[INFO] What is TMW Classic?

Content and general development discussion, including quest scripts and server code. TMW Classic is a project comprising the Legacy tmwAthena server & the designated improved engine server based on evolHercules.


Forum rules

This forum houses many years of development, tracing back to some of the earliest posts that exist on the board.

Its current use is for the continued development of the server and game it has always served: TMW Classic.

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WildX
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[INFO] What is TMW Classic?

Post by WildX »

What is it?
TMW Classic is a game by The Mana World, a game development organisation and Open-Source game publisher. The game comprises various releases of content by several generations of developers beginning in 2004 and continuing... we hope forever! (Why not?)

What does it mean?
The Mana World has a long history and most of it has been based around the 2004 tmwAthena server. It is now commonly referred to as the Legacy server or TMW Legacy. Throughout the years the plans for this server changed many times, as different generations of developers changed course from no longer supporting development on it due to its age and its serious technical faults to eventually restarting development due to player demand.

The main problem all devs encountered was that any new servers would take too long to finish and players wanted to continue playing the game they had always known without having to fear a forced migration to some different version. And, with an active community, publishing content to Legacy became more rewarding than working on new projects as the results could be enjoyed much more quickly by real players.

This all led to the creation of the TMW Classic project. Classic guarantees that development for tmwAthena/Legacy can continue while also working on a lossless migration to a better engine called evolHercules. The aim of TMW Classic is to seamlessly continue the 2004 project which remained popular with its longstanding community and playerbase for over 18 years on a more operable server engine with zero loss for players.

Server history

eAthena Wiki wrote:

Athena (commonly called jAthena, short for Japanese Athena, by non-Japanese speakers) was a Ragnarok Online game server emulation project that was started in late 2002. It was created because around this time, the official free-to-play Ragnarok Online servers exited the open-beta phase and became pay-to-play, and many players either did not want to or could not pay to play the game.

eAthena was initially born as AppleMod in late 2003, an English translation of Athena by a developer that went by the handle AppleGirl. AppleMod eventually forked from Athena and was renamed to eAthena in early 2004.

tmwAthena is in turn a modified server engine based on eAthena which was created in 2004 by ElvenProgrammer as the base for The Mana World.

evolHercules is a modified version of the Hercules server engine, itself a modification of eAthena. evolHercules was started by the Evol Online project in 2013 to allow for a wider range of features that tmwAthena could not support. It has then evolved into the new server engine for TMW Classic.

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