The Mana World / News: Recent posts

As of April 16th, 2014, the Mana client is no longer supported by http://themanaworld.org.

if you would like to continue to play The Mana World,

New packages for the new client:
- Manaplus http://manaplus.org/

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

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

We're making an effort to keep the news on the main page (http://themanaworld.org) as up-to-date as the in-game news (http://updates.themanaworld.org/news.txt).

We're probably going to drop the sourceforge news feed, which is currently being used to generate the main page.

It seems Tulimshar is finally recovering from the impacts
of the great earthquake.
Although the eastern half of the city is still closed,
it has become much more lively, with children playing between the houses,
farmers going back to their fields, reports of increased trade activity.

Three pieces of news today.

First, Mana 0.6.0 got released today. You can find it at
http://manasource.org, or wait for your distribution.

Second, we will be completely dropping support for the old
TMW 0.0.29.1 client soon - unless there is further reason
for delay, in April 2012.

Finally, there will be a purge of accounts that have not been
used for over a year. This should help responsiveness
when logging in and choosing a character.... read more

After all the activity in Nivalis due to the Christmas time,
the townsfolk would like things to be quiet again.
Unfortunately, some strange people have set up their camp
near the woods west of town.
They came from their village high up in the northern snow mountains.
What might have caused them to leave their hunting grounds
and come down to Nivalis?

Christmas is coming near and Santa and his helpers are busy
preparing everything for the celebration in Santa's house near Nivalis.
But somehow... everything seems to go wrong.
Bad luck? Or rather - malicious interference?
It looks like someone could use your help.

Previously, only activity while the user was away from the keyboard was a bannable offense. Now, any sort of automated following (especially, but not only, attack-following) is also covered.

If you know any of the people who left this game due to the prevalence of bots that were previously tolerated, please tell them it's time to return.

A new client is available since a few days in the downloads page! Almost two years have passed since the last stable release of the client. Hence, it's not practical to go into much detail about all the changes that have been made, but we'll mention the most important ones.

First off, the client is now based on the Mana client. It was 1.5 years ago that the Mana project split off from The Mana World, so that the server and client software could be developed independently from the content of the game. The 0.5 release marks a great milestone where the client can form a stable base for many games, including The Mana World. From now on, the client version will match the version of the Mana client that it is based on.... read more

This actually already happened a few days ago, but I had a slight delay figuring out how to post news onto the SourceForge project feed after the SF site redesign...

Anyway, we finally have a development server up and running at dev.themanaworld.org using the technology from http://manasource.org/ ! Access to the development server is restricted to contributors of TMW CR1 and Manasource developers only. We will have a more public test server and eventually an actual free-for-all free-to-play production server, when the time comes. So all TMW content will be rolling out in controlled and well-tested Content Releases (CR).... read more

The Mana World was covered in Amiga Future 82 (released earlier this month), being the only available MMORPG for AmigaOS. The one and a half page article goes in detail about your initial steps after creating your first character and ends with an encouragement to give it a try. The magazin is available in both German and English.

A screenshot of The Mana World can be seen on the front page:
http://www.amigafuture.de/album_page.php?pic_id=14787... read more

For years The Mana World has used many different channels on the irc.freenode.net. As of now, all The Mana World related channels have been moved to irc.themanaworld.org, our own IRC server.

The move is mainly due to an increase in abuse to our channels, which was not addressed properly by FreeNode staff. This new IRC server should be better for players, since they can generally expect their nick to be available and we will in the future be able to provide more elaborate services.... read more

Because of the release of an easy to abuse spamkit that could automatically create a large amount of new accounts and characters, we've had to disable new account creation from the game client. This meant that for the past few days we've had to create new accounts manually.

Now I'm happy to announce that we've developed an alternative way of creating a new account, using the web form linked from the 'Server Status' section on the right. Unfortunately it wasn't feasible to create new accounts immediately, so after you've used the form you'll have to wait a bit until you receive an email that says your account has been created.... read more

This is release is a stability update to 0.0.29, which admittedly featured quite some crashes (we fixed four) and other smaller glitches. This was only to be expected after such a large update, and public scrutiny helped to quickly find most of the remaining issues. Thanks to those who helped us by reporting the bugs they found!

Two new features also sneaked into this patch release. It is now possible to change your password yourself, in the character selection dialog (so I can stop doing it for you ;)). Also, when you're in a party, you'll now see the leader of the party displayed in bold. As usual, see the changelog for the full list of changes: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=106790&release_id=688651... read more

For once, I just don't know where to start. So much has changed since the last release that we needed a very long time before the client was in releasable shape again. However, I think we eventually managed!

This release clearly is our largest ever. First, many improvements and new features were merged in from the Aethyra project. Then, we spend a month merging our own two grown apart clients, one that supported the eAthena server and one that supported the tmwserv server (support for this server is currently a compile-time option). Finally, we spent two months fixing, improving and generally cleaning things up in order to prepare for this release.... read more

As the version number suggests, this is just a small bugfix release. The main thing that got fixed was to make the translations work on Windows. Also, translations for German, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish and Polish got updated.

The biggest visible change in this release is the switch to using TrueType fonts instead of bitmap fonts. This was necessary in order to properly support internationalization and also allowing people to chat in their own language when it wasn't using the Latin alphabet. Another nice feature that we hope to start using soon is support for animated tiles. This should allow mappers to make maps feel even more alive.... read more

It's already been more than three months since our last release, but I'm happy to say quite a bit has happened in this time. Not the least of which is our switch from Subversion to git, which will increasingly allow us to work more efficiently and more easily merge changes between branches. The Aethyra fork followed us in this switch, which has made it easier to share improvements.

We've also set up new Game Masters and are in the process of formalizing the guidelines along which they work. For a long time, Platyna was the only one caring to do this job. The Game Masters are there in the interest of the community, and their actions are made public.... read more

As many of you have noticed, this weekend the server started having problems. It turned out to be an issue with the harddrive. Currently the server is up again with a temporary harddrive that Platyna borrowed from a friend. Unfortunately, the last backup was from 30th of October, some of you will have lost some progress. We're sincerely sorry for this, and we will try to make sure we're better prepared for these problems in the future.... read more

Two months ago we released a new version of the client. New features are the ability to show custom being effects (which will soon be used when we introduce the magic system by Fate) and some particle engine improvements. Also, names and chat are now positioned in a way so that there is no overlap when possible.

In other news, our server is running out of disk space. We have never asked for donations before, but Platyna, our server administrator, would really like to upgrade the server with two new and stable disks that will carry this project, among others. If you would like to contribute, see the fund raising forum thread for details:... read more

On Sunday we released a new version which brings features such as: whispering to other players, friends and ignore lists, shortcut window, particle effects on NPCs, improved accuracy of monster targeting and many others. During the process we also fixed numerous bugs.

Please note that Guichan 0.8 is required when compiling this version yourself. Binaries for Windows and Mac OSX are available under downloads.

We made it! I'd like to thank everyone who nominated TMW. Your help is really appreciated.

The Mana World is one of the finalists for the "Best Project for Gamers". Again I'm asking you to vote if you think this project is worth it.

You can use this link: http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-finalists

Best regards

Sourceforge opened votations to choose the best open source projects. If you like The Mana World you're kindly invited to provide your support by nominating TMW as best project or best project for gamers (or both of course).

You can use the banner in the SF project page to start nominating.

http://sf.net/projects/themanaworld

We've decided to do a small release to fix some outstanding issues with the previous one. Some small feature additions were made as well, for example it is now possible to clear the chat window by typing /clear and a key was added for targetting the nearest player. Also, it is now possible to walk through other players with the keyboard (with the mouse this was already possible).

While we're making progress towards the new server and the 0.1.0 client release, recently peavey has been making some fixes for some long outstanding bugs on our eAthena server. We realize that one of them, a fix for the fast attack bug, has changed the gameplay and balance. Please know that we welcome any feedback from you regarding this change and also suggestions for further changes.

This release is our Christmas present to you! This version comes with many requested features like the ability to define your own key settings, handling connection loss better, trimming of chat messages and resizable buy/sell dialogs, as well as a lot of bug fixes. Other notable additions are support for female-specific hair styles, and XP-gaining notification.

On the technical side of things, this version brings support for dynamic sprite recoloring (at the moment only used for the different hair colors) and loaded resources are now no longer instantly thrown away when no longer used, which should reduce hiccups due to resource loading.... read more

The Christmas event 2007 has started today. It is an event in two phases. The first phase is from now until Christmas (december 25th) and the 2nd phase is from Christmas until new year.

This time the event is something special. For the first time in the history of The Mana World we will have a cooperative event. This means everyone has to work together for the benefit of the community. At Christmas everyone who participated will get the same number of rewards depending on how well everyone did. It won't matter how well every single person did - only the accomplishment of the whole community will count. So everyone can help to make this years Christmas a very special one for everyone. ... read more