The Mana World Forums

These last days wushin and I have had some great conversation about tmw and evol, but there's a point where I'm lost and where I want to have some other opinion, (the quote on the other thread made me think back about it).

wushin wrote:Not sure what the original goal was but at some point it became all about Forks and Hats.

What is the goal of tmw?
Is it still to do a MMO-Secret-Of-Mana-like? An open source MMO? A RPGMaker-like project?
It's understandable that the project evolved through these last years, but at the date of today, what is the purpose of tmw?

From what I could discern the pre-alpha community grew overly attached to a game that was never intended to reflect the finished product. Now the goal seems to be more administrative in nature (most of the infighting now a days tend to revolves around whose the administrator, and what GM is doing what), basically nobody wants to change the game in any fundamental way because they are happy just running what is already there. Basically the game became mostly about releasing hats periodically (because people are not wearing enough of them) to keep the few people who play happy.

Since I joined the project, my attachment to the "intended temporary server" has been entirely practical in nature: we had one choice that was workable and one choice that was vaporware. That was even ignoring the porting cost: even if we throw away the entire world, we will still be keeping a lot of the internal content.

As for the goal? I do want TMW to become the project that everybody seeks to fork, but I also want it to be something that makes forks *reliable*. I've made a lot of progress into making TMW packagable for distros - basically we're only missing a little config to turn http://updates.themanaworld.org/tmwa-nightlies/ into a deb repo, although we're still missing an init script (probably will be systemd only) and we still haven't hit the major "port the savefiles" milestone, which will be kind of interesting, but controllable as long as there aren't many forks at the time.

As far as the in-game content? I see a duality: we need to show what is possible, but not just minimal demos. I could probably write more about this but I don't feel like it right now.

From my point of view there is no set goal, everyone has their own goals, the project as a whole has all those goals as goals in some way.

The players goal is probably to have as fun as possible, the content deverlopers probably to make as good quests as possible, the art people to make as nice items as possible etc. I think it would be weird if we had a goal to become a clone of this or that game, then we restrict ourself to do what they have done in a way.

Different people are inspired of games they like/liked, if we can implement ideas from many different games hopefully we can become more rich and even better than the stuff that inspired us in the first time.

IMO we should not strive after being a cover band, we should strive at becoming the best band possible by combining what we find is good in a lot of other peoples work.

veryape wrote:From my point of view there is no set goal, everyone has their own goals, the project as a whole has all those goals as goals in some way.

The players goal is probably to have as fun as possible, the content deverlopers probably to make as good quests as possible, the art people to make as nice items as possible etc. I think it would be weird if we had a goal to become a clone of this or that game, then we restrict ourself to do what they have done in a way.

Different people are inspired of games they like/liked, if we can implement ideas from many different games hopefully we can become more rich and even better than the stuff that inspired us in the first time.

IMO we should not strive after being a cover band, we should strive at becoming the best band possible by combining what we find is good in a lot of other peoples work.

Design by committee is generally considered a terrible way to make something, as you tend to get a generic product. http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/de ... -committee

Its almost always better to have some unifying vision for what your going for, this doesn't mean we just become a clone of this or that game.

“The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.” - Tom Peterson

Len wrote:

veryape wrote:From my point of view there is no set goal, everyone has their own goals, the project as a whole has all those goals as goals in some way.

The players goal is probably to have as fun as possible, the content deverlopers probably to make as good quests as possible, the art people to make as nice items as possible etc. I think it would be weird if we had a goal to become a clone of this or that game, then we restrict ourself to do what they have done in a way.

Different people are inspired of games they like/liked, if we can implement ideas from many different games hopefully we can become more rich and even better than the stuff that inspired us in the first time.

IMO we should not strive after being a cover band, we should strive at becoming the best band possible by combining what we find is good in a lot of other peoples work.

Design by committee is generally considered a terrible way to make something, as you tend to get a generic product. http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/de ... -committee

Its almost always better to have some unifying vision for what your going for, this doesn't mean we just become a clone of this or that game.

“The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.” - Tom Peterson

Yes, but since we do not pay people to make things for the game, we will have to make do with what they want to contribute with. Ofcourse the the content lead works as a moderator and picks what (s)he thinks fit into the game. But we can only get thins into the game that someone wants to make. Everyone makes contribution that fits their vision of what the game should/could be.

“the content lead works as a moderator and picks what (s)he thinks fit into the game”

From what I’ve seen and experienced whenever anyone attempts to enforce standards, another developer will try to override them for fear they might scare away any contributors. Or they just use to an appeal to tradition argument (a logical fallacy), saying something akin to ‘we never enforced this or that before so why change ‘. Which is one of the many reasons why TMW hasn’t made the same strides as similar projects, such as Battle for Wesnoth.

What it comes down to is this. The mana world is suffering from an annoying amount of moderation and it drives our players and potential developers away. Sure some members are attached and possibly into sadism so they stick around but I have seen many great members just leave because they were simply fed up. If we don't lighten up a bit and start welcoming people and their ideas in this project without shoving a rule book down their throat than this project is going to continue to sit on pause for a very long time. Currently as a graphics artist I put my art on the forum so I can get valuable constructive criticism on my work. Once I feel that something is complete I than have to put it on Trello.com ( an entirely different website) and wait for it to be noticed. We have one content director and everything has to go through them. If we have one content director running the show than we are going to be running very slowly. The only thing that tmw has going for it is our system for GM's because they all have one goal and that's to enforce the rules and there are many GM's but they are all working to do the same thing. This is not the same for content development as the project stands. This is from my experience and I've been around for almost 7 years now. I'm not saying that our current content director is the problem. I'm saying we need more than one and not just for a second opinion. Be reasonable or fail that's what it comes down to.

Goal? I'm not sure there is one, or even needs to be one.

TMW has attracted many awesome developers and artists throughout the ages. These people work to move their personal vision for the game forward, then eventually wander off to other things. The goal of TMW is the sum of the goals of whoever's working on it at the time.

This leads to the game being somewhat haphazard and disjointed, but it seems to work. How old is TMW? And it's still getting updates and improvements! As long as we can be welcoming and attractive to the next generation of developers and artists, TMW will continue to evolve. If we start brickwalling and blocking them out, TMW will die.

ahh... MadCamel typed the words I couldn't find. I can just point at his post as I share his opinion.

MadCamel wrote:Goal? I'm not sure there is one, or even needs to be one.

TMW has attracted many awesome developers and artists throughout the ages. These people work to move their personal vision for the game forward, then eventually wander off to other things. The goal of TMW is the sum of the goals of whoever's working on it at the time.

This leads to the game being somewhat haphazard and disjointed, but it seems to work. How old is TMW? And it's still getting updates and improvements! As long as we can be welcoming and attractive to the next generation of developers and artists, TMW will continue to evolve. If we start brickwalling and blocking them out, TMW will die.

That's all well and good, but when I joined the project at a time when the promise was (and what we were supposedly building towards was) to create a 2D MMORPG with a similar play-style to SOM. My personal vision was to undo some of the "haphazard and disjointed" aspects of TMW, and to see the original promise made real. I (and I'm certain many others) contributed to that end, was it all for nothing?

I strongly disagree with the "we don't need a vision", I just haven't played enough old-style games to speak much about play style.

The Goal has always been the same;

The Mana World (TMW) is a serious effort to create an innovative free and open source MMORPG.

The "How" is the only thing that has ever changed as TMW stayed "Open Source", "Massive", "Multi-player", "On-Line", "Role-Playing" & "Game" the whole time.

The "How" is the development, which like any project, mutates and creeps based on the composition of the team. Team composition is normally chosen by what ever structure leads the project, whether a sole individual or a group of people. If you walk back through TMW you can see the effects team composition and governance has had on TMW. The forks, the hats, the players, the events, the rares, the leaders, the conflicts, etc. All effected by how everyone worked together.

There are plenty of problems that plague this project and it's forks. All of them started here with us. We have to accept none of us can be great, if these problems still exist. We all know what we could do (See Wesnoth) but something happened along the way. All of our failures are in this project, but so are all our successes.

TMW has it's moments of clarity in-game (Illia) and co-operation among projects (The ArmedToDie Incident) when the "How" is clearly defined. We've been trying to find our "How" as we are left with what was created, abandoned, perfected and changed. No one of us has ever done anything like a group or all of us. A plethora of the changes in game are from forks. More changes are being worked on as we speak.

TMW is like a top. If you leave it alone it falls. If you touch it to fast, hard, or to much it falls. TMW gets trapped between "Change Everything" and "Everything stays the same".

As Len Said,

... the pre-alpha community grew overly attached to a game that was never intended to reflect the finished product.

As o11c Said,

... even if we throw away the entire world, we will still be keeping a lot of the internal content.

As meway Said,

I'm saying we need more than one content director and not just for a second opinion.

As veryape Said,

... everyone has their own goals, the project as a whole has all those goals as goals in some way.

There are many brilliant & talented individuals involved with this project. The capability of the individuals involved has never been a problem. Finding a way of getting them to work together consistently has. Even getting people to argue effectively is hard.

When I first joined the project the GHP was migrating to the TMWC. I witnessed the ensuing fallout. Over time I watched lots of people come and go. The forums contain numerous "Good Bye" and "TMW is dead" threads from the past decade. These unplanned departures can hurt development. Often materials related to their work gets lost or orphaned. For Example: Thread of Forgotten Content

The current TMWC inherited all of TMW, the history, the drama, the problems, etc. Ever increasing with the passage of time. The scope of TMW is huge. Over time, TMW became a World and forks matured.

Content's Goals after the "Primary Directive"

• * Make TMW Consistent & Extensible & Easy-to-develop
  * Recruit More Help

Make TMW Consistent & Extensible & Easy-to-develop
The Goal here is to shift content to a state where we don't need to constantly bug an artist for something to be slightly altered or added in some way. Such as; New Npcs, New color for an item, "what color purple palette is good?" etc. TMW needs to make it far easier for anyone to help out. Finding ways or people who can complete a task whether it's administrative, judicial, legislative, art, design, etc.

The Sprite 1.5 & Npc's as Dolls projects are complete. NPC's are way more consistent looking. NPC's & Humanoid mobs are easier to make. Mobile NPC's could be possible. We also enforce sanity checks on server and client data so everything is properly formed. If you look on github you'll notice client-data has travis now. the server-data does it's own debug on start-up which I imagine will make travis one day.

All of this work allowed us to work on changing the Head Style to add more races/species. The Manaplus Palette system will also be slowly introduced during this time as well. The palette system simplifies the dye system so "purple" can always be the same color of purple you want. You can also change an item's color based on other attributes as well.

The current tilesets/tiles work but are not really that consistent. Slowly but surely I've been working on a number of sets currently on the forums. They are meant to remap the current world entirely on new maps. I'm not throwing any content away. The current world maps are partly slapped in and others contrary to any world map anyone ever drew.

We've fixed and added more global functions to the server-data as a whole meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the script code; Unequip, Ammo Types, Magic Wand, NPC Range to Player, etc. Slowly a framework is developing built on a couple years of solid functions and quests.

Recruit More Help
Making the environment open to change and easy to develop should encourage the community to develop the game for us. How To Develop

"The Vision" is what is in game minus what enough of us don't like about it enough to change.

Why Secret of Mana btw?
I totally love SoM and played it countless times (even played Hard-SoM and helped with the german translation of SoM2), but TMW is nowhere near SoM.
That's not even about the content itself, the game style, battle system, magic system, nearly everything is so different from SoM.
As far as I can see that's a pretty obsolete goal.

Len wrote:I (and I'm certain many others) contributed to that end, was it all for nothing?

Do you really feel so?
IMO every contributor can be proud of himself/herself to have made many people happy playing a nice "old school" 2D MMORPG, TMW, regardless of whether it's SoM-like or not.

Cassy wrote:Why Secret of Mana btw?
I totally love SoM and played it countless times (even played Hard-SoM and helped with the german translation of SoM2), but TMW is nowhere near SoM.
That's not even about the content itself, the game style, battle system, magic system, nearly everything is so different from SoM.
As far as I can see that's a pretty obsolete goal.

The gameplay of TMW is actually based on Ragnarok Online, because it uses a server software made for that game. In the earliest days of the project, the idea was to hack eAthena to make it support such a gameplay, but that plan was soon given up, because it just wasn't designed for doing that. So they (still before my time) decided to keep eAthena as a temporary test server for content development.

We developed Manaserv in parallel which was supposed to have more action-oriented gameplay. I did quite a lot of work to make it more SoM-like and got quite far. I had targetless combat, area damage, pushback and stun working pretty well. But then I got a job and had no more time to maintain that branch. Other people took over development and developed Manaserv in an entirely different direction.

That's the problem of TMW: No constant development team and no product owner with a consistent vision. Each generation of developers has their own idea and carries the project into a different direction. That's why I decided to quit TMW development and start my own project. I have my goal, and nobody argues with me about where the project is going, nobody demanding creative influence, no drama. I can just develop what I feel like. And should I ever decide that I need help, I will form a company, hire people to do it for me exactly the way I want it to be done and start monetizing my game.