Mana/TMW Development Weekly Summary

[Jenalya]

In the past week, alastrim searched and fixed a bug in the Rossy quest.
There was a restart to bring the fix in, which also brought in a new haircolor added by Bjorn.

In regards to active projects,
- Nami is working on a lot of graphics for the snow area extension (and for many other things )
- mistergrey is working on the xml for the child NPCs needed for the North Tulimshar quests
- Ablu fixed the Log Heads xml
- I'm working on the scripting of the snow area quests

[Jenalya]

It has been a bit quite during the past three weeks, mainly because most of the developers had some real life things to pay attention to. Nevertheless there was some progress.

- Alastrim worked on the scripting for the Easter Event, I did some mapping, o11c and I started review and testing this weekend.
- Thanks to MrGrey, Nami and salmondine, the child NPC's graphics and xml are done now, so the North Tulimshar quests only need the spellchecking, which is currently done by Frost.

There'll probably be a release next weekend, bringing in the Easter Event and those North Tulimshar quests.

In regards to other projects,

- Skipy is working on the graphics needed for the crypt, Yubaba is working on the map, and skipy and I are balancing the new monsters stats.
- I also worked a bit on the scripting for the next snow area content. I hope it'll be ready for the testserver somewhen soon, but will rather concentrate on the release.
- Crush started to work on a chess dungeon tileset and Dude on some chess monsters.

[Jenalya]

Last weekend, there was a restart which brought in the Easter Event and some new quests in North Tulimshar.

During the week, I got the scripting for the Blue Sage quests ready for testing. There's also a new weapon made be ChefChelios and new snow maps made by PjotrOrial.

Everyone is welcome to do some testing and give feedback in the forum topic about the Blue Sage quests.

[Jenalya]

In the past two weeks, there was a lot of work going on for the Blue Sage quests, which are planned to be released shortly after reward time of the Easter Event ended.
A snow tileset addition and new NPC sprites done by Nami and salmondine got finished and several new snow maps done by PjotrOrial were added. Thanks to the feedback of the testers, I did some bugs fixes and tweaks.
More testing is welcome, please leave a comment in the TEST-topic after testing.

[Jenalya]

Sorry for the delay, here's finally a summary again of what is going on in development. There were a lot of things happening in the past month:

We released the next part of the snow area extension, the Blue Sage quests. Many people were involved:
Storyline/scripting: Jenalya
New graphics: Nami, salmondine, Chef Chelios, Derpella, varuna
Mapping: PjotrOrial, Jenalya
Generating the minimaps: cody
Spelling and grammar check: Pihro, Kandiman
XML: Ali-G
Review/testing/suggestions: o11c, v0id, Nard, Derpella, Frost, baedamichi, GonzoDark, Johanne Laliberté, Whistler, ZdlN, jessyb03, EVILPANDA12345, cody, Dude and more
Special thanks to varuna for explaining the bug about the slime subquest.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

There also happened various bugfixes done by: Yubaba, Ablu, PjotrOrial, me

Currently, Ali-G is working on extending the Debug function used on the testserver and adding a set of smileys, partly from manaplus but also new ones.

For continuing the snow area extension, we're in need for pixelartists, to create the tilesets, new NPCs and items for the Barbarian Village and Thermin. Every help on this is welcome!

We're also in a brainstorming phase regarding the balancing of skills, addition of new skills and higher levels of magic.

[Jenalya]

In the past two weeks, there were several restarts due to some urgent bugfixes about the tutorial quest, the towel event and map issue. Thanks to everyone who reported about those bugs, especially Nard, Johanne and GonzoDark.
Also there got some additions by Ali-G in, most remarkable are a new set of smileys and for the testserver there is an extended Debug function.
There were some graphic updates, Lizandra reworked the female Forest Armor, varuna and Ali-G updated the Resist Poison icon and the potion icons.

As for projects being worked on and planned,
- the snowarea extension including the barbarian village and Thermin still needs more graphics.
- I worked on reformatting all xml files to a uniform style, which needs testing
- Chicka-Maria is working on some new monster sounds
- MrGrey and I are working on expanding magic. He is looking into scripting some new spells and creating graphics, I was getting familiar with the already existing quest for level 3 life magic (Kadiya quest) and plans from Fate for more additions

[o11c]

In rewrite news, I've finally written a 'configure' script that does what I want without being retarded. It kind of helps that I have a classmate I can throw all sorts of python code at and get a critical review. Now I just have to combine it with my makefile (now de-hardcoded), warning system, network layer, timers, and then finally port the network layer onto it.

I'll need some readline+select+buffer code sometime. Use GNU readline, implement it myself, or port pyrepl (which is used by pypy)? It's not essential for tmwa-admin (I could just avoid it and use rlwrap), but I want the tty code for a future project ("7: a text editor named just to annoy VI users.")

What exactly to do about the integer problem is still up in the air. I know I'll need little-endian versions, but I don't know what do about normal ones. Fixed size? Expand-by-assignment? Do something special with constants? It's a cool idea, but would I want to maintain it? If I implement UDLs I bump the requirement to g++-4.7 instead of 4.6... building with clang requires 3.1, but that's okay since gcc is fine for ordinary users to build with.


My S-Expression language is not going so well ... I can't figure out how to implement macros the way I want. And I need macros in order to implement things like local variables. I think I'll actually ditch the python approach - the parser works well enough, so if you want to script in *python* you can just use the python methods.

I'll just write the final interpreter in C++ (and save myself millions of type-safety assumptions that are hard in Python. Do I interpet "physical" expressions (limited to 4 types) or script-level ones (unlimited types, but possibly necessary to make macro expansion work properly, e.g. with (get-unique-token) and in the 'break' macro)).

I've also decided that named arguments are an important option and should possibly be used nearly universally. I'll use (name: value) syntax for that, and transform it to an index at "compile"-time. The "function" and "macro" builtins need to accept duplicates (for 'let') but I don't see any reason for user functions to.

I've also decided to finish writing builtin functions and macros (which are almost indistinguishable - how would you categorize 'if' ?) before deciding on the syntax of user-defined functions. It basically comes down to a question of how many types I can deduce, and whose problem is the mutable-ref vs const-ref vs copy problem (is 'ref' a builtin function or a type?). And that's *without* directly reading/writing fields of C++ classes (although I think it will be easy if I get refs working - it just needs to export 'get' and 'set', which can be done as a templated subclass that holds a pointer-to-member. Of course, that requires that the containing class be representable as a script object. Hm, smart pointers don't supply ->*).

Things like instances are trivial in comparison.

Note that, despite all potential improvements, it *still* won't be completely safe to have more than one script running on the same user during suspend or event operations.


Also, since finals are next week and I only have one class over the summer, I'll finally have some actual free time to do all this.

Cool toys I'm not playing with for the foreseeable future: PostgreSQL (should be relatively easy), LLVM (it doesn't seem intended for embedding - it's uncountably hard to interact with opaque C++ objects, and nontrivial to implement CPS).

[Jenalya]

In the past month there happened some small fixes on maps, scripts and xml.
Inspired by the discussion about when and why new players stop playing I did some small modifications in the tutorial. The NPCs give rather clear directions of who to talk to next and Sorfina heals players who are still doing the tutorial.

Millarca did some great progress on the barbarian village tileset.

Chicka-Maria started on creating NPC avatars for a new approach to the dialogue window.

I was working on modifying the cave map near the theater for some follow-up quest of the Orum quest. The changed maps are already on the testserver. This quest is planned to be used to introduce several new spells, especially for followers of the dark path.
Mistergrey is working on those spells and on getting familiar with the spell scripting language. (Since we don't have an active dev who's familiar with the scripting language, this is a tricky task.)

During July I'll mainly focus on contributing to an entry for the Liberated Pixel Cup together with some tmw/mana developers. We're going to use the mana server and client, so in my opinion this is a great opportunity to see what progress has happened on manaserv.

[Jenalya]

The Liberated Pixel Cup is over and tmw is getting more attention again. Though the game created during the LPC continues as Source of Tales.

As for tmw, we're planning to have a content release sometime later this week if possible. Before we can do that, we'd like to have some final testing of the things that are planned to be released:

- tux9th's PvP Event below Hurnscald
- the Fine Dress Quest, conceived by Chicka-Maria and scripted by v0id
- an update of the Candor announcements to (5, 10, 15) minutes instead of (5, 15, 30) done by Chicka-Maria
- some maps tux9th is working on

I'm currently working on a follow-up quest of the Candle Helmet quest, which will require the maps from tuX9th, but this quest isn't ready yet.

[tux9th]

Dear Mana-Community

Yesterday the server was updated with the new content. Most of these updates are bug fixes but we also included some new maps, a new quest and a new item.

New Maps
I am currently working on an extension of Argaes. The first three maps of this extension have been added. The maps connect to the map where Sagatha is and the one above her where the woodland labyrinth is.
Jenalya mentioned these maps in her previous post as being part of her new quest. The quest has not been released yet and it will still take quite some work until it is finished. However we wanted to include the new maps.

Quest
We also added a new DailyQuest. The quest NPC is on one of the new maps. Go and look for him =). He is the brother of Arkim and he is also kind of strange.

Item
V0id was so kind as to rewrite the crafting logic of our smith apprentice Peter also adding Warlord boots. (I guess Nard will update the Wiki very soon )
The graphics for this item were done by Dude and Ali-G if I recall correctly.

Ongoing Projects
Currently there is a lot of developing going on.
As all of you know V0id is working on his Illia Quest. Please do not forget to check it out and comment in this topic
TEST: Illia Quest

Jenalya started early to be sure to complete a new and stunning event for Christmas. That is why her other projects are currently on hold.

Chicka-Maria is currently working on a very big project involving the development of a whole new area. It will include new quests, maps and new items. Spoiler alert the items have something to do with snakes!
She currently needs help with graphics as Skipy is away. Check this topic out

That's it for this time. Hope you enjoy the new content

greets tuX

[Nard]

Creating this Topic was really a nice Idea. and a great communication tool to outside Mana/TMW.
In the same order of idea I suggest a yearly summary wich could be on the wiki. (yes I know, I ask extra job, sorry for that).
Source forge notes: Would it be possible that the Sourceforge is updated from the notes.txt instead of the opposite ? It could make the maintenance easier.

[Jenalya]

We're going to have a release very soon, probably today or tomorrow. Beside of some several fixes it'll bring in some new seasonal content.

Unfortunately the original Halloween event we planned didn't get finished due to some unexpected real life things the scripter had to pay attention to.
To compensate a bit for this, V0id created an after-halloween quest which will be redoable every year from november 4th to 25th. Nami created a new icon for an item used in this quest.

[Jenalya]

Today we had a content release which brought in a huge amount of small fixes and changes, also removing the Christmas event.

The fixes include the reported spelling and map errors.
I also did some reorganization of player variables, due to the risk of reaching the maximum sometime soon. One of the changes this brought is that the Cave Snake Lantern quest is now a Daily quest. Most other work on this shouldn't be visible ingame, but only in the scripts and the save files.
There was also some restructuring of global variables, since the save file containing them is written by the map-server, and there's a chance that this was the source of the lag, or at least contributed to it. If you see differences in the lag, please report about that in this topic: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... =4&t=16954
Another change are the Ragged Shorts, which are given to new characters in the tutorial from now on, based on the feedback from this topic: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... =4&t=16911

[edit by o11c] Additionally, the way of generating the news feed changed, and now the main page uses the same data as the in-game news.

[Jenalya]

This weekend we're temporarily doubling both the experience rate and the drop rates for all monsters, to give the chance to recover from the rollback we had due to filesystem corruption.

There are also some bug fixes and new content:
Most notably are the changes on Tulimshar done by wushin, paving the roads and moving the craftsmen to the new forge at the northern market. Thanks to Nard, Hetchel finally came back from her vacation and is offering her services in silk weaving there, too.
Also tux9th modified the Evil Obelisk to offer much more affordable spawns.

On the technical side, there are some changes from o11c so in case of network congestion, you will no longer be kicked with an invalid packet error.

Thanks to everyone who helped by reporting bugs and those who fixed them.
Enjoy the weekend.

[Jenalya]

We're having a content release today.

The most noticable change is wushin's rework of the desert caves with the new cave tileset and the addition of sewers below Tulimshar. That involved several changes on the Tulimshar Mining Camp, and Malivox moved to a house south of Tulimshar.

Nivalis is now connected by ferry, and Dyrin changed the warp location for Kaizei to be near the Blue Sages Mansion.

The Hitchhiker towels are now disabled in Candor and Cindy's cave, to prevent issues as reported here: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 76#p135576

As usual there are also a lot of smaller fixes and changes on maps, spelling, scripting, ... Thanks to everyone who reported issues and helped to fix these things!