The Mana World

Christmas is coming near and Santa and his helpers are busy
preparing everything for the celebration in Santa's house near Nivalis.
But somehow... everything seems to go wrong.
Bad luck? Or rather - malicious interference?
It looks like someone could use your help.

Previously, only activity while the user was away from the keyboard was a bannable offense. Now, any sort of automated following (especially, but not only, attack-following) is also covered.

If you know any of the people who left this game due to the prevalence of bots that were previously tolerated, please tell them it's time to return.

A new client is available since a few days in the downloads page! Almost two years have passed since the last stable release of the client. Hence, it's not practical to go into much detail about all the changes that have been made, but we'll mention the most important ones.

First off, the client is now based on the Mana client. It was 1.5 years ago that the Mana project split off from The Mana World, so that the server and client software could be developed independently from the content of the game. The 0.5 release marks a great milestone where the client can form a stable base for many games, including The Mana World. From now on, the client version will match the version of the Mana client that it is based on.

The client will now download a list of servers on startup, making it easier to discover and select between different communities. Also, it will now display an informative message if a server doesn't allow direct registration, as is the case with our main server.

Many other convenient features were added like the ability to switch server or character without having to restart the client, nick autocompletion by pressing Tab, changing direction only by holding the "emote" key, support for pasting text from the clipboard, new mouse cursors that indicate attack and talk actions, and a new Outfit window to quickly switch between multiple outfits.

Creating a MMORPG isn't an easy task. Creating a free one is even worse, because nobody is paid, nobody gets up in the morning, drinks a coffee, and looks at the tasks given to him/her 8 hour a day. Even so, we somehow made it this far, with a lot of mistakes, trial and error, and so on. We're still here, hard at work!

We hope you'll enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it, and wish you many hours of fun in The Mana World!

This actually already happened a few days ago, but I had a slight delay figuring out how to post news onto the SourceForge project feed after the SF site redesign...

Anyway, we finally have a development server up and running at dev.themanaworld.org using the technology from http://manasource.org/ ! Access to the development server is restricted to contributors of TMW CR1 and Manasource developers only. We will have a more public test server and eventually an actual free-for-all free-to-play production server, when the time comes. So all TMW content will be rolling out in controlled and well-tested Content Releases (CR).

So, if you are currently playing the game and wondering how does this affect you: it does not, at all. So what's the deal here then? Time for a short history lesson...

TMW was started in 2004, coded in C and Allegro, not really having a server software at all. Early on it was ported to C++ and SDL and an eAthena (RO server emulator) SVN snapshot was taken as a temporary platform to test the client technologies (graphics drawing, eventually particle engine). It was supposed to be running there for about 3-6 months, while we get our own game together and have a server to run the game on. A classical engineering mistake: the temporary fix stuck on and our own server was not really usable until now, over 6 years after.

At first we did not have the content to attract much people over. We were quite content with the amount of technical feedback we were receiving for the client. When time passed and content piled up, it started to appeal more and more to gamers. Unfortunately not much care or thought was put into the content, "since it was all for a temporary test platform". It was not until much later than related people realized we have a strong community around the server. This is what we call TMW-eA. This is what you are currently playing. For about 2 years now, there has been a team of people dedicated to TMW-eA content, honing it to its fullest potential and slowly fixing some mistakes of the past as well. There is currently also a steady flow of new things into the game too.

So, we essentially have 2 different MMO games developed simultaneously at TMW. One of which you can enjoy right now as you have been able for over 6 years now. The other one is getting closer to being available for you day by day.

Related forum thread: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?t=11428

The Mana World was covered in Amiga Future 82 (released earlier this month), being the only available MMORPG for AmigaOS. The one and a half page article goes in detail about your initial steps after creating your first character and ends with an encouragement to give it a try. The magazin is available in both German and English.

A screenshot of The Mana World can be seen on the front page:
http://www.amigafuture.de/album_page.php?pic_id=14787

More about this issue 82 of Amiga Future:
http://www.amigafuture.de/viewtopic.php?p=40487

For years The Mana World has used many different channels on the irc.freenode.net. As of now, all The Mana World related channels have been moved to irc.themanaworld.org, our own IRC server.

The move is mainly due to an increase in abuse to our channels, which was not addressed properly by FreeNode staff. This new IRC server should be better for players, since they can generally expect their nick to be available and we will in the future be able to provide more elaborate services.

Discussion and coordination about client and server development, which has recently separated to the Mana project at http://manasource.org/ , will still happen on FreeNode in the #mana channel.

Because of the release of an easy to abuse spamkit that could automatically create a large amount of new accounts and characters, we've had to disable new account creation from the game client. This meant that for the past few days we've had to create new accounts manually.

Now I'm happy to announce that we've developed an alternative way of creating a new account, using the web form linked from the 'Server Status' section on the right. Unfortunately it wasn't feasible to create new accounts immediately, so after you've used the form you'll have to wait a bit until you receive an email that says your account has been created.

Have fun playing The Mana World!

This is release is a stability update to 0.0.29, which admittedly featured quite some crashes (we fixed four) and other smaller glitches. This was only to be expected after such a large update, and public scrutiny helped to quickly find most of the remaining issues. Thanks to those who helped us by reporting the bugs they found!

Two new features also sneaked into this patch release. It is now possible to change your password yourself, in the character selection dialog (so I can stop doing it for you ;)). Also, when you're in a party, you'll now see the leader of the party displayed in bold. As usual, see the changelog for the full list of changes: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=106790&release_id=688651

For the Windows installer, we've finally replaced the images that were allegedly fanart of copyrighted material. However, with my artistic talents lacking, I've had to mash them up from existing graphics. If you feel up to the task of beefing up our next installer with some shiny new TMW-themed art, be sure to submit your alternative here: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6812

For once, I just don't know where to start. So much has changed since the last release that we needed a very long time before the client was in releasable shape again. However, I think we eventually managed!

This release clearly is our largest ever. First, many improvements and new features were merged in from the Aethyra project. Then, we spend a month merging our own two grown apart clients, one that supported the eAthena server and one that supported the tmwserv server (support for this server is currently a compile-time option). Finally, we spent two months fixing, improving and generally cleaning things up in order to prepare for this release.

The list of changes is way too long to go through, but I'll mention a few of my favourites. The client now supports more eAthena features, among them is the ability to form a party, which allows you to see who else is online and to share experience and pickups in combat. Also, direction changes are now propagated properly, support for NPC storage was added and you can now specify the initial attributes of a new character. Then, there is the new tabbed chat window, which makes it much easier to keep track of private conversations. Finally, archers will enjoy seeing their arrows fly through the air.

Almost complete translations were done to French, German, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese. Over a dozen other languages feature partial translation. Unfortunately due to the font we ship, the Chinese translation isn't enabled by default, which we hope to resolve in a future release.

The full list can be found at the release notes: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=106790&release_id=682467

As the version number suggests, this is just a small bugfix release. The main thing that got fixed was to make the translations work on Windows. Also, translations for German, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish and Polish got updated.