Development:Joining the project

So you want to help this project, but you have little or no idea how to get into it? The Mana World development team is not a closed circle like many other projects. You don't need to apply to anyone or ask for "being taken into the team". You don't have to ask for permission to work on something or wait for someone to assign a task to you. A team member is basically anyone who volunteers to do something for the game.

Note: Besides reading this page the best way to start is asking for further information and assistance in our IRC development channel or on the forums.

If you know how to use Git you will even be more effective.

Technical aspects

The technical aspects of development of TMW include tweaking our custom server (tmwAthena). The server is done in C++ and scripts are done in the tmwAthena scripting language. Notably tmwAthena is an SVN snapshot from eAthena (a Ragnarok Online game server emulator software) in early 2004. We've extensively hacked it and cleaned it over the years (it was at the moment of taking the snapshot in transition from the basis of an old hacky MUD server to the current eAthena codebase). The technical aspects of the TMW project also include packaging data updates for the client.

ManaPlus Client

Originally just a fork of the official Mana client, ManaPlus got blessed when Mana stopped being updated and ran behind on features.

Site and downloads, bug tracker.

TMWA server

The Mana World Athena is an MMORPG server that forked from eAthena, a Ragnarok Online clone, in early 2004. The major advantage of TMWA compared to RO clones is that it does not rely on a proprietary client that can't be changed, but nowadays we're quite distant from the RO community.

TMWA has been maintained by o11c (Ben Longbons) since early 2011 or so. Before that, it never really had a proper maintainer, since everyone thought that ManaServ was going to be the thing. But it won't ever be, so no more random hacks in TMWA, have a design plz kthxbye.

TMWA has a bugtracker: https://github.com/themanaworld/tmwa/issues But it's probably worth getting on IRC first: irc://chat.freenode.net/tmwa https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#tmwa

Note that this channel is *only* for technical discussion of TMWA (and attoconf), not general chat or TMW content development.

The Mana World (Athena) server originated as a snapshot of eAthena. It has since been extensively kludged, purged, optimized, and strictened, to the point that it will usually bitch at you if your scripts or config are wrong instead of silently doing the wrong thing. It it also well on the way to being a well-behaved package that can be installed with the usual package management tools (for all of you who don't know what package management tools are, your OS sucks and you deserve what you get), but we'd need to ship some sort of server data snapshots for that ...

There are no specific instructions to set up TMWA alone, the only instructions are in How to Develop. Particularly, building from a tarball will not work, use 'make dist' instead.

Content

Content means: new monsters, new equipment, new maps, new NPCs, new quests, new anything into the game. Content does not mean: GFX, SFX.

Before anything can get into the game, it should be designed. After that it should be implemented server-sided. Then GFX and potentially also SFX can be requested for it and it can go into the game once they're done. Currently visioning ideas is a collective process anyone can take part in and the people doing scripting are cherry-picking whatever ideas they want to get into the game. Scripting stuff is also a free for all process. Once there is a good idea to expand the world, in general new maps can be requested. Reading the forums thoroughly and asking publicly usually gets you answers rather well.

Graphics

Graphics development could currently (June 2013) use a few pixel artists going about and retouching old mistakes in tilesets and sprite sets. Also if the content development crowd picks up and starts to provide concepts which would require new GFX work to be done, then there is going to be a demand for new equipment work, tilesets and sprite sets. Please remember to pay attention to our guidelines.

Also do hunt for unfulfilled REQ topics on the forums if you're looking for something to do. Newbie pixel artists or people doing their first pixel art piece ever are also very welcome. The community can be pretty harsh at times, but there are also people around who actually do know what they're talking about. It is up to you to distinguish between these two.

SFX / Music

The SFX and music development scheme for TMW is currently not really all that active. New sounds and music are always appreciated.