The Mana World Classic – Open-Source MMORPG | Hacker News Reader

The Mana World Classic – Open-Source MMORPG

classic.themanaworld.org

95 pointsddl23 comments

I had my first negative experience contributing to open source with Mana World.

I thought that there were too few quests, so I wanted to add some. I was struggling compile code or getting the server to run or something like that. When I asked for help in the forum, I got a rude response mocking my technical abilities. It was completely demoralising and I stopped trying to make more quests.

For years, that was my last experience with contributing to open source.

hurt people hurt people. destruction is linear but fast. creation is slow but exponential.

I hope you found a better culture by now! It makes all the difference. I used to hate trolls but now I just empathize and pity them.

Interesting I always viewed it as creation is sigmoidal and destruction is superexponential.

I had similar experience with TMW. Tried to contribute with a new system in the game, made proposals and first draft implementation. I had 10 years of professional AAA gamedev at the time... I was mocked and kinda bullied.

Never looked back to this project, but explains why this project is basically stuck at the same place as before.

In any case, I didn't let this bad experience affect my passion for foss and I continued contributing to more welcoming and successful projects.

Did you find any games to contribute to?

Not really. Hard to find any decent open source game unfortunately, but also lost interest in using my day job also as a hobby and focused on other kind of software to help when possible.

If you wanna give it a another shot and you like Zelda, check out my profile. We'll be kinder.

No OP but I enjoyed contributing to Minetest!

Welp, glad I didn't go through with trying to contribute to TMW. That's disappointing to hear. I've had a much better experience trying to build my own MMO engine instead.

my first open source experience was thinking i knew better than the mana world devs about something and just screwing things up. i dont blame them for being standoff-ish as the internet is full of teens who got up one day and said "i could build my own MMORPG. how hard could it be?"

i have my own reasons for avoiding open source (ask me about them!) but i hope your experiences got better

In a similar vein, see Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free and open-source roguelike that's been continuously developed by volunteers for 20 years: http://crawl.develz.org/

Highly recommended. The developers put a lot of work into quality of life changes, so for instance, you can search for any item you've seen and travel directly to it even across levels, hit a key to explore unexplored parts of the current level, set exclusions so that those explorations don't wander near an extremely tough enemy, and so on.

https://git.themanaworld.org/explore/groups is the page linked to by the sidebar, but then https://gitlab.com/themanaworld is linked to by https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Git_repository#Worki... as is https://github.com/themanaworld which itself references their own GitLab URL, not .com

Digging around the few repos, it seems to be GPLv3

I swear every time I fix an outdated link, someone somewhere in the internet find three more outdated links to be fixed. The first link is the correct one, the others are mirrors. Thanks for reporting, I'll see in having the wiki page updated tomorrow.

I was the lead programmer on The Mana World client from about 2005 till 2009 and have been project and server admin for a while as well. I remember TMW being a very welcoming project, with at some point over a dozen of active contributors, so I'm a little surprised by the bad experiences reported by @wulfeet and @jdright.

Of course, the project has had its struggles, being an open source online game, there's a lot of challenging dynamics and competing visions, and the many forks that sprung up did not help either. I've tried to at least unify various projects around maintaining a shared client at https://manasource.org, but in the end most developers, including me, got busy with other aspects of life, like families, and could no longer maintain it. The new server we were developing for The Mana World is currently only used by the still somewhat experimental Source of Tales project (https://sourceoftales.org/).

These days, after various teams have "joined forces", the website https://themanaworld.org/ forwards to the wiki and unfortunately paints a very confusing picture of what this project is really about and what is "The Mana World", actually.

Since a few weeks, I'm trying to revive the Mana client project (at https://git.themanaworld.org/mana/mana), and I hope that others might be interested as well, or would give The Mana World another chance, so that we might once again have an active development team with a shared passion for this kind of game!

I was gonna ask about hosting costs, then I saw "14 players online". I wonder what's the ratio of developer/contributor:player.

No cost whatsoever: The Mana World is part of a 501(c)(3) public charity and have its hosting costs sponsored by Microsoft and domain costs sponsored by Gandi. You can find that information somewhere in the donation and donors pages of the wiki.

The online count is misleading as TMW Classic allows the same user to connect multiple accounts and even home made shop bots, so I wouldn't trust it. Right now there are 15 players online — 5 involved in the project, 5 players, and 5 bots or alts.

So a 1:1 rate in overall. And you're welcome to make your own bot for fun and connect it to the game server, but staff will get upset if it participates in combat or otherwise tries to give advantages to others.

PS. Only TMW Classic allows multiple accounts per player, but it's been this way since forever. Considering the average player profile, not much surprising that half of players had involvement with the game.

The Mana World seems to be in a somewhat fractured state at the moment; for what it’s worth, it has a pretty interesting history.

Several years back, the game still used to have a single server (The Mana World) and a single client (ManaPlus); both were being developed by different people, but they pretty much existed as a single community. There were some other projects using some of the same software, but developed by different teams with different ambitions; notably Land of Fire [1] or Evol Online [2]. TMW was by far the biggest, most active, and possibly the only one with a considerable (if still modest) player base. It was the game you’d stumble upon in your repository and stick around since there were actually people playing it.

At some point the developers announced the server software they were currently using was a huge mess and no one was up to maintain it, so they’d be moving to better and more actively maintained software. It was also decided the project would merge with Evol Online and build on their content and art direction instead, donning the name ‘TMW rEvolt’. (What little content Evol did have certainly felt more polished than that of TMW.) The main server was to remain on-line but see no active development from then on.

Since then, the new server seems to remain in sporadic development. Everyone has kind of accepted that the legacy server has no long-term perspective, yet it’s received several updates entailing new content and events to keep the players entertained in some way.

But if you look at the wiki [3], you’ll see that some developers have instead diverged their focus to create even more TMW-themed projects. You now have:

• ‘TMW Classic’, the abandoned-but-not-really legacy server.

• ‘TMW rEvolt’, the supposed successor.

• ‘TMW 2: Moubootaur Legends’, which is actually a separate project bearing a somewhat misleading name and pretty ghastly terms of use.

• ‘Source of Mana’, which according to the description is a new MMORPG made with Godot. It seems like some of the branding for rEvolt has been used there, and some of the developers are working on it, too, but I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a replacement for rEvolt or not.

• ‘ManaVerse’, a fork of ManaPlus created after the developer of the latter broke ties with TMW due to them wanting the option of ‘other’ gender in the game. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s always been there, but it was probably called ‘unspecified’ or something.)

I used to be somewhat active in the community and have contributed a little; unlike some other commenters, I found the people were reasonably nice to me. But ultimately I left since the project leads insisted on using non-libre platforms for development and refused to even consider a libre alternative (which was readily available at the time), showing that freedom wasn’t really even a factor for them. (They also moved the hosting over to Microsoft and introduced Discord as a platform for chat, which was a bit meh…)

  [1] https://www.landoffire.org/
  [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180726040023/https://evolonline.org/
  [3] https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/The_Mana_World:Home

To clarify, TMW has always been internally fractured due to diverging visions. That goes as far back as 2008. It was a single project until 2009, when the game client (Mana) was split off from the game content project to spare it from the internal infighting.

During at least three points in TMW history, almost everyone on staff quit and the few left had no choice but to resort to similar projects to remain alive. I can mention 2010, 2015 and 2019, requesting aid from The Alternate World and UFB, Evol Online and Moubootaur Legends respectively.

In general, people either tried to contribute to The Mana World, decided it was pointless and moved to a fork; or moved from a fork to The Mana World.

The history of developers is so convoluted partly because this, that at times The Mana World wouldn't run on Linux and at times it wouldn't run on Windows; at some times developers had no qualm in adding parody characters (like Kirk and Doctor Who) to the game while at others they abhorred the idea. At times GPL was idolized while at other times MIT license was the favorite.

It's so hard to describe The Mana World history without its forks or whoever happened to be the team at the time, which it's kinda of a small miracle the project survived to see its 20th anniversary (in April).

Just to correct a couple other minor informations: TMW rEvolt is formally abandoned, Moubootaur Legends formally abandoned its Terms of Service in favor of The Mana World Privacy Policy (and is no longer a separate project), Source of Mana is not meant to replace anything. There was "no long terms perspectives for the currently running server" since 2005~2006, yet somehow and defying all expectations it still runs. ManaPlus was made in 2011 as a fork of Mana, the original client which begun in 2004, split off the game in 2009, got abandoned in 2014 and was resurrected in 2024 and already compiles and runs on newer systems.

The rest is mostly accurate, even the part of how ManaVerse came to be. I cannot cite sources for my information because they still weren't published, they should become public in a month or two as part of the 20 years commemorations.

I think you could experiment with new tile sets using stable diffusion.

its open source; I think you could. In fact I encourage you to do so

If I could I would, but not a possibility at the moment.

An isometric view + a redesigned tileset would greatly help surfacing the fantasy behind this game in a more immersive way.

TMW is seriously a very interesting game. Our team's been going full throttle, cooking up all sorts of new stuff and making it even better. The gameplay? Smooth as butter. Seriously, you gotta try it out!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com