Announcement - 2.5 is now in "Soft Launch" Open Testing Phase

SecretsOfThePast

Super Secret Squirrel Dev
Yes, you heard that right. We're opening up 2.5 for everyone to test now.
It's a glorious feat that we've even got this far, and now you, the common Shards of Dalaya citizen, can experience 2.5 regardless if you have been invited or not! So what are you waiting for, read this post and get started with testing!

As an added bonus, your characters from 2.0 AS OF JUNE 29th are available for testing on 2.5. Old 2.5 beta charcters have been wiped. As such, we have disabled the ability to use /cm betaheal, /cm betamana, and /cm betalevel. Note that no progress will be saved on the 2.5 Open Testing Phase, however...

Woldaff Edit: We actually may transfer over experience gained in 2.5 beta to your live character... but this is completely dependent on if there are bugs or other problems that make it unfair to treat beta exp as earned exp.


This phase of testing, depending on participation, may award fame for your live character when 2.5 open testing concludes. We have methods of tracking participation, though no specifics on numbers are being announced until we move closer to the end of testing.

The following are step by step instructions to replace your patcher and get in-game:

1) Copy your Shards of Dalaya "EverQuest" folder and keep this one separate from 2.0

Step 1 Troubleshooting:
1a) If you get permissions errors copying the EverQuest folder, move the folder to a place such as My Documents.

2) Visit this link for the 2.5 patcher executable. **IT MUST BE PLACED IN A DIFFERENT FOLDER THAN YOUR 2.0 PATCHER, AND MUST NOT BE RENAMED FROM SODPATCHER.EXE**
https://shardsofdalaya.com/patcher25/sodpatcher.exe

Step 2 Troubleshooting:
None!

3) On the patcher, set your EverQuest directory to the one you just made a copy of. Make sure that "Bypass DLL Injection" is always unchecked. Make sure "Repatch All" is checked for the first time you are running it, it can safely be unchecked after the first run.

Step 3 Troubleshooting:
3a) Make sure that "Bypass DLL Injection" is always unchecked.

4) Attempt to start the game. If everything works, enter the same username and password you use to connect to 2.0, except at this new fancy login page!

Step 4 Troubleshooting:
4a) If you receive an error message about DirectX, visit this link to download the Microsoft DirectX Runtime, which contains all of the DirectX Files.
4b) If your game does not start, delete eqclient.ini and re-run the patcher.
4c) All other errors related to the login screen and starting the game, post them here.


In Closing
We'll be rapidly making changes improving the 2.5 Open Testing phase over time. Your feedback and bug reports are valuable, and we request that you use either channel #25testing on IRC or /bug for reporting those bugs and feedback to us. When we feel it is ready, we will, of course, push 2.5 out to the actual servers!

Thank you for playing on Shards of Dalaya, and thanks for being a part of this testing phase! We hope to see you ingame on the 2.5 Open Testing Phase!
 
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FYI, you almost certainly will no longer be able to run this in Wine, sorry Mac/Linux folks. If people find differently, by all means let us know how you did it, but some of the tricksy stuff with the client just doesn't work well in Wine.
 
EverQuest cannot find the zone file "clz" in the directory that you are currently running EverQuest from. Please check and make sure that you do not have more than one directory with EverQuest installed. If so, you may be running the wrong directory. For assistance with this porblem, pleas call (858) 537-0898, or visit our website at hhtp://ww.everquest.com

ea time the game is done loding and b4 char select i get this msg and eq crashes
i did re patsh all and did delete the eqclient.ini and did repatsh all 1 more still this is happening ea time .......
 
Made a small edit above about the *possibility* of transferring experience if it is fair to do so.

Everyone should log in and give this a try! Secrets has been pouring her heart out into it the last week or so, and the entire team is pretty damned excited.
 
Made a small edit above about the *possibility* of transferring experience if it is fair to do so.

Everyone should log in and give this a try! Secrets has been pouring her heart out into it the last week or so, and the entire team is pretty damned excited.

Okay I got a pre made team to test this out .. but its hard to convince them to play on the test server if they cant keep their XP .. as we are all new players (been playing now for about 2 weeks all together) we're just reaching the level 30 mark on SoD live .. any chance of throwing me a bone to help convince them to help test and not keep XPing/Looting/Exploring on live?
 
Okay I got a pre made team to test this out .. but its hard to convince them to play on the test server if they cant keep their XP .. as we are all new players (been playing now for about 2 weeks all together) we're just reaching the level 30 mark on SoD live .. any chance of throwing me a bone to help convince them to help test and not keep XPing/Looting/Exploring on live?

As much as I would love to say everyone should play solely on the beta, there is a non-zero chance that there will be a bug that prevents us from transferring over experience. We also are not transferring over gear or items looted.

If you want to play the game as it was intended, stay on live. The 2.5 beta is for us to figure out the last few bugs and get it ready for final transfer. The quicker we can stamp out the big bugs, the quicker we can do the final transfer.

There is no shame in waiting until we transfer over officially. If you are just leveling up and collecting gear, it very well might be better to wait.
 
Loving the beta so far, the ability to reduce max frames per second greatly increases the ability to move quickly. Auto standing when casting a spell helps loads when boxing a caster or healer, love this addition too! The UI hotbars are also loads better than the old school EQ 2 wide vertical one.

/cheers folks, you are really taking a great step forward here!

And as for the slight chance to transfer XP, looks like my group is going to stick to live for now .. such a shame, its like putting a kid in a candy store and telling him he has 30 seconds to look, but cant take anything with him!

And idea on a general ETA? 2 weeks? 2 months? more?
 
Loving the beta so far, the ability to reduce max frames per second greatly increases the ability to move quickly. Auto standing when casting a spell helps loads when boxing a caster or healer, love this addition too! The UI hotbars are also loads better than the old school EQ 2 wide vertical one.

/cheers folks, you are really taking a great step forward here!

And as for the slight chance to transfer XP, looks like my group is going to stick to live for now .. such a shame, its like putting a kid in a candy store and telling him he has 30 seconds to look, but cant take anything with him!

And idea on a general ETA? 2 weeks? 2 months? more?

It is around one good weekend away.
 
In all honesty it is getting pretty close. It depends on how many bugs we unearth as we expand testing.

The entire team has worked hard over the last year to make this happen - Taryth, KLS, Jumbers mostly on the code side. But this surprise ramp up in timing is largely thanks to Secrets coming out of left field with solutions and time to mass fix bugs over the last week or so.

If we keep up this pace, I would estimate that it is relatively soon that we can switch over.

The current plan will be to find a week where the team can agree to be around to pound out bugs after the transition. The game would likely be up and down over that week, and players would definitely be affected, but I think that it would be worth getting things out and cleaned up quickly. Then we would obviously have some sort of big celebration.

Of course, the pacing for projects like this fluctuates - especially with an all volunteer team. So it is always hard to provide good ETAs.
 
Currently with your die-hard fanbase of players one week of server instability would likely be accepted, and the outcome would be that you would have 100-200 people logging in and testing your new update constantly .. I hope you and the rest of the team decides to do this, then follow it up with some events and a double XP weekend or some such thing. ;)

/cheers to Secrets, I have been watching his/her videos, hell of a lot of hard work and dedication going on there!
 
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Your feedback and bug reports are valuable, and we request that you please make use of these forums and IRC (you nerds!) for reporting those bugs and feedback to us.

Following these instructions, I made a bug report thread on the forums. Taryth responded by locking it and telling me to rely on using /bug in-game instead.

So... what is the actual procedure I'm supposed to follow here?

Being treated like I'm not following the instructions when I'm following the instructions that were posted (as I understood them) is one of my biggest pet peeves in life, so I'd appreciate an answer on this.
 
Following these instructions, I made a bug report thread on the forums. Taryth responded by locking it and telling me to rely on using /bug in-game instead.

So... what is the actual procedure I'm supposed to follow here?

Being treated like I'm not following the instructions when I'm following the instructions that were posted (as I understood them) is one of my biggest pet peeves in life, so I'd appreciate an answer on this.

I'm sorry about this; the OP has been changed to reflect the preferred method. I typed this post at 3am, so some of the information was off in the clouds.

I know that feeling when you are told to do something then told it's wrong. I'm sorry about that, but please let it be known it's not your fault. Thanks!
 
I'm sorry about tis; the OP has been changed to reflect the preferred method. I typed this post at 3am, so some of the information was off in the clouds.

I know that feeling when you are told to do something then told it's wrong. I'm sorry about that, but please let it be known it's not your fault. Thanks!

Thanks much Secrets. I'll follow the updated info, and I have /bug'd my issue in-game now for review.

Your empathizing with my feeling was much appreciated, and it freed me from the lingering tension of having a pet-peeve get poked, so thank you extra-much for that. :)
 
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