It seems the harddrive of the server is acting up (could be the cold weather, it's -15°C over here). The server will keep going down every once in a while  until I can buy a new harddrive which doesn't keep crashing the server.

 

If you would like to read up on some SVO history, check out my blog post about it.

Cobalt has finished the amazing battle sprites, check out the Gallery for an overview of what characters you can choose from in the SVO world!

 

Hello my fellow EB fans!

 

About 2-3 years overdue but the battle system is almost ready to go live! Darkfrost has been spending many a night the last couple of days getting it to work. Using PK Hack and Starmen's EBDB to get every action, detail and move exactly the way they're used in Earthbound. The EB battle system doesn't look complex but when you dig deeper it's a whole other story. Over 48(!) variables/parameters per enemy that decide stuff ranging from damage taken to how much damage your PSI Fire alpha will do.

 

That being said, just a bit more polish and it's ready to go (give DF another 2 weeks or so). Once it's 'done' we'll be testing it by ourself for a couple of days and then release it for the public. SVO Elite folks might be given the battle system pre-public version as well.

 

Cobalt has been working on 'inbattle' sprites for the selectable character sprites in SVO as well as ones for the chosen four so you wont' see some bland default sprite, you'll see YOUR sprite when PvP (player vs player) battling!

 

We'll be releasing a video of the battle system in action once the layout is finished (that is, the boxes where you select your move, the psychadelic backgrounds, ...). We know it's been a while but as I've said before, the EB fans are used to waiting for something awesome to be released, right?

 

Check the forum every now and then for more updates!

There are basically two options to display the battles we have thought of so far, a fullscreen and a windowed one. Let me explain the differences:

 

Windowed:

This one will be displayed in a window, takes less space, you can still view the surrounding area of your character while battling. The screen might be dimmed a bit as to put the focus on the battle window. An advantage is that you can see who's around in case you need to "call for help".

 

Fullscreen:

Exact replica of the Earthbound battle screen.

 

We can also add an option where you can set the default view you want and toggle between them while battling, e.g. you select fullscreen and during a battle you'd like to see if anyone is around, just toggle it to windowed for a second, look around and toggle it back.

 

Please share your thoughts about this in this topic, we'd love to hear what you guys think!

Just a quick note, SVO has just got its rev8 release (more info). It's fully playable now. Please reply to this post if you have any issues (or post in the Alpha Discussion board). Check the online graph (click the players online link in the top right) to see how many folks are online at what times, ingame type /who to see who's online.

 

Note that if the server is offline, it probably crashed. Give us a couple of hours to reboot it if we're not around.

 

Some things that might come in handy, type any of the following ingame:

 

/who - show who's playing

/shout or /g [text] - send a serverwide message

/die - kill your character to respawn if you're stuck somewhere (do please let us know what happened so we can fix it!)

As promised we're continuing the reboot of SVO. Today another 'milestone' has been reached. Database synchronisation has been set up which means you will be able to log in with your account (however, new accounts and password changes are synced every five minutes so please a few minutes if you cannot log in); You will be able to make a character but you will NOT be able to go ingame with it. For some reason the game has a glitch that we will fix in the end of Jan/early Feb version update.

 

TL;DR: