Hakaku

I use prettiful coloring crayons and paper ^______^ http://images.bootkidz.co.uk/childs_drawing_1.jpg

My biggest issue with SubSpace Downloads is that the website feels heavily inactive, broken, and tied down to the past. It's not hard to imagine that someone visiting the website will be immediately thrown to wonder whether the game still exists, if it's even worth it. Many of the links that tell you to download the game simply redirect to the main page. The layout needs revamping. Something more intuitive, friendly, and if possible interactive. It's always nice to see people be able to comment and vote on files and the such. Make it simple for new files to be uploaded. Allow screenshots so I can see what I'm downloading. Make it so that I can find all the versions of X on the same page, rather than having to search everywhere or ask myself if this file has a more recent version. Simplify the navigation. If you're going to add polls, don't keep them there for eighty years. Keep information of all sorts up to date (zone reviews, links...), and remove the old and unnecessary (calculator, dead polls, submit a link...) especially from the primary navigation menu. On the backend, make it simple for administrators and the such to be able to make modifications of all sorts (including managing downloads, pages, navigation, layout, settings). Ease skinnability. Modularity is always a plus. Perhaps integrate the login with SSForum if possible, which you could also use for stuff like player comments and ratings. Make permissions configurable and flexible, so that you could allow more people access to updating and modifying certain stuff such as pages, or block certain users from say, commenting on files.

Both Continuum and the SSC biller allow names to be created up to 23 characters. However, the game protocol only handles some 18 characters, meaning that two players with similar long names will seem to be the same person. This is bad for bots (aliasing, banning, etc), since two players will appear to be the same. ASSS chooses to handle this by cutting all usernames down to 18 characters; meaning that a player with over 18 characters from a Subgame zone will be prompted a new registration. This could potentially block some users from logging in since it may impede on a different player's account. Ideally, the biller should reject any username over 18 characters until the protocol restrictions are revamped. For reference: http://forums.minegoboom.com/viewtopic.php?p=81328#81328 Edit: On a similar note, make sure this new biller rejects usernames with the character %, to avoid the entire macro name fiasco.

Well, the name password used to communicate with the directory server still doesn't have anything to do with Jabjabjab's remark, which was that the prefix "SSC" in the Zone Name is used for nothing more than nostalgic purposes. There's no reason why a zone not using this prefix couldn't connect to the central billing server, with T3 The Gauntlet being the obvious example as Gravitron pointed out, other than the fact that the tag acts as a cheap method to signal to a player that the zone is connected to the SSC biller. The problem with the 'spoofing a network' theory is that not all directory servers handle name passwords in the same way, if they handle them at all. And there's really no reason why they should specifically cater to the SSC prefix either. A zone could still be easily setup with the proper name password, but may not actually be connected to the SSC biller. In such, you've achieved no better security.

Because directory servers are run independantly from the SSC Network, so it's misleading to place them here. That's my two cents.

Notepad is specifically oriented around the Windows Operating System, where the enter key translates in plain text to a carriage return character followed by a line break. The problem is, different Operating Systems handle the enter key differently. For example, *nix will just use a line break, while Mac takes only a carriage return. When Notepad opens a file, it expects the file to conform to the Windows format, otherwise it treats everything as belonging on the same line. There's not much you can do to avoid this except use a different program such as Wordpad.

It's all good. A striked out name simply means that the specified directory server was not responding for whatever reason at the time of a routine check, which may suggest that it is currently offline, but should not necessarily be dismissed. Seems to be working fine now, so updated.

There's already one in the appropriate forum: http://www.ssforum.net/index.php?showtopic=11952

Don't be so quick to say something is "stable" when it hasn't proved itself. Let time be the judge. Directory servers have come and gone; the majority never living up to their initial advertisements.

All directory servers use UDP.

Yeah, as Mav pointed out, sending a message to more than one person would be a good idea, squads could definitely benefit from this.

SSCV has a better ring to it imo. But the reason in the poll kinda killed it.

Nah, subgame can send over chat 10, you just have to type ";10;;message", or was that ";;10;message", I forgot now. But, there's also client limitations: you can't send ";a;message" with Continuum. Edit: or was that a biller limitation. gah, it's been too long since I tested all of these.

Try taking a look at all the feature suggestions provided in the Accede sub forum. Some of them included the ability to have more than 10 chats, to be able to send and receive more messages, be able to send more than one message to the same user, be notified when a friend logs on, be able to own chat channels (and kick people off), integration with a web interface to be able to access messages/change email/etc...

The directory server list is always here: http://www.ssforum.net/index.php?showtopic=11952 sscentral.sscuservers.net (also known as sscentral.trenchwars.org) has been down for something like 3 months now, and these downtimes have been fairly frequent over the last two years, so I wouldn't even recommend relying on it. Consider it dead.

Why not an RSS feed of subspaceonline, seems more appropriate.

You can't expect everyone to have the money to put into such a project, nor can you expect every player to have a paypal account or other payment-over-the-internet method, nor does everyone necessarily agree with the fact that these advertisements are having any impact whatsoever on the game. I'd rather be honest and vote 0, than vote something I could never fulfill.

Why not use SSCC The CompleX?

I don't really see how it's a yay when it's merely a redundant update :/

I'll challenge you on all 144 monitors with me playing on one at the lowest possible resolution.

For clarification's purpose.

This looks to be very useful, but, would it work on Windows? Do I absolutely have to use a makefile and the such, or can it just generate me a .c file that I can convert myself?

Wait, what? I've never seen anyone kill a turreting Mervbot before.