Te download section is online again, sorry about the amount of time it was offline. I did not realize this was the case still.

Damian

I just thought you might like to know, Damian is now going to attack Shards because they are using "Copyrighted" material. Supposedly he has already hit 2-3 Websites.

So If using 55R beware of Damian :twisted:

He's finally gone over the edge, and scaring away what little users he has left. The Link below is the post this infomation came from, If it is removed I will post the saved copies.

(Page 6 and 7 for the Initial Damian Comments about getting 55R users)

I just thought you might like to know, Damian is now going to attack Shards because they are using "Copyrighted" material. Supposedly he has already hit 2-3 Websites.

So If using 55R beware of Damian

He's finally gone over the edge, and scaring away what little users he has left. The Link below is the post this infomation came from, If it is removed I will post the saved copies.

(Page 6 and 7 for the Initial Damian Comments about getting 55R users)

We finally have the new windows version up for download. Those who got the windows 4.0.1 version before this topic was posted will want to redownload, the one that was up was a little buggy as I found out on starting it up, but everythings fixed now.

Ok, we now have a knoppix release, new and up to date. Check it out.

We now have the newest build of 55r3rc4. It isn't a version change, because rc4 was never supposed to be released yet, but it does have some new stuff. For one, the SPEED variable alot of people were waiting for. Documentation is coming soon.

Also, we have the linus versions, but these won't be the latest builds. They are rc4, but not as up to date as the windows versions up for download.

Kell, well known from his scripts and the Sphere 55i Revisions, has started a petition after getting a post locked where he wished to discuss the idea. Anyone interested in seeing Sphere go Open Source and thus bringing further development should sign this petition!

Quote:

To: Menasoft and the Sphere developers

In this petition we request the copyright owners of the SphereServer UO emulator software to accept discussion regarding the eventual release of the SphereServer UO emulator as an open source product. This will allow the community which has been created around said emulator to be self-sustained, and the server to be further developed in an open manner, led by a group of individuals whose primary concern shall be the development of the software.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?sphere19

In this petition we request the copyright owners of the SphereServer UO emulator software to accept discussion regarding the eventual release of the SphereServer UO emulator as an open source product. This will allow the community which has been created around said emulator to be self-sustained, and the server to be further developed in an open manner, led by a group of individuals whose primary concern shall be the development of the software.

Sign this petition

I can only speculate to the true meaning of the petition. I suspect Kell, or somone, plans to continue development of the 55R series regardless of the controversy the Sphere development team enjoys(and I mean "enjoys" in all senses of the word). If that be the case, then this petition is the stately action in which those involved in the further development of Sphere 55R allow Menasoft to save face, and not have them portrayed in the future as an evil nazi regime. In which case, I respect the less obvious objective immensely.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this letter to you in regards to the copyright infringement that is taking place on a domain that is hosted by one of your customer’s twilightmanor.net.

The following works are currently being hosted on this site for files of scripts and executable programs that SPHERESERVER a.k.a Menasoft and Partners owns right to such work.

These links are: http://www.twilightmanor.net/cel/files.php#232

If you open up any of the sphereserver files, most of the files clearly already has our copyright information in the header of the files.

Again, I am writing this letter to you in good faith belief that the above statements, and the copyright infringement that is taking place on this site is in fact true, and I am authorized to make this accusation to protect the work that we own.

Under penalty of perjury this information is accurate and true as stated, and I have legal right to this Copy Right infringement to ask that you remove our work from this site and keep access from it.

Sincerely,

Alan E. Chipura

Manasoft and Partners

SPHERE is used by thousands of admins around the world, and hundreds of thousands of players.

The next logical step for the team was to create an original MMORPG, using the lessons we learned in developing the SPHERE project to start fresh. From square one, Magic Hat Software has hired game designers, artists and programmers to help us on the journey toward our new goal: our new MMORPG code named Gray Matter.

The thousands of SPHERE admins and users around the world have been a special part of our game development lives, and we invite that audience to sign up as alpha and beta testers for the new project.

Unlike SPHERE, which was a hobby project done in our spare time for the pure joy of gaming, Magic Hat Software is a real company producing an MMORPG for the retail market.

Visit www.magichatsoftware.com to sign up for the Alpha and Beta testing program. If you use invitation code SPHERE on the form, you are guaranteed to be accepted into the new MMORPG testing program as members of the SPHERE community.

The SPHERE team intends to continue updating SPHERESERVER: We won't forget where we came from. Won't you come along with us?

Sphere 1.0 RC7 Available in IRC, on Site later 2/7/2004

Hail all, in preperation of SPHERE version 1.0, we have decided that it is time to upgrade the site as well.

Of course it will take a little bit to get everything perfect... So please be patient, we are working on it.

Hail all,

Just wanted to post a little update here on SPHERE version 1.0....

Right now the target date is Feb 2, 2004.......

We believe that this is a realistic date to finish fixing bugs and get the server stable enough for a live shard.

Right now we have just about finished guilds and are working on some other issues.

Hopefully within a week or so we will put up a test server for people to log into and report any issues they happen to find.

There will not be any new features added to the current version other than fixing bugs and things that do not work.

Now I know some people may ask how did this date come about and why all the push for it now?

Well, this date was actually discussed a few months ago but we did not want to post anything about it till we were more certain that it was something we could commit to, and it looks like now we are actually able to commit to it!

For those that are skeptical, well.... Not too much we can say, except...

Oldsphere is currently down. We lost out hosting arrangements and are currently unable to provide services of any kind. We lend our condolences and heartfelt regrets.

We here at Oldsphere enjoyed providing hosting and support to those of the SPHERE and UO community. We had some good times.

If anyone wishes to continue Oldsphere, please contact Evil Bob and he will burn you a CD containing what has been collected by Oldsphere over the course of its existence. This includes the clients, archaic shards, scripts, tools and all of the HTML. All that is asked of you is that you pay for shipping plus the cost of the CD(30 cents.) The shipping cost will be given to you after Evil Bob receives your mailing address and will be mailed through USPS(unless otherwise specificed) when he receives the money. Payments can be made via Paypal, cash, check, or money order. The files available on CD have been made available for download as well. Evil Bob suggests that you use a download accelerator/manager/resumer. He recommends Download Accelerator.

I know, it was down again. This time it's because an update has to be made to enforce the server's security. It's now back online with a bunch of new hardware, and let's pray that it'll stay this way.

Also, the new SPHERE 99z documentation package and a script for backward compatibility has been added to the download section. It's update time again

I'd Like to Thank The Devine One for all the work he has been doing. Without Him Oldsphere would not be what it is today. I would also like to tell everyone that I am currently working on a Linux server. What this really means is I'm testing SQL and we will soon support it. The Linux server will also make a Nice backup server. If anyone is interested In learning Linux Oldsphere can Now provide Linux shell accounts so feel free to ask. (AKA Telnet) Also in the near future CVS support and Voicemail Whooot!

Hail All News of the moment is that there is a new test server version up. 99z. it's in the downloads area. Fixed the issue with spellbooks. should work with latest clients. working on the last major hurdle of guilds this weekend. rrr. also there is a xploit in here with the [PLEVEL 1] commands. You may want to remove all player . (dot) commands on public servers til the next version.

Also in other subjects. check out this link (http://thorgrim.sytes.net/) for "Ultima Iris". Sweet looking new client. Keep an eye on these guys, they appear to be making decent progress as well. I hope they put up a new version in the near future, cant wait to try it. BTW there are a few custom support features in the new sphere that one can only make use of with this client.

OK, the test sphere is a bit shaky. I more or less knew it would be. but i wanted to get some loading on it anyhow. I have most of the AOS features in. But many things got broken in the mean time. Some of the bugs are pretty blatant, but also very easy to correct. We should have a 'real' test version in a couple days.

2 things: 1. I'm again helping out with a survey. SOme of you helped with the previous game survey's Thank You Again. But we need 100 people to do the new survey. So please, and thank you in advance for going here (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=34295192488)

2. The promised priority list. As for things left for Version 1.0 Heres the first take of my list: (more or less in order of importance) This list will be added and possibly subtracted from in the near future. I have not incorporated much feedback yet so please dont attack me yet.

We have put up the official SPHERE test server this afternoon, version .99y8.

The login for this server is:

loginserver=test.sphereserver.net,2593

User names and passwords are the same as your Forum Account.

If you do not have a forum account, you will be unable to login to the test server.

Also, please post BUGS in the forum that was created for the test server, only one bug per a post please!

Hail All, In the interest of keeping everyone updated, In the next day or so we are going to be having the "countdown to 1.0" ! What I want to do is come up with a prioritized list of things to complete before we consider ourselves ready for 1.0 candidates. As usual I have a million things I'd like to change and add. What features need to be in? What bugs need to be fixed before we consider it to be stable? (or stable enough) Looking for input. So I'll put up my list tonight then I'll set up a forum for feedback.

All the sphere tools have been updated slightly to reflect changes to the client. Check the download section. The map editor should be able to deal with the new maps now. The new server is looking pretty good. We are currently revamping the dialog systems. So all the major dialogs. (ie. ClientList, GMPageList, and GuildList) are fully broken at the moment. hehe. The idea is that all such dialogs are now going to be scriptable.

P.S. To those that got a copy of SphereMap before Tuesday,02/08/2003 please get it again. The previous copy has a problem writing out proper map script files.

New test version 99v2 of the server is up in the downloads area. Just get the server and scripts seperately as the AllInOne has not been updated.

We have been knocking off the bugs as fast as we can but we need more testing. As much as I've been trying to avoid putting new features in the server, hehe, can't seem to help myself. The context menus are now working. They only have basic functionality at the moment, but they will be very useful in the future. Please post any bugs on the bug bboard.

There's a new test version up in the downloads area. We'd like to take another crack at bug fixing on this version. So please report bugs to the bug bboards. The last pass was mostly to get the internal server bugs. We are assuming (hoping) the server EXE and the scripting language is stable now. This pass (if all goes according to plan) is to improve the scripts themselves.

Beware, the guild system in 99u is completely broken. It was not previously scriptable at all and had to be scrapped. Next version should have a full new guild/town system that allows scriptability. There is also an update fixing some bugs in SphereAgent for those interested.

Sphere 0.99t has been updated (in the Downloads area) for public testing. Remember this is still in evaluation phase, so please expect some bugs. We are attempting to actually do this right. The plan is to go through a bug testing phase on 0.99t before finally moving to version 1.0.

Thanks to everyone involved in the 99s Test Night!

Everything went great. We collected a lot of good feedback (yes and bug reports) hehe. But mostly everything went well. The server never crashed (which is nice). The list of bugs was not all that severe, which in my opinion is excellent. So the current plan is to spend a day or 2 fixing these. We are still of course, trying to reduce the conversion difficulty from previous versions.

Also Thanks again to everyone who took a minute (or 2 sorry it was sort of long) to do the gamers survey as well. Got some good stuff there.

Site is stable once again - The site should be stable again now. The last days posts to the bboard have been lost however. Sorry about that. I did try to warn people that might happen though. So I don't feel too bad. hehe. The database needs to be consolidated onto the same machine. That process does not go as quick as one might hope.

In other news the sphere lister is back up. or will be back later today. 99r is being tested. It's looking good. Be nice to have a stable version again. ok, I just woke up, can you tell? hehe.

Server Development Status - OK, You asked for it!, Server development status. People have asked for a 'percent completion' graph. Not sure I can really do that. I've been working in software for 18 years now and have never estimated a project completion date correctly. hehe anyhow, the holdup is the command parsing system. It's just not as 'clean' as I would like. As soon as I get over that, we can have a first pass test of the new server, say Sunday night (rl always being the problem here). Large scale tests possibly next week.

Hail All, just wanted everyone to know, there should be ...

A version for testing coming out the end of the weekend. The reason the bugs have not really been getting addressed is that the current code for Sphere has been a real mess up til late. It got totally ripped apart for the COM project I was working on as well as merging in a totally new script engine. (http://c-smile.sourceforge.net/) Most of those changes are complete and the code has more or less "healed" hehe.

I think the current version is more or less stable now. There are some script changes that will need to be made. (unfortunately) but it should be minor. I'm sure you'll all be happy to know that the code is much much prettier now. hehe. So it should be much more fun for the all the dev to work on. (which is very important of course)

Just as a side note. It has really pissed me off that POL has always had a much better scripting engine than us. hehe. Working on fixing that. The idea is (subject to some amount of change) that the current Sphere scrpit will still be supported as well as adding support for COM and also the new tokenizing, mutithreaded, c/java like, typeless, scripting language called c-smile. hehe i know, goofy name, but very nice.

On another note. I'd like to have a feature request forum in the future. But I don't really want it to degrade to just random adhoc "I want X features" . So I'd like to have 2 forums. One for adhos requests, the other for more targetted subjects. The posts could be started by devs to discuss exactly how certain features should be developed.

During recent weeks, Sphere has had more than its share of interesting turns of events. I, and I am sure many others are wondering, what is the current premise of Sphere?

Does Sphere 1.0 still symbolize the significance it once did? Or by the time it arrives, will it be yet another small update to the .99x series?

I remember the first release date was early March 2000, we're nearly a year and a half beyond that date. Specifically why the delay? Yes, there have been many explanations, but in actuallity why did you not release it then or soon after then? Does this time lapse represent an equally great advancement in Sphere? Or does it represent a problem in Sphere development?

Sphere 1.0 issues aside, is there anything else we should be made aware of? In the wake of recent events, I feel I am wright to say the community you have built deserves at least some insight.

There is no truth in me going to DEV Pol, I am simply moving out of the way of sphere.

As you may or may not know, TAR (My Shard) was the test server for sphere, and I felt that leaving it as such would be misleading and should move out of the way for someone else to do the official test server.

With real life issues, I am far too busy to attempt to take on another task of working on another EMU, it would not be fair to the people running EMU’s and or the people looking for dedicated people working on them.

SPHERE is not going anywhere, there is still many dedicated people working on this great EMU. For personal reasons I have left Sphere DEV, will I be around in the future, maybe, but only answering occassional questions. Currently my life is demanding alot of time and working on sphere was taking too much time, so I feel it is best to move out of the way so that development can continue and others can pick up the work I was unable to get to.

Good luck SPHERE, and good luck to everyone else.

Damian

Before you read this, know that this is no way a promotion of any emulator.

POL and Sphere are oposite ends of the spectrum. Sphereserver specializes in simplicity, and out of the box functionality. Its language is simple to learn, and simple to use. The majority of Sphereserver is hardcoded, meaning it cannot be changed.

POL is designed for a different audience. I will make myself clear that unless you are unsatisfied with what you can do with Sphereserver, don't bother investigating POL; especially without programming experience.

POL is the most powerful emulator. Aside from the TCP/IP and Syntax, almost nothing is hardcoded. Everything is scripted through a language called eScript, which is almost just like C. It does come with default scripts yes, but try not to think of it that way. You can completely delete everything that you know to be UO save for the graphics engine, and rewrite it to your liking.

Unless you know what you're doing, however, you will find your shard creation experience much more productive with Sphereserver.

Many people have been asking for a new test release, well, here you have it!

We are releasing version .99m for testing, please do not use this for live shards, it is not considered stable!

Only the EXE is in the download section, use your own scripts or download .99f version to get scripts to run on it.