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 Contribute
The Mana World uses Git. A list of tasks that need to be completed is available at GitLab. In order to contribute please see these tasks and coordinate with the team either on the forums or IRC. We will be happy to assist you.
If you need to practice more before contributing directly, feel free to create anything you wish and submit it to the appropriate development forums, there you will receive feedback and ideas for improvement.
How-to Develop
- Instructions to set-up a TMW server are at How to Develop.
- Development Documentation contains more detailed information than 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
Parts of TMW
Evol-Hercules Server
Until recently TMW used TMWA an MMORPG server that forked from eAthena, a Ragnarok Online clone, in early 2004. 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.
During the summer of 2016 the devs decided to move on to the hercules server, an active developed fork of the original eathena. They wrote plugins to support the TMW specific bits.
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
PLACEHOLDER
ManaPlus Client
Originally just a fork of the official Mana client, ManaPlus is now the official client for The Mana World, it is actively developed and supports various operating systems.
Site and downloads, bug tracker.
