The Mana World Forums

Unfortunately the development didn't went that well in april.

The sudden disappearance of the forum and the wiki together with the person responsible for hosting them had a heavy impact on the productivity of the whole team.

While some developers tried everything to contact said person or the hoster to find out what happened others started searching for and programming tools to get as much data as possible back from search engine caches and others paniced, ran around in circles and proclaimed the end of the mana world. But noone really got any work at the server done.

Fortunately the administrator of the forum and the wiki reappeared in mid april and we were able to restore all data so that the work could continue and we could get at least a few things done in april.


I am currently programming the monster AI. Monsters will soon be able to react on player attacks by chasing the attacker and attacking it back. I even implemented a simple aggression management system. Monsters prefer targets based on distance and damage received from them. Unfortunately the whole thing is still too unstable for committing it to the latest svn version.

In the meantime trapdoor is still working on the guild system and is making good progress with it.

Crush wrote:I even implemented a simple aggression management system.

I think World of Warcraft has some sound ideas when it comes to monster aggression. Healing spells cause aggro, there are specific abilities that are meant to cause aggro (i.e. Intimidating Shout), so that aggro can be managed somewhat, and players who are spec'ed to do lots of damage usually include abilities to reduce the aggro they get. This is one of the main things that keeps the teamwork an important part of the gameplay. I do not think we should copy WoW, but hopefully this can be used for some inspiration for future development.

Keep up the good work TMW Devs!

We plan to implement the monster AI with external scripts later. The AI implementation I am currently programming is only a temporary solution to allow minimal gameplay.

The "aggro control system" from wow isn't that special. Almost every modern mmorpg uses a similar system. Personally I don't like it very much because damage dealers and healers can't use the full potential of their characters without "causing too much aggro".