2019-03-14 16:36:57

Hello! I am  having some issues using the internet server in  Manamon. I´m not sure how this function works.   You get access to the function after you´ve completed the first stadium and are playing the full game. How does the function work exactly? I  know you can either trade or battle, but how do you perform these things? I would really need an explanation to this. Thanks in  advance!

2019-03-14 16:52:48

If you had paid attention to the in-game text, you'd know there's a person in the pokemon center (ahem, my mistake, the manamon hotel) who can hook you up. They're usually found in the top right-hand corner. Talk to them to get started. Also, consult the game's documentation, which gives extremely vague ideas of what will be involved. Manamon's online functionality is, well, touchy to say the least. The only thing that's easy to do is to download updates and to check for mystery gifts.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-03-14 18:31:56 (edited by Chris 2019-03-14 18:39:35)

Manamon's online functionality is peer to peer, meaning you establish a direct connection with the other person. For this to work, the host must forward UDP ports 15000 and 15001 to his/her computer and then give the other person his/her public IP address. This is waaaaaay too technical and/or difficult for some people to configure. I'll say this right now! That is absolutely! unacceptable! for!  a commercial product! Yes, the exclamation points are supposed to be there. There's no excuse for this!

Why can we check for game updates and gifts using Aaron's server, but not play online using the same server? I suspect it's mainly a laziness issue. If Aaron responded to the concerns of his customers, he would have had this done years ago.

Why can't we have both means of communication? Peer to peer is nice when the main server goes down, but how hard is it to set up a server program that does most of the heavy lifting? Choose connect to server from the online menu which connects you to the central server. Once connected, you can check who's online as well as create or join existing battles or trading sessions. The server would handle all the communication and no one would have to open ports on their networking equipment. Also, why can't we play with three or four players? Why is the online mode between two people only?

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2019-03-14 20:29:02

I still say it's a pity this couldn't be open-sourced in some fashion. Improved upon, both in the online functionality sense and in the balance sense. If Aaron doesn't want to do it, pass it off to someone who would. I've said before and will say again: clonish as this tgame undoubtedly is, it does a lot of things right and would have a whole lot more potential if it were only tapped. It didn't have to essentially die in less than two years, and I feel like the choice to essentially stop active development and balance issues is a case of deciding to run away with an investment. I mean fine, he doesn't have the time or the inclination to keep tweaking it. Okay. I hear that. So if others are willing and able to make a product better, why not at least consider it?

Bah, I'm grumpy. Don't mind me.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-03-14 21:10:19

If anything, they could use the manamon server to then connect people and negotiate peer to peer, or it could be more of a relay similar to how Nvvda Remote works.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2019-03-14 22:04:02 (edited by JLove 2019-03-14 22:08:34)

I have to agree with post #4 here.  It baffles me why so many developers refuse to open source their projects that they have abandoned and no longer wish to support, maintain, and improve.  If a developer makes a project, then decides they don't want to maintain or improve it, that they no longer have the time or the desire to do so, then why not open source it, and let others from the community keep it alive?  It doesn't hurt them to do this.  It's not like they lose credit for their initial work, and seeing as they're no longer interested in the project, what is the harm?  Especially in a community such as this, where so many games have just been abandoned.

2019-03-15 00:18:57

Well, let's be blunt for just a moment. The harm is financial. As long as Aaron Baker hosts and owns the rights to Manamon, he can charge whatever price he wants for it, and sales will still trickle in. If he decides to go open source, that stops happening and he stops making money. Ditto his other projects (The Gate, Psycho Strike, Paladin of the Sky) which all have issues. People still occasionally buy these games, so Aaron's finances occasionally see a tiny uptick without him having to really lift a finger (aside from whatever he's paying to host his games and his website or whatever it costs to maintain the thing that allows people to purchase, of course). Essentially, these untapped sources of potential represent what I'll call passive income, and as long as there's someone out there who's not too discriminating, or so desperate to pay someone forty-odd dollars or more to play an unbalanced pokemon clone or an open-world RPG with literally hundreds of grammatical errors in its script, Aaron risks absolutely nothing to just maintain the status quo as it exists right now. He is, of course, under no obligation to capitulate to anyone's requests, and is especially unlikely to do so given that any potential incentive the community gains from him doing so is quite literally going to fly in his face. What I mean by this is that Aaron has historically been the sort of person who gives ground very, very grudgingly. If he open-sources his program, and one or more people go out there and improve things and the community gets re-acquainted with some of those projects, they're all going to know that it was not -because of Aaron that these projects are thriving, but in spite of him. And let's be real. Nobody wants to be that guy.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-03-15 01:53:14

First of all, I doubt very seriously that the amount of money he currently makes from sales of Manamon are significant enough to amount to anything, and I doubt highly that he's going to get a massive influx of purchases for it in the future without making some improvements and updates to it, so it seems fruitless to use income as an excuse in this case, since I doubt there's much income flowing in for it.  Secondly, it would seem to me that if I am expecting people to pay for a product of mine, then I should in all fairness support and make improvements upon that product when I can.  If I decide to stop supporting the product or making improvements to it, then why should I continue to expect to make money on it?  Thirdly, as far as anything "flying in his face," I don't fully understand this, since if he were to open source it, he's saying he has no further interest or inclination toward improving it.  Therefore, if someone else improves it, that can only be a good thing for the community.  Anything before open source becomes irrelevant.  In other words, no one is going to care about what the product was before it was open sourced.  Why would they?  They're just going to be pleased that it's been improved upon and there's a viable game to play.

2019-03-15 02:19:58

Okay, how about I clarify then.

First point: I didn't say that Aaron's income was so large that he could float on it. But it's greater than zero, and presumably greater than whatever he's paying out in order to host his games. In other words, he is not losing anything, and is gaining little drips of income now and then. This is passive income. It's not enough to live on, but there's no reason whatsoever, from a financial standpoint, to change.

Second point: I say again, Aaron gives ground very, very slowly, if at all. He was absolutely dead set against changing dragon strike scrolls in Paladin, and so some of them are just straight-up bad. He was very much against adding NVDA support, citing some vague nonsense about how audio games and screenreaders were not meant to work together, which I still don't get and which he only grudgingly gave ground on due to large public backlash in the original manamon thread. He has been very resistant to player feedback over the years. As such, open-sourcing the program is indeed saying "You guys go do what you want with it", but it's also a tacit admission that Aaron either didn't do his best work or is letting other people take over where he left off. For someone with a history of sticking to his guns, this cannot be easy.

Now combine point 1 with point 2. So he doesn't want to come off as the guy who gave the community what it wanted after so firmly rejecting its help. And he doesn't want to lose that sporadic revenue source, however small and inconsistent it might be. So the games are not open-sourced, and are extremely unlikely to be in the future.

If it were me, I'd probably just get to a point where I decided the community should just get whatever is left, and I'd open-source my stuff and tell you guys to go to town. But then, I'm not nearly so dead set in my ways, either, and I'm not above admitting when I'm wrong. For me, if not for Aaron, coming back a year later and seeing my old project revived and made loads better would please me. I might be a little annoyed that I didn't think of these improvements myself and capitalize on them, but in the same breath, I'd realize that I had no one but myself to blame on that front.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-03-15 02:41:07

That's the thing.  Wouldn't it please you to see something you started, something you chose to give up on,  become awesome?  This community loses so much because developers either start something and never complete it, or finish something, only then to turn around and abandon it in a short time.  If I start something, then for whatever reason decide to abandon it prior to completion, why shouldn't I just give what I've started as open source to the community and let people see if they can finish it.  If I finish making something, and then I decide to abandon it, I'd be more than willing to open source it so that the community doesn't lose as a whole, and if they come up with things that improve on what I made, hell, I'd probably enjoy playing the improved product right along with everyone else.  In a community such as this, it seems to me that too much pride can be a bad thing.

2019-03-15 05:26:30

@Post 10, your argument would be flawless, except the following:
I don't know if you hung around the ultra power days, or hell, TK. Thing is, if somebody released their project as open source, a person who hangs out in this community is gonna go and clone the thing, changing the story if it's something like Manamon, variables if it's like TK, or sounds if it's ultrapower. Now that you know that bit of information, let me ask you this: Do you want to spend 2 or so years building a project, open source it, and watch as it's being cloned? If you do, *claps* I can't stop ya. Go ahead. The problem is that very few individuals will actually use the code for learning and or fixing the game. Most of people will grab the code, go "Cool! I can code now," Change a few values and then call it quits. There will be some rare exceptions to that rule, there are always those special cases, but for the most part the situation described above will occur.
Not to mention, if Aaron releases his paid games as freeware, I imagine that most people (myself included) won't be too happy about that fact. Our argument would be something like this: "If I paid for it, why do these people get it for free?" This, in turn, will cause drama to flare up on the forums, creating a headache for everybody. While I'm less concerned about the second outcome, it is still something to consider. Screaming that something should be open sourced is not to be done lightly. Do I wish that Manamon would be balanced out? Of course! Do I want the game to be rid of it's grammatical errors? Yes! Do I wish to create drama in doing so? Not at all.

2019-03-15 05:46:23

I'm not intending to scream about anything. I feel like Aaron's repeatedly shooting himself in the foot regarding game development, but I'm not about to say that we have a right to open-sourced projects just because a developer is done with a project either. I'm not nearly that whiny and entitled. It'd be awfully nice, and it'd be good for the community for the most part, but I'm not kidding myself. I'm not owed anything here.

Regarding your two points:
1. Inferior clones and derivatives will pop up, cause drama, get squelched and get ignored. If there are better/stronger clones or derivatives of the original source, they'll gain the majority of the attention. The reason a lot of drama has come up about certain games, the names of which will not pass my lips specifically, is because frankly we weren't talking about a mind-blowing source to begin with. it's not like someone took a really solid game and then made crap with it. In my admittedly limited opinion, most of such cases began with a meh game and then just had fun with it and made messes with the results. Manamon, as one example, is already perfectly playable and fairly solid, so I daresay if it got open-sourced, there would be people ready to pounce all over it and truly optimize it. Yours truly, if I could find someone to help with the coding aspect, just to name one.
2. Other devs have made their old paid games free. Liam is one example I can think of. Also, things routinely become cheaper as time goes by, games as well as other products. While it's true they usually aren't free, we're also talking about a small community here. Frankly, people who want to yowl because they had to pay for a game that is now open source really have better things to be doing with their time. I am saying this having bought many games over the years (Shades of Doom, Super Liam, Judgment Day, Super Egg Hunt Plus, Manamon, Paladin of the Sky). I would personally have zero problem seeing any of these games open-sourced even though I once paid for them. Know why? Because part of the reason I paid up was to help the developers, and most people probably feel the same way. If those devs want to discontinue supporting the game and want to open-source it, I see it as a potential win-win for the community.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-03-15 06:26:15

i don't understand one thing that the aaron said.
he said in paladen of the sky, when my resources will go up then i will be able to add the foot steps, but, i think, he does not want to add them, because he can add free sounds of foot steps, it will not effect the game.
and for paid projects of aaron, all the games stopped getting updates, this is not exceptible, at least for me.
here in india, we have to pay more money for the international transfurs, i had to pay 50 dollers for manamon
and he stopped the updates? i am very angry at this!

2019-03-15 07:13:08

@12, that's my point.  I'm not saying that anyone should open source their projects because of a sense of entitlement.  I'm saying that open sourcing products that you have no intention of or desire to support, update, or improve helps the community as a whole.  As far as cloning, if I am through with a project to the extent that I wish nothing else to do with it, and I am not willing to maintain or update it or listen to user feedback, why would I care what is done with it?  Sure, it might get cloned by some, but it also might get used as a learning tool by some, and who knows, maybe even improved upon by some.  I see nothing but benefit from that, for all of us.

2019-03-23 02:30:01

I agree with what you´ve said Before. I  Think it´s not good that updates have stopped, because I enjoy the games. I Think Manamon is a good game with some functions that are confusing like the online functionality. I Think it´s a bit   weird that you have to share your ip adress. This could have been fixed as you have said Before. I´m actually using yor text guide, Jayde. It has helped me a lot, but I have noticed some errors. Especially, the name of the 3rd stadium  is incorrect.

2019-03-23 04:03:00

I'm so regret that I have to pay for a product that is no longer maintained. 40 dollars wasted! Oh well.