The Mana World Forums

The programmers currently working on TMW server are focussed on the Linux platform.

If the TMW-Athena server is to continue to be supported on Windows (currently it can be compiled and run in Cygwin), then we need help.

The best way to get involved is to log on to FreeNode IRC and join channel #tmwa.
The current version of source code is available at https://github.com/themanaworld/tmwa
The next version, which is under development, is available at https://github.com/themanaworld/tmwa/tree/test/

Note that this is only about whether Windows will be usable to run the TMW server. We'll continue to support the clients that people use to play on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

I'd just like to reiterate, more people working on the code is needed, or we can't keep supporting other platforms like Windows. Someone willing to keep it working on Windows is needed for it to continue to be available there.

Anyone working on this will need to be very familiar with:

• Asynchronous I/O
• File change notification.
• Synchronous signal handling.
• Lots of stuff I can't remember.

For the problems listed, perhaps an abstraction layer such as [libevent] or [libuv] would help?

It's worth pointing out that tmwAthena has come a long way from the nightmare it once was. For a long time, it would only work when built for 32-bit linux, and almost all of the comments were in poorly re-encoded japanese. It now works for 64 bit as well, and even appears to work under cygwin. Most of the obscene thousand-line switch statements have gone, and the japanese comments have had their encoding fixed, too.

Despite how far things have come, I'm not sure official ongoing tmwAthena windows support is going to be a thing at this point. The only thing that has sort-of worked was cygwin, and support for that was very much on a best-effort basis. Still, working that close to the system seems overkill, anyway. Using a suitable library for abstraction should simplify matters, and perhaps keep things relatively cross-platform as well.


---Freeyorp

libevent forces pthreads, which slows down stuff in libc. But libuv looks promising.

That said, I've come up with specs for how the system should look, and I don't know how much effort would be required to use libuv.