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.
How-to Develop
- Instructions to set-up a TMW server are at How to Develop.
- Development Documentation contains more detailed information then the short summaries below.
- TMW uses git. how to use Git
- TMW staff is available for further information, assistance or help in our IRC development channel or on the forums.
How-to Help
Any player can at any time help us in various ways other then development
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.
Parts of TMW
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.
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 ...
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 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.
