Admiral Kirk

So long and thanks for all the fish. Leaving SS is like getting unplugged from the Matrix, welcome to the real world bud Good luck

@Hakaku My appologies if my comments were inflamatory, no offense was meant and I appreciate your level-headedness in replying to it. My fault for letting my frustration form my response. I believe you are correct in your sumation of the situation. I just wish it could have turned out differntly from the start. I owe this game a great deal for where I am in the word today. A professional programmer making good money with a loving wife who is several months into the process of creating our first child. None of it would have ever happened if not for this game, quite litterly. I just wish we could have all worked together to do more, but I guess everything has its time and perhaps the bell for this game has started to toll.

Snrrrub, long time no talk, send me a PM if you happen to read this, might be nice to catch up. As for the rest of you, all I can do is shake my head. SVS never understood, and niether do most of the rest of you. I personaly know 5 people with sufficient information in thier possession (myself included) to code a cheating client that would pass as Continuum. The reason you dont have a horde of cheaters on your hands isnt because of Priit's masterfull encryption (although what he did with the exe was pretty impressive from what Snrrrub has described) but because no one realy cares anymore.

Holy crap on a stick this post makes me feal old... I cant believe your still at this Pol

kirk.sscentral.com is gone. If their is any continued interest in this code or any of the other SS source i have drop me a line at kirk56k (at) gmail (dot) com and I'll find some other place to put the files, if i can ^^. But since I think anyone who actually wanted it already has it I'd save myself the trouble unless someone else actually needs it.

Well, first time I've been back here in about a eon... Not sure why I started googling Continuum to and stumbled accross this forum again. And even more not sure why I happened to remember my login lol. Anyway, point being if anyone is actualy interested in starting MG back up for whatever reason I believe I have the only complete copy of the entirety of the server files just before the server was shutdown by Freakmonger. Including bots maps, settings, SSC biller pw's etc. Not that I expect most of it is usefull now some odd what 6 years later? Anyway, if any of it would be usefull to anyone you can send me a line at kirk56k (at) gmail (dot) com. If anyone had a serious interest in it I could probably dump the files on an FTP server or something. Honestly I'm just kind of surprised that this game and its supporters still exists ^^ its impressive realy.

If you live in NewEngland dont bother with FairPoint Fiber, I tried for a month and a half to get them to activate.. ACTIVATE!! an existing fiber connection in the house I bought and they couldnt do it, then I told them to go screw themselves and got Cable, a week later.. i got a bill.. no service, just a bill. Bloody morons. Dont much care for cable but at least they got the service thier and activated inside a few days.

Kittens! Your argument is invalid...

Mmm, Narcissism, yummy

Shock has the gist of it, although the boot failure is probably due to data corruption and not as specific as inaccessible boot device. Lenovo's are the only laptops we buy here at the shop one of the biggest reasons being the shock protection built into the harddrives (Lenovo = IBM Thinkpad). http://www.ubcd4win.com/ Thats your best bet for trying to run a chkdsk which is realy your only remote hope. If that fails than its a new drive. Replacing drives in laptops is generaly very easy, the important part is finding out what kind of drive it uses, most take standard 2 1/2 size laptop drives, but some, like tablets, require special smaller drives. Check the bottom of the laptop, one or two screws should have you the drive in hand. Good luck ^^.

Ragnarok is game whos server code was reverse engineered many years ago. Thier are several server emulators available now and even the official server code in some of its earlier revisions can be had. Thier are somewhere around 200-300 "private" Ragnarok servers available. Each with their own styles, settings, customizations and levels of professionalism. Some server operators do a good job of putting together an easily download-able and installable client package. Others only know how to do the most basic setup, which usual involves a combination of installing the Korean client, the English Client, and then a customization on top of those two to make the resulting client connect to their servers. A little googling will provide the top lists for private Ragnarok servers and you can usually go from their. Some of the more professionally run servers are almost as good as the official ones, but 90% of the private ones are a joke. Cant speak for this one in particular though.

Long time no see bud, hows things going? I've almost finished my first commercial coding project, in the QA dept now man they are ripping it to shreds though, getting bug reports almost every day for 3 weeks now . Anyway, drop me a line!

As per Cre>'s request, I finally got around to packaging up logicbot2's source code with the appropriate license. This program is written in C++ and uses several very advanced techniques. If you can only just barely manage a working MERV plugin, this code is definitely not for you. Again, I don't really think anyone will find this source code as a hole very useful. Plenty of people have done the SS protocol in C++ and much better than me. Thier are some interesting C++ tidbits in here, like a working Plugin architecture and an advanced exception handling mechanism that can catch exceptions within the plugins, unload the plugin and write an entire stack dump without crashing the bot itself. Anyway, as always, no warranty express or implied, use at your own risk. If you have questions feel free to post em, cant guarantee I'll answer them but I'll try. Have fun! http://www.gnu.org/graphics/gplv3-127x51.png LogicBot2 - Code Only LogicBot2 - Code and Working Builds

As per Cre>'s request, I finally got around to packaging up logicbot2's source code with the appropriate license. This program is written in C++ and uses several very advanced techniques. If you can only just barely manage a working MERV plugin, this code is definitely not for you. Again, I don't really think anyone will find this source code as a hole very useful. Plenty of people have done the SS protocol in C++ and much better than me. Thier are some interesting C++ tidbits in here, like a working Plugin architecture and an advanced exception handling mechanism that can catch exceptions within the plugins, unload the plugin and write an entire stack dump without crashing the bot itself. Anyway, as always, no warranty express or implied, use at your own risk. If you have questions feel free to post em, cant guarantee I'll answer them but I'll try. Have fun! http://www.gnu.org/graphics/gplv3-127x51.png LogicBot2 - Code Only LogicBot2 - Code and Working Builds

After being a zone owner for 6 years you kinda loose your taste for actually playing the game. I stopped playing the game 8 years or so before I actually left it. Honestly, their just isn't enough tactics in SS to interest me anymore. I used to play SVS zones when they were actually popular, basically once Realms became MG I stopped playing. I loathe one shot kill settings, its like playing counter strike, nothing but a bunch of lame head shots. No energy management, no rationing of specials, no perfect timing for that final shot. All the zones have dumbed down their settings, basically _removing_ aspects of the game. Why? Because the 4 y/o's that this game is most popular with now, demand it. So I'm not saying that anything should change honestly, whatever the majority demand is the best course of action. But that's why I personally left.

VisualAssistX will give Visual Studio all the refactoring tools youd expect from NetBeans and others plus more if you want. Also I would say what you should start with really entirely depends on your personality and the structure of your mind. Some people can start with Java and then move to C++ and unlearn all the bad habits Java and its ilk teach you without much problem. Others can never quite get past the idea that C++ has no garbage collection and you actually have to take some responsibility and keep track of the memory you allocate Then theirs starting with C, some people can quickly grasp the idea of Object Orientation and move away from the bad habits procedural programming will cause, others can never get past GOTO Either way my personal opinion is that if you can get into and understand C++, you will have absolutely NO problem understanding ANY other language you want from that point on. C++ is (just short of assembly) the most powerful and complex programming language ive ever encountered. Whatever you decide let us know and we can probably point you in the right direction for the language your interested in. If you are still interested in C++ I would suggest Jamsa C/C++/C# Programmers Bible. Its more of a "dive in and get your feet wet" type of book, if you learn that way. It starts off with C but you can skip it if you want and it goes all the way on to C# should you decide that's your particular flavor of choice. If your more of a "learn the concepts first and then do it later" type of person, then I would recommend going to college courses or buying college coding books, they tend to flow more in that direction.

If you find it useful, more power too you. Just keep in mind that none of the code has been QCed, Profiled or even seriously debugged. Also of note would be that the text control is not easily portable as it uses Win32 API pInvoke for access to GDI as C#'s GDI+ implementation has bugged text measuring functions as of .NET 3.5 that MS has made no mentions of fixing any time soon. Anyway, have fun ^^.

Here is the unfinished source code to SubChat3. It was never completed and as such isnt even an alpha. (aka, its not usable in its current state). However, thier is a lot of very nifty C# code in this archive, and im hoping some aspiring C# coder will be able to make use of some of it. Unfortunately because of the way the world works I find myself compelled to license this as GPLv3, please respect the license. I wish I could post it without any license at all but such are the times we live in. Officially, Freakmonger was given this source code to make SubChat3 complete, and officially I still consider him the head of the project. But to the best of my knowledge he has not even had time to look at it yet. If anyone is interested in finishing this, you may want to contact him if you can before you start. Thiers definetly a few things of interest here to C# coders, even ones not interested in SubSpace, like a custom writen Text Control that works like mIRC's, and a few other things. I do check these forums every blue moon or so, so if anyone has any questions feel free to post em Somehow I kinda doubt anyone will even notice this is here ^^. Anyway, have fun! http://www.gnu.org/graphics/gplv3-127x51.png GNU General Public License v3 SubChat3_Source.rar

Oct - 28, Fallout 3 / Fallblivion / Oblivion with Guns. Be what it may, its still kinda fallout and I still cant wait to play it

1) Big fonts dont act wierd, they just dont fit ^^. 2) Doable 3) doable to some extent 4) If subgame doesnt know, then thiers no way that subchat could know 5) doable 6) autohide for that would be nice, or put soething else usefull on it 7) doable needs custom controls, much like ive been trying to do for SubChat3 so mabye in the future 9) easily 10) not easy ^^ lots of custom controls and other hassle 11) this was a protocol mistake, fixed in subchat3 Ive been working on SubChat3 for awhile, unfortunatly it got put semi-hold for a bit due to personal issues. When it gets finished is hard to say. But I do intend to finish it... eventualy ^^

An excelent rig by the looks, cant go wrong with BFG cards. Just a warning though, that video card is a duel GPU card and in essence SLI in one card. At the current time although this duel gpu says "sli supported" the drivers dont actualy support 4 gpu configurations for !@#$%^&* right now. For that matter alot of older games dont even support 2 gpu configurations very well right now. Also, TomsHardware seams to think that two Radeon 4850's in CrossFire beat the pants off of the GeForce 9800GX2 but im not sure id be comfortable with radeons, ive never realy had a taste for them myself. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming...rds,1965-4.html Otherwise, looks like a sweet rig, wish I had the money for something like that ^^

I always prefered keeping it configurable, just define each chat type in a configuration screen along with the background color and let the user decide what colors they want to use.

sorry about the ports, didnt relize it until noonish yesterday, all fixed now.

An MMO by the name of Ragnarok uses a fully authoritative server model, and it works quite well. Basically you make the server fully authoritative and then add "guessing" logic to the client. Basically what this does is that when the client issues, say, a weapons packet, it uses its _own_ logic to determine what the repercussions will be (much as our current client already does). This substantially reduces or entirely negates the inherent latency in a fully server authoritative system that would normally make implementation in a real time environment difficult. However once the server receives the weapons packet, it then responds by telling the client what _actually_ happened according to the servers fully authoritative check. If the two differ the client corrects its representation. This can sometimes cause minor jumpiness on laggy connections but imo thats better than our current model which can result in hitting your target on your screen but not on someone else's with no way of knowing whos representation was accurate. This is a very simplistic version of the same protocol that WoW uses (which is also fully authoritative). The only reason SS was never designed this way is due mostly to bandwidth limitations and to a lesser extent server speed. However at this time, thier is no reason a game of SS's comparative simplicity could not use a fully authoritative server model. It would, however, involve a great deal more code in ASSS than it currently has.

You may be right in some of what you say but thier are a few important facts you are glossing over. 1) If the source code for the entire encryption and key expansion are released, it would be near trivial for anyone with a few hours of spare time to write a quick and dirty client that could join any existing zone and spray L4 bombs all over the place while being invincible, while at the same time using rotating public proxy's to byp!@#$%^&* any attempt at a ban. The strength of the BanG banning system relies entirely on the client providing accurate system data when logging in, with a custom client you would be reduced to nothing but IP address for banning, and anyone who was here when VIE dumped us knows how well _that_ worked out... 2) Even if the source were only released to a select few "responsible" parties, you would still need to be an x86 !@#$%^&*embly genius in order to protect your executables from reverse engineering as effectively as Priit did with his. And of course you would need this creative genius once for every platform you intended to compile your program for. 3) Anyone who is a serious programmer knows how much it hurts when something you have slaved over to perfect is made invalid or obsolete by someone else. Say what you will about Priit and his apparent apathy to this community but he did help us and continues to albeit in small ways now. As a fellow coder it makes you think twice before delivering the ultimate insult of obsolescence. Now, thier are 2 concievable solutions to this problem that come to mind, one of which we are all aware of, the other mabye not. 1) We all switch to ASSS, make it fully authoritative, and drop the Ctm encryption in favour of something more standardized and open sourced. Obfuscation is no longer necisary with a fully authoritative server. 2) Someone who _does_ have sufficient knowledge of !@#$%^&*embly be given the Ctm encryption, who will then develop a library with the necessary function calls to act as a client, but also add all necessary checks to make the library fully authoritative thus not allowing any cheating by clients of said library, then obfuscate its code as well as Ctm's. Either way its not a particularly easy question to answer, no one wants to be responsible for the second Twister, and I fully understand that in regards to Snrrrubs current decision.