A change in the organization of things
Posted: 21 Oct 2009, 20:42
The current situation of development being closely related to one central server has always shown considerate drawbacks. For example:
The Mana Roadmap
- We've always strived to make the client generic enough to be used with entirely different servers, but this opportunity isn't used in practice. Instead, we've seen several times that other projects prefer to fork than to cooperate (without much success, unfortunately).
- Developers get dragged into community politics, even though they really don't want to. It could be much better if developers were separated from this, or could choose their preferred player community independent of having to choose a development team.
The Mana Roadmap
- Client and server development will be moved to the manasource.org domain. It will be separated from content development, although manasource.org can still maintain a content library.
- The tmw client will be renamed to Mana Client (executable can be simply called 'mana').
- The tmwserv server will be renamed to Mana Server (manaserv).
- themanaworld.org will stay the home of the current player community and server.themanaworld.org will remain one of the primary "production servers". However, other servers may also wish to participate on an equal footing, for example thealternateworld.org, invertika.org, aethyra (if they're compatible), our Brazilian friends, etc.
The Mana Client itself will contain minimal branding (but enough to identify it), independent of any of the servers. Right after login it will brand itself as appropriate to a certain server (wallpaper, music, gui style). - A testing server will run on testing.manasource.org, maintained by the developers. It is meant to run a reference world that demonstrates the features of the server and client.
- The formerly planned The Mana World 0.1.0 will be released as Mana Client and Mana Server 1.0. While these can still gain features in minor releases, work will then start on the Qt-based Mana 2.0 platform.
- I will remain project lead for the Mana Client and Server. I will however only administrate the testing server. The running of other servers will be left to those who feel up to the challenge. Hopefully Platyna will keep hosting server.themanaworld.org since it has proved a very dependable service, but I also hope other projects will be able to grow and develop in this ecosystem.