Hey Luke,

What you said is totally right. GUI redesign is one of the big topics on our feature list, including a merge of equipment/inventory windows and changing the npc talk window.

Also, we wanted to switch from floating windows to fixed window positions :)
We already posted some of our GUI ideas in this thread. Skill button is already hidden when there are no skills available, but our final plan is to reduce button count to maybe four buttons + shortcut buttons (attack, spells, item shortcuts) and put some of less important buttons in game menu or remove them. Smileys could be include in the chat, for example.

Sadly, we've very little time right now and are struggling to get the core features done during lpc, so we'll most likely not get around to do the GUI changes before the end of lpc :(

Thank you for your feedback, it's always motivating to hear that people like our game (or how the game could turn out later) ;)

Hey.

@Luke:

Glad that you like it. Just a comment about the TMW related stuff:

We use an different server than TMW. So we do not have this skills in that way. Manaserv (the server we use) handles skills in a different way. A skill is your experience with a special weapon kind (like sword, axe, bow, ...) or magic or crafting. So you level the skills you are using most. So if you use a sword it will train your sword skill. This means everybody has all skills (you only might habe no experience in it).

The system of manaserv that is similar to the TMW spells are specials. This can be magic spells/special actions. The effect it coded in our scripts. At the moment you can trigger those by hitting buttons in a crappy window of the client. We are aiming to have a shortcut bar but it is quite a bit of work.

About the interface:

As you can see in this thread we have a lot of ideas how to change it. But it is probably too much to implement this during the LPC so we will have to move stuff behind this phase probably. Important atm is getting special shortcuts working + getting a basic crafting interface (server already supports crafting).

But well if stuff is too much for LPC we will do it after it somewhen.

EDIT: Too sloooow... ;)

Best regards,

Ablu

Daily update time! :)

We have a new quest: Defeat the hive!
Durmak is afraid of bees, so whenever he sees some of them, he'll give you the quest to fight the whole hive and kill them all - no survivors allowed! Maybe he overreacts a little bit, but he'll reward you, so you might consider the offer...
But if you're afraid of bees, you should call some friends for help, as these special bees can get really dangerous!

Also, I can show you some changes made to the main map (still a lot missing):

The rest is smaller changes and fixes that won't bother you. So I'll just go to bed now :)

Good night!

Hey people,

Today we have only some extensions to the main map (beginning of a forest, two houses indoor maps).

Sadly, I'm rather tired right now, so I won't provide many screenshots yet. You can look forward to see them tomorrow, though! Ablu said he might put some online tomorrow morning.

Good night! I need my sleep now :P

Ok here comes the update from yesterday (sorry for being late):

Extended main map:

More house maps:

And there was work on redesigning the ui.

Best regards

Ablu

Hi, this time the update is on same day (at least for our timezone) ;)

All the houses were updated a bit / new ones goes added so here is a full list of all houses:

Then the main map was updated again:

There was work on some kind of a boss cave (i won't spoiler more):

And a new quest was added to learn magic:

Thats it

Best regards

Ablu

Err, wait, what? No update yesterday? Whoops^^ Seems like we were to busy with various birthday celebrations :D

Well, you'll get some stuff today: A WIP screenshot of the main map (still not completely done, but pretty much - I think we'll finish mapping just in time). Enjoy!

We've also pretty much new stuff regardin npcs, npc texts, waypoints, etc., but you'll see that soon enough when contest deadline approaches :D (also, it's hard to tell that in just a few screenshots).

We'll have to leave quite some features out to get the game done till deadline, and there are a lot of things that are not optimal, but I guess we'll nevertheless deliver an impressive piece of work that shows great potential for the future :) Most things will work as expected, and of course an mmorpg stands and falls with it's community (yes, that's you :P)

Good night!

No new screenshots today as I'm mean today^^ (stab PjotrOrial if you want to know why, he has forbidden me to post any further screenshots today ;) )

But we're working on it. Trying to fix some bugs, doing some dirty hacks to client/server (because we're running out of time), defining waypoints, polishing maps/dialogs/items/npcs, balancing, ...

Wow, the map is /awesome/.  I wish I had that kind of skill.

Thanks, I'm glad you like it :)
Credit goes to Atheros (I'm really glad he joined the project) and me, and Ablu (some tileset corrections) and PjotrOrial (layout of river and Goldenfields) for some initial help.

Also, we wouldn't have done this without the great terrain brush feature of tiled (and bjorn generating tilesets for it) or without tileds automapping feature done by PjotrOrial (used for the trees).

And of course, the map is not finished yet - still some polish to be applied ;)

Also, I don't think we could have achieved this with a small team of one or two people. To be fair, atheros and me didn't do much else for the project than mapping (and probably writing daily updates ;) ) this month.

We have a temponary testing server up!

SERVER IS DOWN AGAIN. Check our lpc repository + its readme for new server and guide for installing client.

Have fun

Ablu

[ 30%] Building CXX object src/CMakeFiles/mana.dir/gui/npcdialog.cpp.o
/tmp/yaourt-tmp-mcmic/aur-mana-lpc-git/src/mana-build/src/gui/npcdialog.cpp: In constructor ‘NpcDialog::NpcDialog(int)’:
/tmp/yaourt-tmp-mcmic/aur-mana-lpc-git/src/mana-build/src/gui/npcdialog.cpp:92:65: erreur: ‘Theme::ThemePalette’ is not a class or namespace
make[2]: *** [src/CMakeFiles/mana.dir/gui/npcdialog.cpp.o] Erreur 1
make[1]: *** [src/CMakeFiles/mana.dir/all] Erreur 2
make: *** [all] Erreur 2

This aur package won't build on my computer :-/

@MCMic: Fixed now. Thanks for reporting.

Well, finally, release! :)

You can still find our data at https://github.com/mana/lpc2012/ - you will find instructions on how to compile the client in the description.

Note that the lpc version of the client is packaged only for arch linux atm. Everyone else will have to compile by hand (there are compiling instructions included in the readme file).

I'd be glad to welcome you on our server :)

Also, big thanks to all the awesome artists and to my team members for bringing us this great game :)

Hi,

Congrats to everyone in the team :)

If there is room for me, I might drop by tonight and become a total rebel. ;)

Best regards,

Hey Bertram!

Drop us a line on IRC. Looking forward to hunt down skeletons with you :P

Best regards,

Ablu

Is the server down? I wanted to test the game :-/

Also, where on IRC can we met you?

Server is running at testing.manasource.org (it is on the serverlist as well). It is not a very strong server but worked fine so far and was up the whole day. IRC is at #mana in irc.freenode.net.

Best regards,

Ablu

Short note. We renamed the game to Source of Tales. Our new repositories are at github.com/tales.

We also got the domain http://www.sourceoftales.org/ (not much interesting stuff there atm). IRC Channels moved to #sourceoftales and #sourceoftales-dev on freenode (Old channel redirects). We are working on declaring guides for mapping and scripting and fixing bugs on server and client. Server is still at testing.manasource.org (and will stay there at least until judging ended).

Best regards,

Ablu

Another short (and maybe bit late note):

We won the Grand Prize of the LPC.

Check our "Thanks"-Message we did here: http://www.sourceoftales.org/news/2013/02/18/we-won.html

Regards

Ablu