's setup information elsewhere in the forums, so it at least worked in the past ...

i'm going to do a major brainstretch and try to install Zorin linux OS and get a win7 VM or setup EnB for linux... will certainly post results elsewhere if it works.

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On 3/1/2019 at 10:30 PM, ghent96 said:

 

What exactly is forcing Net-7 devs to update your cipher suite to keep the newest SSL?  Why not keep/support the older SSL protocols, and thus allow WinXP users back in?  I know there's probably some .Net dev tools or software you're using for the Net-7 launcher, but original EnB didn't need "new" SSL.  Other than being prim and proper with the latest windows developer environments, why would it be "required" to stay current on our SSL?  No one is going to hack/cheat on EnB :/

 

Can we get an estimate of how many XP users we've lost that have never upgraded to Win7 or newer?  Maybe it doesn't even matter, but it could be a lot of players.  I'm not asking for steam-like metrics, but do devs keep any metrics at all?

 

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)

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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.   net7orgRating 2019-03-03 112127.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

back from dabbling (Xenon + Pirates  wiped out) a bit in X4 Foundations (an even older "love" pre-dating EnB)  

 

picked up a second hand HP Deskpro for about 80 EUR (new ssd drive, windows 10) . also got about 24 old 24-inch LCD's sitting at the shop collecting dust. just need to find a cheap GPU that can power 3 LCD's (DVi+VGA only) .  

 

concerning the TLS bit; 

 

have a bit of work to do on some customers VOIP Phones, the supplier is also dropping TLS 1.1 support , which'll mean firmware upgrades for most (autoprovisioned luckily, but forced reboots/some downtimes)  if you do nothing you lose network phone directories etc..

 

used to remember when windows 98 went through the same thing as XP, you could basicly connect a 98 machine to the open internet and watch it get infected fairly quickly.

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Dear Friends:

 

I expect to be out of game beginning April 4 for "some" days.  Time away depends on what the surgeon discovers when he opens me up.  I've some nerve issues in my left arm which are becoming worse over time.

 

While they "think" the problem is localized to my elbow, it is also possible that direct inspection will determine that the nerve farther up is not responding properly -- in which case they close the elbow and do a detailed imaging sequence looking for spinal issues in my neck.  [oh, lovely].

 

At the least, I expect to be out a few days due to pain meds and inability to use left arm.  [I hate pain meds -- they interfere with my mental processing.  The mild buzz of one beer is about all i can handle.]

 

Well, I've little choice -- I'd like my fingers and hand to still be working in a decade -- and if nothing is done, they likely won't be.

 

 

[Thankfully, I live in the US so the wait time to do this "not immediately essential" surgery is a couple of weeks, not months; and paying for the procedure will not be denied due to my retired status and pushing toward elderly age (unemployed old folks don't really need two well functioning hands, do they?  Well, I'd not want to put that question to the NHS since I know they don't think wet macular degeneration in one eye is worth treating if you're elderly {I bet there's an exception to this for politicians}).]

Edited by Lquan
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1 hour ago, Lquan said:

Dear Friends:

 

I expect to be out of game beginning April 4 for "some" days.  Time away depends on what the surgeon discovers when he opens me up.  I've some nerve issues in my left arm which are becoming worse over time.

 

While they "think" the problem is localized to my elbow, it is also possible that direct inspection will determine that the nerve farther up is not responding properly -- in which case they close the elbow and do a detailed imaging sequence looking for spinal issues in my neck.  [oh, lovely].

 

At the least, I expect to be out a few days due to pain meds and inability to use left arm.  [I hate pain meds -- they interfere with my mental processing.  The mild buzz of one beer is about all i can handle.]

 

Well, I've little choice -- I'd like my fingers and hand to still be working in a decade -- and if nothing is done, they likely won't be.

 

 

[Thankfully, I live in the US so the wait time to do this "not immediately essential" surgery is a couple of weeks, not months; and paying for the procedure will not be denied due to my retired status and pushing toward elderly age (unemployed old folks don't really need two well functioning hands, do they?  Well, I'd not want to put that question to the NHS since I know they don't think wet macular degeneration in one eye is worth treating if you're elderly {I bet there's an exception to this for politicians}).]

 

I hope your surgery goes well and that you recover quickly!

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