Mana/TMW Development Weekly Summary

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- alastrim, o11c and I worked on the barbarian content, including some of the feedback we got from testers using the testserver.
- with help of some testers, pateame and I are working on rearranging the Yeti's stats.
- some testing of Kage's electricity battle cave were done and he did some adjustments on it.
- TheKandiman started to work through the NPC scripts to adapt them to our new scripting standard.
- some other fixes were done by Ali-G, o11c and me.

Beside of all this, there happened some brainstorming and discussions about some new quests, the rebalancing and, related to that, new skills and magic. Though this is still very early development.

Also, a big 'Thank you!' to all the testers. I'm very happy the testserver is used and we can use your feedback to improve the content.

[Bertram]

Hi all

- Manaserv:
This week, Ablu and me kept on working on some rough edge of the equipment code.

Ablu made a patch to fix items disapearing when the inventory was full, along with many additions to the scripting commands, and I started fixing the equipment slot display order, and the popup-menu. (Those two will be available in my fork soon.)

I also rewrote the way skills are loaded the last week so that work on the attack system will
happen any time soon.

- Dark Talisman: (I didn't forget about it, Ali-G )
To all devs reading this, I'd be glad when someone could test this patch and give some advice about it,
so we can finally take care of adding particle effect to equipment pieces.

- Covered hair:
Last but not least, client-wise, Jenalya convinced me to take care of the helmet covering hair problem (I swear there were no pink candies involved ),
and a solution should be found shortly. I'll have a look at 4144's solution to the problem (Yes, 4144, we need to talk ) and I'm also open for other suggestions, xml and code-wise.

See ya!

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- enchilado and o11c added the new pink haircolor.
- The Yetis now have back their previous difficulty.
- Ali-G finished two maps for a new quest which story is still in early development.
- I made Dyrins warp cost dependent on the level. Players with a level below 45 can now use his warps for half the price.
- alastrim and I worked on the barbarian content.
- o11c, alastrim and I searched for some bug in a script that caused a server crash.
- some tilesets were updated with impovements (Desert tree from Len and Snow rocks by hal9000)
- some minor fixes were done by o11c, Ali-G and me


Beside of that we're doing some clean-ups
- TheKandiman and Frost are working on giving all the NPC scripts a standardized format (replacing all tabs with spaces...).
- alastrim started to work through the scripts to set all local variables to zero before closing.
- Ali-G is looking through all maps for different aspects (names, layer names, warps ..) to give them a standardized format as well, with review and feedback from me.

This things will make the content more comfortable to work with and possible bugs are easier to find. Also new developers can learn better about how things work.

[Bertram]

Hi all,

This week,

Mana Client :
- Crush made a patch fixing the snails' slime trail. It will be available in the next client.
- I started working on fixing the hair-covered-by-helmet problem, opting for 4144 solution, which sounds very flexible to me.

Manaserv:
- Ablu kept bringing improvement to the scripting and chat commands.
- seeseekey joined the effort and provided an proposal to implement persistent floor items on map between two server restarts.
- I also kept working on the auto-attack system, doing concept mostly, to be sure I'm in the right direction before finishing it.

Note that many improvements that didn't make it yet to the official next client version are available in my clone, here (so you can try it out):
https://github.com/Bertram25/mana

I'm planning to bring an unofficial pre-release of the client based on my clone, so people can test it out and send me feedback. :3

Stay tuned!

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- TheKandiman and Frost finished the reformatting of all the NPC files according to our new guidelines
- Ali-G finished his map review with some feedback by me. Since he also did some changes on the warps to make the more accurate, it'd be good to have some people testing as many warps as possible on the testserver: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 13&t=14154
- o11c and I did some code clean-up in the tutorial NPCs
- Ali-G created some new indoor in Nivalis and I added a storage/banker there
- enchilado is working on getting the trousers to be ready for release
- some minor fixes were done by alastrim, o11c, Ali-G and me

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- Enchilado and I added the trousers.
- o11c improved a tool to make our dbs easier to read.
- I added some usual maggots to the tutorial area after I asked my cousin (who didn't know the game at all) to test the tutorial and watching him to fail again and again to beat the scorpion because he had only 3 vit.
- some minor fixes were done by alastrim, Ali-G, Frost and me.

Today we had a content update, the most remarkable things that changed are:
- storage/banker in Nivalis
- trousers
- some bugfix of two NPCs in Tulimshar which caused the client to hang
- Ali-G's map review

Also, o11c pushed some changes to the repository with the server sources:

o11c pushed a stable subset of his changes, fixing eathena-monitor (Note, the config file is missing though!) and removing the false dependency on zlib. The wiki has been updated with this information and with a workaround for if your version of make is less than 3.82

[Jenalya]

Since the last content update,

-Ali-G worked on fixing some problems on maps that got in during his review, especially about the broken warps. He also made good progress on writing more clear and descriptive commit messages, which makes it less time consuming for me to review.
- enchilado did some fixes on some graphics

Today's restart brought the map fixes in.

Besides that, there's something eerie going on behind the scenes...

[Jenalya]

In the past days,

- Ali-G did a lot small of fixes on maps and xml.
- A snow particle effect created by Dark_Mage got tested and is about to be added.
- I did some scripting on the barbarians and added a third part to the quest series.

Beside of that some planning and discussion was going on about how to expand the snow area and about Thermin.

[o11c]

Today I diagnosed a server bug that under some circumstances renders magic unusable every 50 days.

I pushed a workaround, so that logging out and logging in again will fix it immediately, instead of depending on the user remaining logged out for an unknown time. A real fix will have to wait for my full rewrite.

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- Lot's of fixes in client-data done by Ali-G were reviewed by me and pushed. Those were mainly map fixes (layer, collision and warps), but also some small fixes on some graphics and xml.
- The snow area extension is moving forward: Dark_Mages snow particle effect got added and Ali-G is preparing the mapping for that area.
- As suggested by o11c I added some small experience gain when an item is rejected to the Forrest Bow quest, Fur Gloves and Boots quest and the part of the Love Triangle quest when Golbenez asks for Jack-O-Souls.
- I also did some clean-up of the npc scripts in the gy inn reagarding the issue turning case insensitive variables into case sensitive and adaption to the scripting standards.

[Bertram]

Hi there,

Life has been crazy to me those times, hence I apologize for not writing here sooner.

Even though, I wanted to make everyone aware that the 0.5.3 version of the mana and the tmw clients have been packaged for windows; files that you can grab here:
http://dev.themanaworld.org/downloads/t ... -win32.exe
http://dev.themanaworld.org/downloads/m ... -win32.exe

Note that those two are candidate installers, so feel free to tell me whatever problem you find with those (when you're brave enough to try them ;]) and I shall correct the problem along the way.

Now that I've fixed (most of) my os cross-compilation packaging problems, I'll soon make a pre0.6 release, especially made for the content team, once I'll finished to add the fix to covered hair, and maybe one or two other smaller fixes along the way.

Regards,

[Jenalya]

In the last week, o11c and I were working on finishing the Halloween event.
The event is based on what was originally planned for last year, so the idea and a huge part of the scripting were done by enchilado last year.
o11c and alastrim worked on finishing it during the past weeks and I tested this week and suggested some changes.
Lizandra created some sweet icons for it short term, thanks for that.

Today there was a restart of the server to bring in
- the event, which will start on the 24th, so tomorrow
- lots of fixes in client-data, mainly map fixes
- Forrest Bow quest, Fur Gloves and Boots quest and the part of the Love Triangle quest when Golbenez asks for Jack-O-Souls now give some small experience reward if the item is rejected

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- a lot of activity happened on the pixelart side: we started to move Trello for organizing Art Development
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... =8&t=14927
Lizandra, salmondine, meway, Wombat, irukard and Ali-G worked on lots of graphics, some of them unfinished stuff from the forum, but also requests for Christmas.
- I'm working on the storyline for Christmas and started with the scripting
- some fixes and clean-ups on several things were done by o11c, Ali-G, meway and me

[Bertram]

Hi there,

What happened recently on the dev side of things:

Manaweb has seen many bug fixes, the use of a proper translation module, and progress on the setup.
Let's thank jurkan, seeseekey and cjwillcock for that.

Manaserv:
Bugfixes and some nice scripting commands have been added to the server
by many ones including Ablu, jurkan, Bjorn and me.

A special point to the addition of making floor items persistent between two server restart
thanks to seeseekey.

I'm glad to also say that the equipment-fix I made for manaserv is now officially merged back into the mainline.
This means that the equipment is now fully working for manaserv including those nice features:
- Dynamic equipment slot configuration which support up to 256 slots (if ever needed).
- Equipment of two one-handed or one two-handed weapons.
- Equipment items are stackable like any other item.

A lot of work I've made so far has been merged back into the mainline of development and I thank all the people
who took time to test it and review it, just like Ablu and o11c. Thanks guys.

As for what's currently coming, seeseekey and jurkan are working on making manaserv support the angel script language, so that scripters can take advantage of its class support, statical typing, ect...

As for content handling, I'm also happy to say that I'm almost done with a first version of a patch adding a sprite replacement option depending on what your character equipment is, so that famous bug: "hair pikes through the warrior helmet" is finally gone, for instance. Note that it may permit other needed changes and that functionality won't only limit itself to change the hair sprite layer but anything needed.

That's all for today!

'Til next time!

[Jenalya]

In this week,

- there was a lot going on in the graphics development: Lizandra, salmondine, Wombat and irukard are/were working on graphics for Christmas, Merlin on the tilesets for Thermin and Ali-G on different fixes of existing graphics.
- additional, irukard invited to a google+ hangout with the topic "Dev Meeting: Inkscape as perspective reference tool in pixelart" where he showed how to create a prototype for a graphic with Inkscape which then can be modified with other tools. It was very interesting and helps to share knowledge between the dev team members. It's planned to have this meetings regularly every weekend.
- Ali-G did some map fixes.
- I adapted Gwendolyn to our scripting standards and changed the amount of eggs needed in her quest, based on some feedback from o11c. Now more cave snake and snake eggs are needed, but less mountain and grass snake eggs, since those are hard to get at early levels.
- I was also working on the scripting for the Christmas event.
- The NPCs Rauk and Leofwin (shop in gy inn) had to be disabled due to an exploit of the iron potion crafting. o11c, Wombat, BigCrunch and I discussed about different possibilties to remove this exploit and the fix will get in with the next restart which is already requested and can happen anytime.
It'll include all the fixes and adjustments that happended since the last restart.