Few questions

[crzyone9584]

First I'd like to apologize if this is in the wrong section.

I have a few questions. I've been lurking around the Mana source for a while and finally decided to download it and see what I can do.

1. I noticed that the clients i have downloaded allow you to pick which server you want to log into. Is there a way to disable that feature and only allow my custom client to connect to my server I'm hosting?

2. Is it possible to change the sprite layout. I'm not familiar with how the engine is setup for sprites. I'm sure it will be a lot of work to do this. Is there a decent place on the web that has a decent amount of free sprites in the way the engine uses them? I'm use to 32x32 sprites like RPG Maker VX or RpgMaker XP sprite formats.

3. I haven't read the license the source code comes with as of yet. I haven't gotten that far yet. What is your views of fan based games. I don't want to give the open source engine you are all providing a bad name by going against what you guys believe in.

4. Can i compile the client on windows but still be able to use it on Linux and Mac?

5. I've never used github. I'm usually svn for source control. If i edit a file and you release a big update for the client or server and i clone the git repository will it over write my changes or is it like svn where it will only over write the portions of the files that need to be updated?

6. Which server is better as of right now? ManaServ or the tmwAthena?

[Crush]

Hell crzyone9584

Welcome to the Manasource game developer community.

1. I noticed that the clients i have downloaded allow you to pick which server you want to log into. Is there a way to disable that feature and only allow my custom client to connect to my server I'm hosting?

Sure you can. You can define a branding file (an xml file with the extension .mana) without an online server list and only with a default server. Then the server selection will be skipped. The branding files can also be used to change some other things like application name or login wallpaper which were usually the only thing many TMW forks used to change. An example branding file is shipped with the client and stored in data/branding/tmw.mana. The branding file to use can be defined as a command line argument in the application shortcut you ship with your installer.

2. Is it possible to change the sprite layout. I'm not familiar with how the engine is setup for sprites. I'm sure it will be a lot of work to do this. Is there a decent place on the web that has a decent amount of free sprites in the way the engine uses them? I'm use to 32x32 sprites like RPG Maker VX or RpgMaker XP sprite formats.

The layout of every spriteset is defined in an xml file which accompanies it. The format is documented here: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Animations

3. I haven't read the license the source code comes with as of yet. I haven't gotten that far yet. What is your views of fan based games. I don't want to give the open source engine you are all providing a bad name by going against what you guys believe in.

The license is the GNU General Public License. When we wouldn't want people to use it as a basis for their own projects, we wouldn't have used it. When you make changes to the software and distribute it, you also have to distribute the modified sourcecode and allow others to use your changes in their own projects. That way it is guaranteed that all Mana forks collaborate with each other.

We would like to encourage you to submit your changes as patches to the main project when you implement features or do bugfixes which would also be useful for other servers. You will also benefit from that, because the less your codebase diverges from the mainline the less headache will you get with future updates.

4. Can i compile the client on windows but still be able to use it on Linux and Mac?

The client needs to be compiled separately for each platform, unless your users are willing to use emulation.

5. I've never used github. I'm usually svn for source control. If i edit a file and you release a big update for the client or server and i clone the git repository will it over write my changes or is it like svn where it will only over write the portions of the files that need to be updated?

Git handles branching and merges even better than SVN does. Here is a video presentation about it from Linus Torvalds which describes its advantages over CVS and SVN pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

6. Which server is better as of right now? ManaServ or the tmwAthena?

When you want your game to run in a few days, tmwAthena would be the better choice. ManaServ is not yet stabel enough for production use. But in the long run ManaServ will be a much more flexible platform. So when you are thinking ahead in years and not weeks, you should use ManaServ.

[crzyone9584]

Thanks for the answers. I kinda don't want to let out all of my edits so this open source engine is not for me. Thanks for all the answers.