10 YEARS ANNIVERSARY
English - Russian
Hello everybody!
Today is a significant day: it has been exactly 10 years since this forum launched in 15'th of February, 2014. At that time, everything started with very simple researches over SMBX engine with the closed source code at that moment (you may find several related documents in the archive here). I started my initial work on the Moondust Project later, on the 19'th of March, 2014 - the date of the first commit in the Moondust Project repository. Even a month before the start of the project itself, it was already clear that one SMBX forum was not enough, the future project needed its own independent space where people could ask any questions, communicate with each other, as well as offer new ideas or even directly help the project. At that time, I was a university student and also lived in poverty.
Our initial composition of team was:
- h2643 - The first forum administrator together with me (I was the one who was being more busy with the development rather than forum moderation). He also performed a lot of interesting research and made many discoveries about the internal structure of the SMBX engine.
- CaptainSwag101 - One of first contributors to the project who helped to debug it on the Mac OS X and helped with the English proofreading.
- Kevsoft - The first co-developer who most actively helped us in the development of the Moondust Project, and, in addition, he helped to the SMBX research works while experimenting with the LunaDLL library and creating the LunaLua at final.
- And, of course, me, Wohlstand.
There are also other well-known contributors of the early era of the project:
- FanofSMBX - He provided the valuable collection of old SMBX versions since its foundation which are helped in the deeper research to improve the compatibility of the project with the SMBX content.
- Veudekato - He contributed the project by some graphics, helping with documents and proofreading the stuff.
- Luigifan2010 - Several help with the testing and debugging of the project on various systems.
- Squishy Rex - An amteur pixel-art artist who contributed with various graphics such as concepts for various in-game objects and the creator of the first custom theme for the Editor.
- Mikepjr - One another amteur pixel-art artist who contributed other part of various graphics for use as an in-game objects.
There are other people whom I didn't listed, but they all are listen in the Moondust Editor's "About" dialogue: there are various translators, application icon artists, testers, YouTube bloggers who recorded several showcases, etc.
In honor of this anniversary, I want to share some of early Moondust Project builds, so, you will be able to see the begining of the everything:
- plweditor 0.0.5-pre-alpha - Win32 - The earliest build of Moondust Editor (that was called "PlatGenWohl Editor" at that moment), it's a sketch of the future Moondust Editor which is able to open some SMBX64 LVL files and display them with various fallback resources.
- PGE Engine Dummy 2014-10-07 - Win32 - The earliest prototype of the Moondust Engine (initially called as PGE Engine).
- PGE Editor 0.2 Beta MacOS and PGE Editor 0.2 Beta Win32 - One of Beta versions of the PGE Editor which was being most functional if don't count various bugs. You should use this configuration package in order to make it work.
- If you looking for the source code of these builds, you may want to find some at the Moondust Project reposistory: it keeps the whole development history since its foundation in the year 2014.
The Moondust project was founded with the aim of reviving SMBX as an independent and standalone game engine, as well as a game engine and development kit for creating new games from scratch. And so, you can see that early development was being focused on attempt to clone the SMBX engine through black-box reverse-engineering method. As a result, the engine itself was not the most successful (at this moment it's still being an incomplete alpha version!), but at the same time, in the entire history of SMBX, this engine introduced technologies are new in the world of SMBX, many of which were later implemented in other engines of different SMBX branches. But at the same time, the engine has something that no SMBX branch has, namely:
- Variable frame rate at the physics level, which is completely synchronous with the monitor, which gives smooth animation regardless of the refresh rate of the monitor. Many SMBX branches, including our TheXTech, operate at aproximately 65 frames per second.
- The ability to customize any animation for playable characters, even without scripts. Many SMBX branches have to use scripts to create their own animation of playable characters.
- The engine implements an experimental scene graph, as well as technologies that allows you to move huge groups of objects on the scene with minimal effort.
In the period between 2016 and 2019, the project was going through hard times:
- I went to full-time job, and from that moment there was less free time for my personal projects.
- In parallel, the SMBX2 project was founded, because of which I had to do a lot of work in the Editor instead of developing my own Engine.
- Kevsoft left the active development of both Moondust Project and SMBX2.
- Horikawa Otane (the founder of the SMBX2 team) left the community that led to the not best relationship between our teams. And since then it has become clear that our goals are contrasting.
The year 2020 has become a sensation - this year, the sources of the original SMBX engine have finally been open. This was the impetus for the foundation of the TheXTech project, because it is more convenient to work with it when it is in C++, and not in VB6. Since that moment, plans for the future have changed:
- The Moondust Project will don't have a goal to clone the SMBX. Instead, the new Moondust Engine will focus on brand-new projects without looking back on old bugs.
- TheXTech will be developed in parallel to the Moondust Project as a direct continuation of the original and canonical SMBX created by Redigit.
In any case, we are still continuing to develop our projects and we are moving forward and only forward! And never give up!
As the founder of this forum and the entire WohlSoft team, I thank all those who are with us! And I also thank all those who have ever contributed to the development of the team's projects!
Have a good time!
