General announcement for Manaplus

[Chicka-Maria]

The fourth point is relevant, because it's a bit unfair saying someone who keeps 80% of the players playing as someone who is harming the development.

He didnt say 4144 directly, he meant the development and effort of the client could be used for mana i believe. But yes its a great client and people will use it as said. Try and look at his point of view. its what hes trying to explain. But its not like people will stop using manaplus.

[Derpella]

I don't get this post at all:3
I said I understand Bjornie's post, but you say I don't, so apparently you will need to write 10 more posts to explain it to the silly Derpy...
I also don't understand other thing- if someone is doing something harmful, I thought you can say the person is harmful, I guess I am wrong... Can you explain this as well?

[Chicka-Maria]

I don't get this post at all:3
I said I understand Bjornie's post, but you say I don't, so apparently you will need to write 10 more posts to explain it to the silly Derpy...
I also don't understand other thing- if someone is doing something harmful, I thought you can say the person is harmful, I guess I am wrong... Can you explain this as well?

as i said in my last post and irc i was pointing out facts from what i understood. im sorry you dont understand my posts...
as for the person being harmful part, he never said 4144 was being harmful or pointing fingers. Maybe you understood his post a different way than i did. But for me he didnt direct it at 4144 BUT at the effort put into it to make it a good client. I think he meant it harms development because this effort is not being put into a client that is being advertised with the game. But either way manaplus is a good client and ill say it should have the general annoncement the main one does.

I am finished spamming the thread i have given my opinion and have tried to explain to you my opinion. If you wanna talk to me more about it please message me on irc.

Regards,

[Crush]

Maybe the mana client can put some features from the manaplus client into it?

Can't you just take the parts of manaplus code and implement it? Licence allows it...

As I said: Just tell the Manasource team what features you need and why you think that they are needed.

[Bertram]

Hi all,

I guess this is my turn to hijack this topic.

For the people not being aware of the whole history leading to this topic, the facts are those:
(Correct me if I'm wrong)
I'll try to stay away from emotional point of views:
- 4144 joined the team a lot of time ago, as someone interested in developing a MMORPG client.
- He proposed many features, some of them being very specific to tAthena, and even if i wasn't there all the time to witness it, some of them were rejected, because of being very specific, hard coded, and some stuff like that. That's the start of the story.
The manasource team (but remember, the team at that time) rejected those ideas, for good or bad reasons, I guess it depends on what and how, but anyway whitout being very communicative on why, I must suppose.
- As 4144 was very prolific, he became very quickly fed up with being stuck at convincing the team, and started a small fork, which became rather quckly what we know today.
- 4144 is coding at a very high pace, making me worry about his social life sometimes
- The changes he's making are working, but can't trivially be put back into the mana client, even if it's feasible, of course.
- Some changes he's made haven't the same vision than we have, and I do speak about the current team, even If I agree on the fact that many features are worth being included back.

I guess it's too late for our both projects to be merged back, but it's never too late to learn from errors from the past, and start to communicate better from now on.

Bjorn, Ablu and I are trying to develop (and actually finish a first working version of) Manaserv, while trying to keeping our users happy, but dealing with our other obligations, too.
I'm also trying to stay away from elitism and disdain, when I'm speaking about ideas and coding.
One thing is sure is that we're willing to keep supporting the tA server as long as it will live, and that there is place for Manaplus to live with us.
I even wish best of luck for the evol project, which sounds very promising.

If there are features really missing in the mana client, please tell us, and we'll try to add them.
Let's try to stay positive.

Now the mana and manaplus announcements are both made through the news window, and I don't think more is needed.

Best regards,

Bertram

[Nard]

For the record, in its 8 years of existence, The Mana World has always announced new client versions in the game and client-side news. Nothing new there.

Now, ManaPlus is clearly a power-user client first and an improved Mana client second. In my opinion it's unfortunate that the improvements it made are lost in that power-user environment instead of being contributed to the official Mana client. A project like The Mana World can't officially endorse a project that demonstrates such lack of collaboration. It is in my opinion hurting us more than we gain from it.

That is the real good question. I am happy to have some answer. Thanks Bertram :/
As many users of Manaplus I wonder, since fortune made me discover it, why it is not the official client. The improvements that were made are not lost since most players use them. May be it hurts your opinion but it made players far happier to play and thus contributed to the audience TMW has. I think it also helped the development team to improve official client, if not asking themselves which features they would like it to include: The follow feature could have been discussed 18 months ago; perhaps the decision would have been at least slightly different if it was an official client feature.
I wonder too why the client is not part of the TMW project, but a "Manasource" one, which when looked from the player point of view, seems unrelated to TMW: different site, different bug tracker, different IRC, only the forum is in common.

[Reid]

I wonder too why the client is not part of the TMW project, but a "Manasource" one, which when looked from the player point of view, seems unrelated to TMW: different site, different bug tracker, different IRC, only the forum is in common.

Nard

It's right, from what I know, manasource is a different project than tmw since 2009, bjorn get away from the tAthena server and *boom*, so to go back to the main topic, I asked to get the same privilege from mana to manaplus, to get an equal place as it was meant on the "free as freedom" and not your authoritarianism on the "Mana is king, ManaPlus is just the third party client, that most of [strike]our[/strike] users use."

Some answers on this thread are really not from Admins statement, really, but much from kiddies which on the verity fact, act like a 8y/o.

But well, as I've heard, the answer is a "no", without any wish of argumentation from the GHP.

Hi all,
(...)
I even wish best of luck for the evol project, which sounds very promising.
(...)
Now the mana and manaplus announcements are both made through the news window, and I don't think more is needed.

Hi Bertram,

We wish best of luck to the mana project too, if the annoucements are both made through the news window, why this need to spam the city? For Manaplus's users it's kind of annoying, what would you do if you were in Evol and that I started some annoucement about the new Manaplus, every 5minutes? We just wish some fairness.

1. 4144 does is program alone, without having to deal with Crunchie's bazaars and yet his client is superior. It looks like he spends more time on coding, than dramas and meetings.

This is because he is mainly alone, it's the same for a content project, when you are alone to work on it, you spend less time in reviewing every pixels one by one.

2. Official client looks a bit like no one cares. Why there is no silly things like online list?

As Crush and Bertram said, if you wish something, better ask them. They are not in game so they can't know what the players need.

3. Anyone under level 40-50 will need ALL of the program functions. And even young or not really tech-savvy people managed to learn how to use it.

Even if I share your opinion, these "gimmick features of questionable usefulness" are sometimes hard for a new player, and I never asked to the GHP or the Mana team or anybody here that I wanted of Mana to fusion with Manaplus, I've just asked the same kind of popularization way for both of these projects, which work both (cetainly in an other way), for the mana world community.

4. Ban his client and see how many people will stay in game.

Could be a fun test, kicking manaplus users will may show to this GHP, through daily connection stats, how many players use the ManaPlus, and they could may change their ideas about it?

[Ablu]

... what would you do if you were in Evol and that I started some annoucement about the new Manaplus, every 5minutes?

I do not want to join this argument.
But: You are using ManaPlus as official client.
And to be honest i do not mind if you do not do announcements for new mana updates since you choose ManaPlus as client.

Best regards
Ablu

[Crush]

The reasons for outsourcing the technical development of the client to an independent project were mainly problems between people. Just believe me when I say that the current solution works best for everyone involved.

Also, the forum is not shared between the projects. forums.themanaworld.org is 100% under the jurisdiction of TMW, not Manasource. Manasource hasn't got an official forum.

[Big Crunch]

[2012-02-12 22:46:40] 009-1.gat(48,36) _o11c(2162590) : @broadcast Mana 0.6.0 officially released
[2012-02-15 19:33:27] 009-1.gat(46,37) Big Crunch(2160466) : @broadcast Dont forget to try out the new Mana0.6! Its got floating smilies
[2012-02-15 19:37:52] 009-1.gat(46,37) Big Crunch(2160466) : @broadcast You can get the new Mana 0.6 at manasource.org/downloads. Get yours today!
[2012-02-15 22:58:04] 009-1.gat(46,37) Big Crunch(2160466) : @broadcast Today is a day of change! Change the old routine and try the new Mana0.6, found at manasource.org/downloads!
[2012-02-16 16:32:10] 009-1.gat(46,37) Big Crunch(2160466) : @broadcast Don't forget to check out the new hotness, Mana 0.6! Go to manasource.org/downloads to get yours! Better wear gloves because its Hot!
[2012-02-16 20:46:32] 009-1.gat(46,37) Big Crunch(2160466) : @broadcast Get it while its hot! The newest client Mana 0.6 is on the shelves! Visit manasource.org/downloads to you get your copy!

6 times is hardly spam.

On topic, and in the same vein, Debian doesnt announce Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu doesnt announce Linux Mint releases, so it stands to reason that only the official client gets announced on the official server.

[Derpella]

If 90% of Ubuntu users used Mint in virtual box, Ubuntu devs would thinks something in their product is not right
Well, globals are sometimes made often about some notthatimportant stuff, is it really such a big deal?

[Ablu]

I think a new major release after some ages of work is something important...

[Bjørn]

Sorry guys for derailing this thread with my bold statement.

When I said that I think ManaPlus is hurting us, I don't mean it hurts the players. I am fully aware that ManaPlus is being developed to please the current players, and I'm sure it does so successfully. I agree many of its features are necessary, though I don't agree with the way many of them are implemented.

For example, of course we all want an online list! Unfortunately, the only way tmwAthena exposes the currently online players is by writing out a text file every few minutes. This text file happens to be available on the internet so people can see who's online. ManaPlus downloads this file periodically and shows it in the client. That approach works for our current setup, but it's not a scalable solution and so it's not where we want to go.

Another thing is that tmwAthena does not have proper working guild support, which we discovered when trying to add it to the client as far as I remember. So we turned it off for now. ManaPlus instead relies on communicating with a guild bot to provide some guild functionality. Again, this is not where we want to go, because it could never properly integrate with the game the way we'd like to do with guilds.

Similar approaches were taken by ManaPlus to add player shops (abusing the whisper chat, to the annoyance of official client users) and to add additional emotes (which of course doesn't work that way, as we all know from instant messenger clients - in the Mana client we have instead made emotes dynamic so each game can have its own).

Our approach to solving many of the missing features in tmwAthena is to develop our own server, now called manaserv. This is not some strange new "manasource.org" idea. This new server has been in development by The Mana World team since 2005, and was always planned to replace tmwAthena once it is ready. Once we control the code behind the server, we can make content development much more comfortable and redefine the game rather than having it be a Ragnarok Online clone for eternity.

So what I think ManaPlus is hurting is the potential to realize our vision. Rather than directing effort to solving our issues properly, it fixes them by patchwork and thereby largely removes the demand for a proper fix. Players will think the issue is solved and just wonder why the official client is lacking such basic features. And that in turn also affects potential developers, who may otherwise have noticed our obvious needs and found out how to help finding future-proof solutions.

[Derpella]

I can understand you think of a finished product of your hard work.
And I understand you want things rock-stable.
But, since it's pre-alpha, it is not that bad, imho... Manaplus keeps people satisfied, and by this keeping your playerbase huuge which:
1. tests your pre-alpha, including stress tests :)
2. helps with finding new devs (as many players after making all their quest prefer to help as their "next quest")

Your client is thoroughly tested even if those % are using manaplus... I think you guys should just <3 each other :)


Oh, and the last thing. Bjorn, I am sorry for arguing with you on IRC. I never meant to depreciate your hard work, good that this new guy explained your view to me :) I feel very bad for misjudging you and I am really sorry.

[Nard]

Sorry guys for derailing this thread with my bold statement.

When I said that I think ManaPlus is hurting us, I don't mean it hurts the players. I am fully aware that ManaPlus is being developed to please the current players, and I'm sure it does so successfully. I agree many of its features are necessary, though I don't agree with the way many of them are implemented.

It was perfectly clear that you did not say that but that manaplus hurted the TMW project. This is exactly what we understood and what TMW users don't agree with.

For example, of course we all want an online list! Unfortunately, the only way tmwAthena exposes the currently online players is by writing out a text file every few minutes. This text file happens to be available on the internet so people can see who's online. ManaPlus downloads this file periodically and shows it in the client. That approach works for our current setup, but it's not a scalable solution and so it's not where we want to go.

The developer who had the nice idea to publish the on line players list on the net was really clever. He hadn't the idea to include it into the client though. 4144 had it and everybody is happy to have both. It is to the leaders of this project of this project to decide to include a better way to make it and choose the means to do it.

Another thing is that tmwAthena does not have proper working guild support, which we discovered when trying to add it to the client as far as I remember. So we turned it off for now. ManaPlus instead relies on communicating with a guild bot to provide some guild functionality. Again, this is not where we want to go, because it could never properly integrate with the game the way we'd like to do with guilds.

I discovered as an Auldsbel GM, that tmwAthena does have working guild support. There is no TMW use of it for different reasons that those which you remember; Freeyorp gave us a clear explanation of the reflection state of development team here:
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 78#p120178
and they are quite easily understandable.
Manaplus does support guilds as they are implemented in tmwAthena, and I am sure that Tarq will agree with me if I invite you to verify it on Auldsbel server.
It also includes a patch for TMW friendly bots support.

Similar approaches were taken by ManaPlus to add player shops (abusing the whisper chat, to the annoyance of official client users) and to add additional emotes (which of course doesn't work that way, as we all know from instant messenger clients - in the Mana client we have instead made emotes dynamic so each game can have its own).

More you could have added that Tradebot, Auctionbot and now Manamarket, could hurt your ideas on the project because they underline some lacks of the server.

Our approach to solving many of the missing features in tmwAthena is to develop our own server, now called manaserv. This is not some strange new "manasource.org" idea. This new server has been in development by The Mana World team since 2005, and was always planned to replace tmwAthena once it is ready. Once we control the code behind the server, we can make content development much more comfortable and redefine the game rather than having it be a Ragnarok Online clone for eternity.

I can understand that you need to control the server code but, you started a public game and now have users who claim for more comfort and content. Because 4144 plays that game and pays much attention to player remarks, he could wonder about players needs and was able to fill them. On the same idea; Jenalya, alastrim, o11c, Ali-G... and all your GMs play and thus are aware of the server and content wholes. You have to deal with it and and perhaps, help o11c in his struggle against tmwAthena code to include to the functional server the features that make Manaplus so attractive. I am sure that your project will get benefits of it. I can understand too, that you have much more interest in coding that in playing, but if you have no idea of the player's needs and difficulties (or a bad one), you drive the bus into the wall. Steve Jobs made his fortune with the Idea that a secretary should not have to know a thing about the command line (just as the player). btw, I tested manaserv 18 months ago and we had no news about it since. Manaplus was ready to support it. Trial was too short to have a good idea about it :/

So what I think ManaPlus is hurting is the potential to realize our vision. Rather than directing effort to solving our issues properly, it fixes them by patchwork and thereby largely removes the demand for a proper fix. Players will think the issue is solved and just wonder why the official client is lacking such basic features. And that in turn also affects potential developers, who may otherwise have noticed our obvious needs and found out how to help finding future-proof solutions.

On the opposite Manaplus and friendly bots, by their wide use, oblige you to do better than they do and show you the demand better than players could do it on Manasource.; most of them don't even know the name. They make players stay longer in the actual game, have more interest in it and sometimes bring you new developers. Ignoring the hard work that 4144 made and the features he introduced because it is not "the official client" is a bad idea just as ignoring the existence of bots. I don't think that "common sense" will be sufficient for GMs for a long time to detect some cheaters. Rules and client have a strong relation. In my opinion the follow rule was also an easy made patch that avoided the leading team to dig deeper into the problem.

Now, I am not sure to support Reidy's Idea to have global announcement for Manaplus because the first thing that a player does when he meets a newcomer is to tell him to switch from official client to Manaplus, then the updates are displayed on welcome screen. Then official client really needs advertizing!

The reasons for outsourcing the technical development of the client to an independent project were mainly problems between people. Just believe me when I say that the current solution works best for everyone involved.

Also, the forum is not shared between the projects. forums.themanaworld.org is 100% under the jurisdiction of TMW, not Manasource. Manasource hasn't got an official forum.

and

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 03#p122403

Thanks Bertram and Crush; maybe communication is one of the major problems in this project. This thread is again a typical example (I cannot say "good"). It is a pity that a so nice project is drawn in multiple directions because some people cannot calm their egoes and act in the common interest (no one targeted in particular but everybody is invited to ask about him/her). For example a lot of nice ideas were lost when UFB and TAW were closed. When I played on them, I couldn't help asking myself "why did they forked?"

Sadly yours;

Nard