The Mana World Forums

As of April 16th, 2014, the Mana client is no longer supported by The Mana World

If you would like to continue to play The Mana World, please update to manaplus.

New packages for the new client:
- Manaplus http://manaplus.org/
- Also available via TMW downloads https://www.themanaworld.org/downloads.php

New sources for game and client:
- Game: https://github.com/themanaworld
- Client: https://gitorious.org/manaplus

Support: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#themanaworld

WTF, why? TMW does not work anymore with its original client?

No one made any effort to maintain it. Even Source of Tales has abandoned mana. The limited development resources of the project makes it too hard to maintain all the various different sources among the active programmers of which for the past 2 years has been only been 1. 4144 stepped up with manaplus and has been more then willing to work on new and old features, bugs & requests. The differences in development ideologies & server goals also hampered progress on both sides of the mana client, manaserv & TMWA.

No one still has made an effort to maintain mana/manaserv. I didn't even know about SoT & manaserv till I was developing for TMW. IMO, the death knell for mana/manaserv was not porting the current game/player base towards it. None of the external web data was kept up to date (sites, links in, etc.). I've already told Ablu and Bjorn a number of times TMW is just eating the traffic. Lack of visibility is what killed Mana long before I came here.

wushin wrote: No one still has made an effort to maintain mana/manaserv. I didn't even know about SoT & manaserv till I was developing for TMW. IMO, the death knell for mana/manaserv was not porting the current game/player base towards it. None of the external web data was kept up to date (sites, links in, etc.). I've already told Ablu and Bjorn a number of times TMW is just eating the traffic. Lack of visibility is what killed Mana long before I came here.

I still do not get what you tried to tell us with this external web data that is out of date? And I also do not get what traffic TMW is eating. Also the mana server is still maintained and we work on it.

But we are no longer going to update the old SDL client since it is not worth the effort to make that client an actual gaming client.
Thats why we made a new client on the base of Qt. That client is more a QML library so anybody can build their own client on top of it very easily.

For our reference client check out the source of tales client: https://github.com/tales/tales-client (Screenshots: http://www.sourceoftales.org/screenshots.html).

About porting the data: I have multiple time offered my help to port TMW data to it. But TMW does not wanted this apparently. So it is more that you do not want to use the mana server but prefer to stick with tmwa. This does not mean that we no longer work on manaserv. We built Source of Tales as an demo for the server and at least I would still like to push Source of Tales to more content (we have a more than decent start).

We just have a different view of an game apparently. But if you think something is wrong with our "external web data" please file a bug for that. I could not get any clue from what you tried to tell me on irc.

Regards,
Ablu

Ablu wrote: But we are no longer going to update the old SDL client since it is not worth the effort to make that client an actual gaming client.
Thats why we made a new client on the base of Qt. That client is more a QML library so anybody can build their own client on top of it very easily.

Like I said earlier, neither supports it. So:

1) Player gets mana
2) Player finds servers
3) Player sees errors
4) Player makes Choice
4a) Player Quits w/o looking for help (Traffic Problem #1)
4b) Player looks for help
5) If not Quit, Player is looking
6) Player hits support
6a) Player installs manaplus & plays TMW (Traffic Problem #2)
6b) Player installs SoT client & plays SoT

Traffic Problem #1:
Due to neither server supporting mana as official, it creates support issues for both sides. Specially when people who might have become players quit because the client is wonky.

Traffic Problem #2:
As I said in IRC when a player comes looking for help they often find Manaplus & TMW first due to web searches and content. The Forums, Development on github, etc. all look more active and recent than mana/manaserv. Therefore 6a happens far more often than 6b.

Which is why I suggested to Ablu that manasource.org and things pertaining to mana start being migrated to SoT. Including using their forums, wiki, etc. I would like to see more of us using our active clients with our active servers. Trying to maintain unity went out the door at the Evol, Manaserv & TMWA split.

Forks aren't Bad. In order for a species to adapt, it must mutate. Some mutate in isolation, others mutate in congregations. There is room for all of us on this great Earth. Each of the projects is special in it's own way. It's also the differences among us that make us stronger together.

In order for "Open Source MMORPG Engine/Client/Game" to be a "Thing", it has to be a Genre.
We have to make MMORPG Games/Clients/Contents so anyone and everyone can run/play Open Source MMORPGs.

manasource.org does not explicitly mention any game.

Also manasource is not going to be migrated to Source of Tales since the Mana Server and our Client library are not supposed to be a single game but more a foundation to build games on. So ideally we would somewhen only distribute server binaries and no clients.

As of advertising Source of Tales. We are not ready to advertise it yet. It has a decent start. But for example the client still needs a bit of UI to slowly start releasing it "officially". If we release now we just ruin the first impression. And you never get a second first impression.

Other than that. Our website is available on git (https://github.com/mana/manasource-website). If something is too TMW specific there to your feel free to submit a pull request on github.

Regards,
Ablu

As of 21th of August 2025, the Mana client works again with The Mana World! Check out the Mana 0.7 release at https://manasource.org/news/2025/08/21/ ... eased.html

This project started early last year. It took a lot of time, but I don't regret it for a second. I hope others will like it too, and maybe some who'd like to contribute as well?