The Goal has always been the same;
The Mana World (TMW) is a serious effort to create an innovative free and open source MMORPG.
The "How" is the only thing that has ever changed as TMW stayed "Open Source", "Massive", "Multi-player", "On-Line", "Role-Playing" & "Game" the whole time.
The "How" is the development, which like any project, mutates and creeps based on the composition of the team. Team composition is normally chosen by what ever structure leads the project, whether a sole individual or a group of people. If you walk back through TMW you can see the effects team composition and governance has had on TMW. The forks, the hats, the players, the events, the rares, the leaders, the conflicts, etc. All effected by how everyone worked together.
There are plenty of problems that plague this project and it's forks. All of them started here with us. We have to accept none of us can be great, if these problems still exist. We all know what we could do (See Wesnoth) but something happened along the way. All of our failures are in this project, but so are all our successes.
TMW has it's moments of clarity in-game (Illia) and co-operation among projects (The ArmedToDie Incident) when the "How" is clearly defined. We've been trying to find our "How" as we are left with what was created, abandoned, perfected and changed. No one of us has ever done anything like a group or all of us. A plethora of the changes in game are from forks. More changes are being worked on as we speak.
TMW is like a top. If you leave it alone it falls. If you touch it to fast, hard, or to much it falls. TMW gets trapped between "Change Everything" and "Everything stays the same".
As Len Said,
... the pre-alpha community grew overly attached to a game that was never intended to reflect the finished product.
As o11c Said,
... even if we throw away the entire world, we will still be keeping a lot of the internal content.
As meway Said,
I'm saying we need more than one content director and not just for a second opinion.
As veryape Said,
... everyone has their own goals, the project as a whole has all those goals as goals in some way.
There are many brilliant & talented individuals involved with this project. The capability of the individuals involved has never been a problem. Finding a way of getting them to work together consistently has. Even getting people to argue effectively is hard.
When I first joined the project the GHP was migrating to the TMWC. I witnessed the ensuing fallout. Over time I watched lots of people come and go. The forums contain numerous "Good Bye" and "TMW is dead" threads from the past decade. These unplanned departures can hurt development. Often materials related to their work gets lost or orphaned. For Example:
Thread of Forgotten Content
The current TMWC inherited all of TMW, the history, the drama, the problems, etc. Ever increasing with the passage of time. The scope of TMW is huge. Over time, TMW became a World and forks matured.
Content's Goals after the "Primary Directive"
- * Make TMW Consistent & Extensible & Easy-to-develop
* Recruit More Help
Make TMW Consistent & Extensible & Easy-to-develop
The Goal here is to shift content to a state where we don't need to constantly bug an artist for something to be slightly altered or added in some way. Such as; New Npcs, New color for an item, "what color purple palette is good?" etc. TMW needs to make it far easier for anyone to help out. Finding ways or people who can complete a task whether it's administrative, judicial, legislative, art, design, etc.
The Sprite 1.5 & Npc's as Dolls projects are complete. NPC's are way more consistent looking. NPC's & Humanoid mobs are easier to make. Mobile NPC's could be possible. We also enforce sanity checks on server and client data so everything is properly formed. If you look on github you'll notice client-data has travis now. the server-data does it's own debug on start-up which I imagine will make travis one day.
All of this work allowed us to work on changing the Head Style to add more races/species. The Manaplus Palette system will also be slowly introduced during this time as well. The palette system simplifies the dye system so "purple" can always be the same color of purple you want. You can also change an item's color based on other attributes as well.
The current tilesets/tiles work but are not really that consistent. Slowly but surely I've been working on a number of sets currently on the forums. They are meant to remap the current world entirely on new maps. I'm not throwing any content away. The current world maps are partly slapped in and others contrary to any world map anyone ever drew.
We've fixed and added more global functions to the server-data as a whole meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the script code; Unequip, Ammo Types, Magic Wand, NPC Range to Player, etc. Slowly a framework is developing built on a couple years of solid functions and quests.
Recruit More Help
Making the environment open to change and easy to develop should encourage the community to develop the game for us.
How To Develop
"The Vision" is what is in game minus what enough of us don't like about it enough to change.The secret to getting all the important stuff done is doing nothing.
That's all well and good, but when I joined the project at a time when the promise was (and what we were supposedly building towards was) to create a 2D MMORPG with a similar play-style to SOM. My personal vision was to undo some of the "haphazard and disjointed" aspects of TMW, and to see the original promise made real. I (and I'm certain many others) contributed to that end, was it all for nothing?
