Ryandor.com

Sphere 55i rerelease? Am I the only one who thinks this is insane. Menace has given Kell and others (I think RT is in there too) the source code for 55i plus some 99 goodys and they are fixing bugs and adding features in the meantime Menace and Westy and others are still working on 99 trying to reach the elusive 1.0.

I understand popular demand for a long time has been keep supporting 55i but I never thought they would give in.

It's almost like saying that 55i is the only useable version of Sphere (which I've thought for a while).

So now they go off on 2 seperate paths and we'll have 55i++ and 99xxxxxxxxxxx. It was a bad idea a year ago when people screamed for it and it's a bad idea now.

Rose if you still roam here maybe you can explain to me what I am not getting. I don't post on Sphere boards since the flamewar incident that resulted in many people being banned and the boards being closed to the general public for a while. I'm not banned but I just seem to get into pissing matches with Damien when I post over there.

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so is sphere going to split just as uox3 did?

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Well it couldn't split quite that way Cal. UOX is opensource. Sphere is not. Even though Menace and pals have given 55i sourcecode to Kell and team to work on it still belongs to Menacesoft. It's just a split of resources not just in terms of we now have 2 teams working on 2 development paths of Sphere; it's also the community resources as well. Someone has to betatest new versions and if the beloved 55i is taken and improved and made more stable then it means that many less people are going to bother with 99.

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Except UOX split a thousand times...

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Hey look at all the punks online. Even Ry is up. I thought I was the only one with insomnia.

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I had the source to sphere sitting around somewhere on my hard drive a while back? I even got it to compile. Bleh, sure is messy stuff. Poor programming. It was cool back when it was TUS, though.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
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I have the source too.. never tried to compile it though.. I'm just a punk anyway.

[edit]
And no can't have it, so don't ask.

-Ryandor

No, I don't mean the stolen source that we all have. I mean it's official. Check out sphereserver.com

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Detials, detials..

-Ryandor

RunUO is easier, POL is more customizable. Sphere just loses in my opinion.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
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I haven't really looked at RunUO much. I've got the newsletters and I've even gotten over my loathing of the .net framework (well mostly) but there's just something about it I don't like. Maybe it's all the new crap. I haven't played on a live UO shard in years. I think the new maps are even more wretched than T2A, the artist that made them should be put out of his misery. Trammel/Feluca thing is gay. Etc, etc. I miss the classic UO experience.

POL is just way too much work.

Sphere I guess I have used most cause I am most comfortable with it but it does have a lot of drawbacks. Most of all is the speed of uncompiled scripts.

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Bah, UOXC owns all. I started using UOX v.3something and a few years later I'm still using the old version. I love it.

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The sphere thingies are weird. I heard something about the 99* builders didn't want the 55i revision team to add in some new features. Such as, fixing the dialogs. I think it's kindof stupid, sphere55i is clearly one of the more stable versions of Sphere, and IF they let people fix up the 55i source then they should let them do whatever they want with it.

Though you are right, it sounds kindof stupid... There's work in progress for 2 sphere versions now without a real use to it. If they'd just all work together on a better sphere +sighs+. But sphere evo is a really nice addon, which unfortunatly only works on 55i :p. And if I didn't make sense here, blame sleep +yawn+.

UOX blah! I went back to UOX3 when Sphere closed it's doors briefly. I was scripting for Ab Initio then. Was even more buggy than Sphere and a perfect example of the major con of opensource; lack of version control. I haven't looked at it in quite some time though. I thought Ryan was the major driving force behind UOX and he went over to RunUO. Who is working on UOX these days?

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UOX3 is still around. Here's the main sites (that I visit)

http://www.uox3dev.net - Main site ran by EviLDeD
http://www.uox3.org/ - Xuri's site

-Ryandor

As horribly unorganized as UOX is, I still prefer to use the old versions over anything else because back then they didn?t have much of a scripting system (which I hate) and the source, although messy, is easy to edit and understand. For anyone who isn?t proficient with C++, I wouldn?t recommend going near it, though. POL is my favorite otherwise, but I haven?t looked at it in quite a while so I don?t know where it stands now days.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
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Exactly Syd. That was my final statement to Llwellyn Mahr about UOX. If we were going to spend the time to recode and recompile our own version of UOX it was worth using but otherwise forget about it.

POL actually has the .95 core out (although that was July) and they are working on .96. Current homepage: http://www.polserver.com/
It is actually updated semiregularly unlike the old page. I have no idea how it is; .94 when it first came out was the last time I messed with it.

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Is POL easy to learn? You're right about UOXC having a horrible scripting system and I would love to use something more customizeable.

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Well...

Sphere 1.0 is a long way off, the 99z* versions aren't usable for a live shard yet to due to bugs/incomplete code, so everyone is stuck (and has been stuck for years) on 55i.

There are huge (300-400 player) shards running 55i and the injection exploits are just pounding them into the ground. Zorm created a DLL to patch 55i in memory to fix these bugs... then he added Kell's KPatch (a few new triggers, some new commands) into it, and ended up with a very nice "fix" for 55i for people to use. Unfortunately, this fix was coded in assembly the long hard way. Kell came back from his year long vacation and saw what Zorm was doing, so he joined up. They created a sourceforge project for it "Sphere Evo" not too long ago. Maybe three days later I showed the URL to it to Westy (one of the sphere coders that's been in retirement quite some time). He felt sorry for them and their efforts and gave us the 55i source to work with that instead of the assembly nightmare they were doing. I'm no programmer, I just have the source for kicks I suppose

Thus was born Sphere 55i Revision 1. A war broke out when the "terms" of having the 55i source were disputed. To make a long story short, the original sphere devs wanted only bugs fixed in 55i and no new features added... wanted it to be nothing more than a lifeline for shards waiting on 1.0... a war that very nearly caused Westy to revoke rights to even HAVE the source. Looks like features will be allowed though, as it's pretty obvious some of the shards on 55i for the last 2 years have no intentions of upgrading to 1.0 when it does finally come out.

The intentions were never to split sphere in half, we're being very careful not to do that. I don't want an UOX-style split in the sphere community. I think there's plenty of users to go around for both versions. Either way.. it's all still sphere

That would explain it all.
Thanks for the clarification RoseThorn!

-Ryandor

I applaud Evilded and Xuri for sticking with it. It's cool that Ryan decided to start up runuo, but i still like uox3 for some reason

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Hah, Xuri is the man, I just wish he would get his shard up. I've been waiting for it since he announced it (yes kids, more than a few years).

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The fastest way to a woman's heart is through her ribcage.

Thanks Rose.

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*reads the topic*

. . .

*stares blankly*

. . .

*decides to respond*

Sphere 1.0 is a myth, it's never comming. It's just like dangling a piece of corn in front of a donkey that's pulling a cart. Don't ask me what cart we're pulling, but I'm not upgrading to sphere 1.0 even if it is ever released (that's even considering that I'm scripting a new shard on 55i).

55i IMO is a decent enough EMU, and despite what anyone says, it's flexible, you just have to have some creative problem solving skills.

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Xelah
--Admin of some nameless shard that is still in developement

55i is even more powerful now

55r2 release will have a whole boatload of new additions, triggers added and tags on all objects and stuff like that