The Mana World Forums

I've noticed that a few people, trying to test out their home-made maps, have had to replace one of the existing maps in order to test out their map, and ran into some slight difficulties involving monsters. To fix this problem, might I suggest the addition of one or more "Dummy" maps to the server? These dummy maps would allow the map developers to test out their maps without having to replace a map already being used in the game.

Or someone could implement this feature request:
http://mantis.themanaworld.org/view.php?id=36

I've been thinking about implement a map testing program in Java (I already have a lot of the code for it) as part of a general suite of utilities for TMW (and other games that use similar resource formats).

Using the original TMW engine for testing maps would not only be a much more authentic test environment but would also require much less work considering all the stuff you would have to reimplement to test maps properly (tile engine, particle effects, overlays, minimap, background music... not mentioning all the planed engine features you would have to add when they are implemented one day like animated tiles, ambient sounds, background image and what not)

But when you are a Java programmer and interested in helping TMW I would suggest you to help Bjørn Lindeijer with the development of Tiled.

The map tester would've been much later any ways. More mundane things (like a generator for the XML files) are in the more immediate future.