Server Task Force

GR hasn’t had a playable and appealing server yet. If we did, then our player count would at least be more than 0. So I have decided to create a team to create an official Graal Reborn server. This is how it will work: I will be your boss if you choose to participate. I will tell you what to do, and you will do it or get fired. I know there is no incentive to develop anything, but I’m hoping some of you share my hope of having an enjoyable server for everyone.

I know there are already a few servers being worked on, but the way player worlds are being developed now is not working. See proof by looking at the server list. If I had it my way, I would delete everyone’s server and make everyone work on only one player world.

Anyone who wants to sign up can post or pm me. All ideas are on the table. My goal will to keep things organized and moving forward. Once a team is assembled we will discuss planning.

If it turns out that no one cares about this, then the Graal portion of GR will probably die soon, and we will just become a community based on something that is shit.

I might be able to help out a bit with levels.

How big is the map going to be? I’m working on Phoenix a lot (it’s nice to know you’d scrap it!), but I might be able to help on levels as well.

I would say don’t even make a map. Just create the server level by level, but this will be up to the team to decide. My idea would be to forget most of the aesthetics and have more fun stuff for the player to do. Even if they just want to sit around, hah. This server should be made for idlers since that’s what most of us do. Bomber Arena is a perfect GR server since it supports fun stuff for only a few players. This server could just be one big house with stuff to do in it. But like I said, ideas will be up to the team.

I know this makes me sounds like a dictator, but I would love to find a way to force members to work on this.

I’d be willing to support with levels and some coding.

I support you as the official Graal Reborn dictator :wink: While I believe people should still make and finish their own projects freely. I also agree that we need a centralized focused place that is “official graal reborn” where everyone can go and contribute. What I am thinking of is something like Graal Classic between 1999 and 2001 but not just another Graal Classic copy server, but rather something new from the ground up with new levels maps and quests and something anyone can submit levels, graphics and npcs to and have it added as part of the overall lands. The peak of GraalOnline was in the summer of 2000 with over 1200 players running around the Graal Classic map "at the time the only official server as playerworlds and server lists did not exist. This magical spark that brought the uber insane crowded server was lost due to multiple reasons. The introduction of and eventually total pay to play. The addition of playerworlds which split everything in 100 directions. The corruption and abusive behavior by the graalonline staff. Players no longer allowed to contribute to the official servers. The sense of community being decimated and thrown out the window. A change of style from the classic SNES RPG styles to something just plain weird I.E. Graal2002/Graal Kingdoms and Era… and finally the simple insanity and nastiness of Unixmad alone drove away thousands of players. So through over a decade of experience and seeing what works and what fails we can learn from the mistakes of GraalOnline and make something that is great again, something that works. We just need to “pull our hands together” and go through the opening to get off the ground. I believe in you guys, and I might be able to throw in a few things too :wink:

Count me in for coding I suppose. Only taking orders from hosler though.

I could help some to an extent.

I’ve been working in my spare time on something… similar. Definitely was going back to the SNES style roots as best I could, but never got all that far. I mean I made sixty something levels, a bunch of graphics (stole some stuff too… I admit it), did a good amount of scripting, spent a bit of time story writing and brainstorming, made some simple toweapons; with some help from the community here, drew up some maps (I don’t know how to make them actual in-game maps yet, but it sounds easy enough), and got some major ideas laid down that can make for a unique playerworld. The map I made of the land is a very simple, hard to understand map drawn in MSPaint. And it coincidentally looks kind of like a Psyduck being held at gunpoint…[ATTACH=CONFIG]3298[/ATTACH] But it doesn’t define the whole world, that’s just the beginning of the story of a nation being freed by one man putting his life aside to organize and lead a rebellion… There are more stories from there so the rest of the world would hopefully take a while to build, and could be built any of many different ways.

Basically to try to keep this short… imagine Agahnim has control of Hyrule, and now people are poor, weak, and suffering blah blah blah… Link stands up, goes through a bunch of dungeons, gets some cool items that help him attack/defend/move around the world… then he beats Agahnim and frees Hyrule… Okay, AlttP was beaten, now Termina needs help because a giant moon is falling on them so Link goes that way now and takes care of that after going through more dungeons and getting more crap… Not saying I would use those situations exactly, but for examples sake. Lotsa dungeons with unique bosses, and more and more unique ways to travel everywhere. For example, I have underground waterways connecting important places in my land (only a few locations marked on my shit map), requiring the player to acquire certain items to be able to get to many places. There are certain currents that will push or pull you, making you use iron boots and/or flippers to get through underwater tunnels in the ground.

I have been rambling, sorry everyone (I do that a lot)… Basically I can help in many ways, but I don’t have the time to help in all of those ways… but I do have a small bit of content developed that may or may not be any good.

I think the problem is the lack of advertisement more than anything else. You can’t attract players even with content if they don’t know these servers and the client exist. The Graal The Adventure and Classic servers are both running all the time, yet nobody is on them. They have content. It was sufficient before. There’s something else that’s wrong.

It’s also notable that more and more people are not using computers at all, or very infrequently. This is reflected by the shift in major companies (Intel, Microsoft) recently with their hardware/software goals. It may be that a lot of the potential (usually younger) players simply aren’t available anymore.

That’s a pretty good point, and I agree that the lack of advertising doesn’t help very much… but take the number of forum users and compare it to online players… if we all pitch in and make a server like hosler suggests, we at least would play. Word of mouth is the best form of advertisement still, and with actual players online you can have that. If we build it. And play on it. They will come.

Problem is… with attention comes ddosers. I remember last time we had a fair amount of people some faggot was constantly bring down the serverlist. I have no doubt it’ll happen again if attention is brought.

If they were able to do that to the serverlist, that suggests that it was coded improperly. (Given that it’s unlikely that they had the resources to do it the distributed way.)

It was unixmad. The dos came from graal servers.

Can’t we just have a whitelist, so anyone who’s not registered on the forums has their IP not accepted by the listserver or any gserver for that matter.
The idea might not work but some means of determining malicious IPs from actual players would be a step forward to preventing ddosing no?

I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Unless this is done by some OS means that I’m not aware of, the blocking would still need to be done by the server software. If coded in a “safe” way, a whitelist shouldn’t even be necessary.

Yes. Unixmad has ddosed us a couple of times. And it wasn’t the software that was brought down, it was the whole server.

Was this from multiple sources…? Maybe I just don’t know enough about the various methods that can be used to strain a server, but I can’t imagine how a single connection could manage this.

Multiple sources of course. :slight_smile:

hosler. i need some practice. i am back now, moved in, and ready to work on pixel art, animation, levels, gani’s, GUI designs, items, monsters, mobs, weapons, layouts, etc.

so i am in. this idea is not only something i mentioned before, but how most people feel. If we all contribute even just a little bit of our time to one server. it would be the official reborn server. If you think about all the people doing their own private servers and what not, having each and everyone contribute some levels, code, items, ideas, etc to it, it could become a pretty strong server really quickly.

do it the way classic was back in the day. have it appeal to those who idle, those who just chat, those who like to design their own characters, those who like to code, those who love to make levels, those who like to do graphics, those who love making their own weapons, those who want their own house or area, etc.

i am in. let me know what you need. get a gserver up and rocking, and ill start working on levels or whatever you need :slight_smile: i think everyone should contribute even just a small amount, even a house, or a couple of levels, some code, etc.

just my thoughts :slight_smile: and yeah, hey all. im back now haha