The Mana World Forums

Hello Denizens of The Mana World!

I'm the new guy who wrote the patch notes for the recent update. Bjorn suggested I post about what I've been doing, at least as a summary, so here it is.

Pictured: my character's quest log at the time of writing

I've been working on migrating a number of existing quest lines to the quest log, and you've probably seen a few appear, either completed or otherwise. Hopefully this will be useful for everyone!

My goal is to migrate as many quests as I can, but to do it correctly. That is to say, I want to preserve the dialog and behaviour as much as possible, without altering the intent of the original authors. There are a few caveats, such as when quests need a big refactor to function in the log (the "furquest", for instance, took a big effort and was broken into three distinct entries in the process), or quests that have glaring issues (Baktar used to request items even after "Warm Nostalgia" was completed, so I gave him a single line of dialog to show his satisfaction).

It's also not always clear when a quest will be easy to migrate, or will offer unexpected difficulties. An example would be the Katze quest, which functions perfectly fine and is quite small, but still poses a challenge because the quest log display depends on a singular variable, but the existing script uses multiple variables for intermediate states. In cases like these, it takes a bit of careful craftsmanship to maintain authorial intent.

We've been discussing some of this process on gitlab, and we've created a wiki page to to document the known information as it evolves. I'm happy to see some feedback and contributions, but one thing I've noticed is that there's nobody to keep the various wiki pages about each quest in line with the latest developments - so if anyone would be interested, that would be welcome

Comments and criticism are welcome, and I'd like to hear if there's certain quest migrations that people would like to see sooner rather than later.