Starting the new year with some good news, Sphere 0.56d now have 64bit builds!

It's already available on downloads page. GitHub page also got updated with setup instructions for 64bit builds if you prefer compile it manually.

Both 32bit/64bit builds are compatible with each other and share the same source code and script pack.

To switch between 32bit/64bit build you must also switch MySQL client library to the version compatible with selected arch

• Windows: replace 'libmysql.dll' file with the version included on downloaded zip
• Linux: replace MySQL package (Ubuntu: 'libmysqlclient20' to 64bit or 'libmysqlclient20:i386' to 32bit / CentOS: 'mysql-community-libs' to 64bit or 'mysql-community-libs.i686' to 32bit)
  

32bit arch can use only up to 4gb RAM and deal with numbers up to 2^32, while 64bit arch can use more than 4gb RAM and deal with numbers up to 2^64. If your server doesn't need this, you can stay using 32bit build without any problems. But note that all modern OS's use 64bit as native arch and 32bit as backward compatibility, so 64bit build is slightly faster than 32bit build because it will use native 64bit CPU features instead 32bit backward compatibility.

After a long time broken, linux build is finally fixed. On some quick testing everything seems to be working fine, no more exceptions at server startup or weird text characters everywhere.

It also have many new internal improvements, which are not really new because these changes are already there since some time ago, but since last linux build working was from a year ago, now people will be able to use the latest build with all these changes.

I can't test it on a live environment since I don't use linux, but feel free to test and report any problem if something still not working correctly.

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And there's also some more interface updates

Admin panel
The new admin panel script was entirely redone from scratch, now using updated code, modern dialogs, and also an new "search" feature.

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Status webpage
The old 2000's-like HTML page also got updated to a modern/clean HTML5 page, which now follow the same design from Sphere forums.
This status page is not used so often because people don't even know that it exists, but it's an useful feature. Every server have this status page enabled by default, so unless it got manually disabled on sphere.ini, you can access it on http://server-login-or-ip:port

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These changes are already available on latest build, you just need to update your sphere_admin.scp file and /scripts/web folder.

I just recently updated the forums to reflect the current development.
There is a section for 0.56d and one for X.
I added a forum in the outdated section for 0.56a/b/c so things are not mixed in with current development.

Nightly downloads have also been updated as requested. There is no more downloads for SphereX debug builds. Those can be obtained from devs if testing is required.

After stay the same for more than a decade, Sphere finally got some general interface updates to make it feel more "modern"

Help menu
- The old prehistoric code using MENUs got updated to new DIALOGs that can be easily customizable
- Players now can send GM pages directly through the dialog, and also remove the request itself

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GM Page menu
- The engine is now softcoded and can be easily customized
- Now everything is dialog-based, GMs doesn't need to manually use page commands anymore
- GM pages can be replied remotely, where players will receive the reply on a dialog even when afk or offline (when offline, it will show on next login)
- Marking the page as "handled" will lock it, only the current GM handling it will be able to reply/delete the page

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Information menu (command .info)
- Old T2A dialogs got updated to an modern AOS design
- Now it will show more information about the item/char
- Dialogs will show properties based on server settings (eg: it will only show elemental damages/resists when elemental combat is enabled, etc)

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These changes are already available on latest build, you just need to update the .exe and some few scripts (sphere_dialog.scp, sphere_msgs.scp and sphere_skills.scp).
More dialogs are planned to be updated (eg: add/admin dialogs) but there's no estimated date.

I know this place is not as busy as it used to be, but to all the dedicated sphereserver users, I want to wish all a happy new year!
I hope this project keeps going for many more years to come.