Branches of Super Mario Bros. X

Super Mario Bros. X - (commonly known as "SMBX"', see the main article) is a Mario fan game engine, originally written by Andrew "Redigit" Spinks in 2009. The game is written on Visual Basic 6 (VB6). After the game development was stopped, many people independent of each other has started their attempts to remake the SMBX game.

Main branches
These are the main branches of the game: all these branches were in active development and maintenance (except Redigit's original branch abandoned in 2011).

Super Mario Bros. X 1.3


(Also known as Vanilla) This is the main branch of the game, it is an origin for all other game branches. It was released in 2009 and was supported up to 2011 (the last version of the game was out in October 2010). This game defines the SMBX64 standard using to declare the compatibility between different branches of the SMBX. Until February 2, 2020, the game had source code is closed. With time, the game has attracted various modders and hackers who developed their extensions and modifications of the game's executable file. The most notable of these modifications is the LunaDLL library made by Kil and published on the Talkhaus community forum. Later, the LunaDLL library has improved and extended by Kevsoft who introduced the lua scripting language added into it. Since that moment the library was been renamed into LunaLua. This library became the base of the SMBX2 project later.

Platform Game Engine Project


Moondust / Platform Game Engine project - a project by Wohlstand founded in February 2014 after finishing the SMBX64 research works first step. This is the game engine and development kit for it. This is the first SMBX successor project which provides full compatibility with original SMBX's stuff and can work with SMBX specific stuff natively: with PGE Editor you can open, edit, play SMBX's levels and episodes with the TheXTech or the experimental PGE Engine, you can edit and create new levels, world maps, NPC configs and use this stuff in original SMBX. The project itself has a focus on making the brand new games from the ground up using the functionality of the Engine rather than being just another clone of the SMBX game. Unlike previous SMBX successors, Moondust coded in C++ and going to be cross-platform: Linux, Windows and for Mac OS X, and later Android. Unlike SMBX, PGE going a multi-component system that includes Editor, Engine, and additional tools. While engine part in development state, Editor part is using by the community as a more advanced alternate editing toolset to work with SMBX levels and episodes.

Super Mario Bros. X by 38A


SMBX-38A, also known as SMBX 1.4 - is a Mario fan game engine, written by 5438A38A as an unofficial successor to the original Super Mario Bros. X by Redigit, developed from the ground up as a clone of SMBX with adding of several new features into it. Before recent times it was known as a fake. On September 13, 2015, by Snoopy Tour was made a post with a link to Baidu where Unofficial SMBX 1.4.1 was published, but people are not beloved him. Kevsoft tried to find a download link and finally found it, downloaded a recent build from Baidu Pan, and tried to test it on Windows 7 x64, but failed. When he sent this build to Wohlstand, he found a way to run it in Windows XP using virtual box. Later Wohlstand contacted the original author and cooperated with him. This project adds many in-game elements, majorly extends the world map functionality, has its own scripting system called TeaScript which uses the VB-like language for the code.

Super Mario Bros. X2


Super Mario Bros. X2 (SMBX2) - is an extension mod of SMBX 1.3, is a combining of LunaLua framework, of PGE devkit (mainly for use of PGE Editor), and a brand-new launcher which does use of Qt and WebKit (eventually it was been replaced with a QWebEngine), founded by Horikawa Otane in December 2015 (before that moment there are was early prepare works done in a secret). It's positioning now as a mainstream SMBX that makes vanilla SMBX 1.3 to be an obsolete thing, even the fact it's still be used as the main core, even it was hacked, extended, and modded by using of LunaLua framework. Since SMBX2 was founded, LunaLua is no more releasing as a standalone framework as it was continued to be developed as a main counterpart and core of the SMBX2 project. This project gives you a lot of new in-game elements and a powerful and flexible lua scripting system that gives a lot of customization abilities.

TheXTech


TheXTech - it's a platform game engine written in C++, is a full port of source code of SMBX 1.3 which was originally written in Visual Basic 6. Created by Wohlstand after one month since original SMBX source code was been released and released out into the public on March 14, 2020, for two purposes: providing a free and open-source, cross-platform, and accurate implementation of the SMBX Engine to allow playing of old levels and episodes, created for an original game, with the same behavior as the original game had; get a more convenient research model for a PGE Engine development. Additionally, it has many functional extensions and improvements such as PNG support, GIF recording, LVLX, and WLDX formats support, using the MixerX audio library, sounds.ini and music.ini support, custom player calibrations support, fixing the bunch of vanilla bugs with an option to re-enable them back if needed, etc. Unlike original SMBX implementation, it has support for other platforms and operating systems than Windows such as Linux, macOS, Haiku, Emscripten, and Android. Windows x86_64, and ARM64 builds were also provided.

Super Mario ReInvent


Super Mario ReInvent (formerly known as New Super Mario Bros. X) is an open-source Mario fan-game currently developed by Core. It is a fork of TheXTech, a C++ port of the original Super Mario Bros. X, and backward-compatible to these engines.

Episodes compatibility
Most branches have their own set of incompatible features with others. However, there are episodes built with the SMBX64 standard following that will properly work on every branch. The case of incompatibility between each branch requires playing certain episodes on the branch for which it was targeted. Playing episodes on the incompatible engine may also cause unexpected gameplay behavior and unexpected elements appearance (for example, the SMBX2 and SMBX-38A do have their different and incompatible item sets; at the same time, PGE Engine is able to use different configuration packages which can provide any different and incompatible item sets to play every level and the episode as expected).


 * * The first episode of "The Invasion" series will glitch on water levels (the BGO expected being foreground, getting shown as background), and the Bowser battle will be unbeatable because of the disabled section expansion functionality. It got been repaired at TheXTech to allow playing old pre-1.3 episodes with no glitches.
 * ** Older SMBX versions than 1.3 had several bugs that got been fixed. There are may exist some episodes built on these bugs, they may not work, or work incorrectly at the SMBX 1.3 and at TheXTech.
 * *** TheXTech doesn't support the TeaScript system and doesn't support a lot of SMBX-38A functionality, however, some levels and episodes saved in the SMBX-38A format may be playable if they follow the SMBX64 standard except the file formats they were saved.
 * **** TheXTech doesn't support lua scripting and doesn't contain a ton of new-added elements (all non-SMBX64 elements will be turned into the goomba and dummy blocks when opening the level). However, TheXTech does support several features supported by PGE Engine and SMBX2.

Cancelled branches
There are notable projects that were being early attempts to reconstruct the game but was been canceled or abandoned by their developers.

Super Mario Bros: Remastered


Super Mario Bros: Remastered (originally named New Super Mario Bros. X, NSMBX, also known as Super Mario Bros. X Remastered, SMB:R and SMBX:R) was one of the first attempts to continue SMBX after Redigit canceled it. The SMB:R had the most publicity in the months of June-September 2011, so it developed the largest community of the smaller spin-off forums (later merged with Cloud's forum), despite not having much progress beyond what was publicized. Unfortunately, Project has been canceled in January of 2012. NSMBX Forums was kept as a backup discussion platform which was sometimes used while the official SMBX forums server is down.

Visual Super Mario Bros. X


Visual Super Mario Bros. X - project by Aero (also known as AeroMatter or GhostHawk) founded in March/April of 2012'th year. The project made using VisualBasic.NET on .NET Framework 4 platform. The goal of VSMBX was to first recreate SMBX and then add on new features and content with far more flexibility. Starting December 25th of the 2014 year, the source code for VSMBX has been published for everyone. Since August 4 2016, AeroMatter announced discontinuing on his official discussion thread.