The Mana World Forums

I would like to ask if you know other amateur MMORPG projects that can be compared to TMW that could be a source of inspiration or could work as a standard we have to reach and exceed.

The only one i know is illutia.
http://www.illutia.com/

The client software is far inferior to ours from the technical point of view. And we are still pre alpha while they seem to call it a late beta version. But please notice that they are using a custom clothes system like we want to. It could maybe serve as a (maybe bad) example for this part of our software.

The graphic is horrible but i have to admit that it is not much worse than many of the old graphics we are still using. but we should surpass it by far during the next releases.

The contend is much further developed than ours. This is an area where we could learn something from illutia.


Another game that i just found is Terraworld Online.
http://www.terraworldonline.net/index.php
Something Awful gave it a devastating review but that doesn't mean much because SA reviews are almost always devastating.

i'm going to check it out and give you a report later.

wish they were for mac but i think ours wins

About Terraworld:

They are aiming much lower then us from the technical point of view. they don't even got scrolling (one map per screen) and the enemies don't even seem to have route finding. they seem to move completely random.

although there are some tiles that look almost ok most tiles are quick hack jobs. the size relations are wrong everywhere and nothing fits together very well. the sprite art is very poor, too. But they got a cloth system.

But the mappers are doing the best they can with the limited posibilities they got. there are quite a lot of maps.

About the gameplay: they got a levelless learning by doing system like we are planning. i haven't played very long but it doesn't seem to be that exciting to me. there don't seem to be many posibilities to influence the playing style of your character.

harvesting and crafting is boring and repetive as hell.

whoever is going to conceptualize the new stat system for tmw: he should play THIS game to see how to NOT make it.

i know two similar games.

Mystera Legends:
http://www.mysteralegends.com/rpgbeta/index.php
I played it about 2 years ago. Realy nice game with day/night changes and good ideas. For example a "Newbe Forest" for players lvl<10, player can buy houses, large world, dungeon with cool random mazes (i can describe the system if you want), the size and style of all maps completly fits together, you can cook meat on fireplaces to get more recovery, fishing , magic spells, you can wear costumes (but i cant remember if there is visable equipment), interesting PvP System (already described in our PvP Thread).
Its closed source and the development was closed too. - But there are many custom servers.
EDIT: its better not visiting the ML Forums... I didnt get the content of the topics because i only see very big bothering signatures in it

Shattered Earth
http://www.shatteredearth.net
Final Fantasy 3 Style game i've played 3 years ago. As far as i know the server is down because thery are working on the game again. Its also closed source. I think its no inspiration except a wordmap like in FF3.

About Mystera Legends:

The graphic engine is similar to the Terraworld engine with one screen maps. But it is a little bit superior to it.

Interesting: they are using 16x16 tilesets and scale them up to 32x32 (double pixels). i dont know if they are doing so because they want to reassemble the low res look of old rpgs or if they are just too lazy/unskilled to make high res tiles.

whats strange: the sprites are using a full resolution. They are very small but they don't look that bad as long as they don't move. the walk animations are just 2 phases and look quite choppy.

the maps look very tiled. the typical problem when using one tile wide trees. although there are quite a lot of maps.

About char customisation: Wow, 90 different hairstyles. When Modanung or Kinetic need an inspiration for their hairsets they should take a look at this game. No visible equipment though.

The user interface is quite poor. many important functions like distribution of char stats or trading with NPCs can only be used with /commands.

The character system is a simple level and stat point system. nothing worth mentioning.


Conclusion

Good examples:
-hairstyles

Bad examples:
-user interface

Matt wrote:http://slothrpg.com/dev/

Do you feel like writing a little bit more about it? I would like to check it out myself but the server seems to be down.

How about stendhal

http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne ... e_stendhal

Crush wrote:

Matt wrote:http://slothrpg.com/dev/

Do you feel like writing a little bit more about it? I would like to check it out myself but the server seems to be down.

No.

http://happypenguin.org/show?Sloth%20Online%20RPG

Peacemaker wrote:i know two similar games.

Mystera Legends:
http://www.mysteralegends.com/rpgbeta/index.php
Realy nice game with day/night changes
(...)

You who played it, could describe how they do the day and night ambientation and changes?

Pajarico wrote:

Peacemaker wrote:i know two similar games.

Mystera Legends:
http://www.mysteralegends.com/rpgbeta/index.php
Realy nice game with day/night changes
(...)

You who played it, could describe how they do the day and night ambientation and changes?

As far as I'm able to remember, the changes were static (day, something between and night without fading). I'm no graphic artist but i see no duplicated tiles in the game folders. I think they only changed the sdl color palette?. For night/day changes check out the Screenshots (number 1,2,3.jpg) http://www.mysteralegends.com/rpgbeta/i ... creenshots

I forgot to mention... there was a small farming system, player were able to slide on ice-tiles (there was a area for a pvp sliding race too ), Screenshot 12 shows the place were you was able to drop and reorganise your inventroy.

It seems to me that they just apply a filter to the whole map, like more contrast or less bright or something like that... Screenshot 2 might look ok but Screenshot 0 could be confusing.

I finally managed to play Sloth. It is in a very early stage of development. there isn't much to see yet and there are a lot of problems that need to be taken care of. But nevertheless i think it might be the project that is most similar to tmw of all the games mentioned here. it got:

-platform independence
-a scrolling viewpoint
-pixel based movement (tmw doesn't have yet but we are planning to do so when we got the new server software)
-it plans to use an action oriented combat system like we are planing
-it is a GPL open source project (too bad that it is written in java. otherwise we could even borrow some sourcecode from it)

i would suggest to keep an eye on it. when it develops well and doesn't die so soon it might become THE reference for tmw in the future.

Crush wrote:i would suggest to keep an eye on it. when it develops well and doesn't die so soon it might become THE reference for tmw in the future.

Heh, let's hope TMW will be the reference for them

Indeed. BTW, why did you forget the TMW forks?

http://www.tos.new.fr/