History of SMBX

Super Mario Bros. X (also known as SMBX) - is a Mario fan game engine, written by Andrew 'Redigit' Spinks in the year 2009. The game is written in Visual Basic 6 (VB6). Project development was stopped in 2011, and SMBX 1.3 is the last official version Redigit has released.

Founding of SMBX
The month was June, in the year 2009. Some random dude named Andrew Spinks had created a Mario fangame called Super Mario Bros. X and posted it on his new site, SuperMarioBrothers.org. The forums (supermariobrothers.org/forums) quickly gained traffic, and some of the first users to join were piejacker, Quill, and Coldwin who you may know. As this site and game gained popularity, Andrew (who will from now on be called "Redigit") released betas and new versions over the coming months. With a larger community, you'd think he would need some moderators, and Kyasarin/Luminous were promoted along with Kuribo somewhere along the line. On April 5th, 2010, Knuckles96 made their own forums and they slowly grew, but we're going to leave this out until the very end. An SMBX IRC channel was formed on Freenode, but the staff caught it and made Redigit change the name from #smbx to ##smbx due to Freenode's rules. They shortly moved to FOSSnet (bikcmp's network) after that.

SMBX 1.2
By July of 2010, SMBX was at version 1.2.2. Kyasarin, Luminous, and 4matsy were administrators now, with DarkMatt and Vandarx being the moderators. The community had turned into a cauldron of hate. New users weren't treated properly, nobody was given a second chance, Kyasarin and Luminous had become very irrational of administrators, and the only way to not get banned was to follow in their footsteps (this explains the attitudes of DarkMatt, Vandarx, and TrinityFlash). Somewhere around the end of July/beginning of August, Redigit decided to close down the forums. He'd had enough of keeping up with the community and had said himself that without Kyasarin and Luminous he would've closed it down long ago. bikcmp of FOSSnet immediately put up new official forums (cdn-01.bikcmp.com/smbx/fourm/index.php) for two weeks that ended up having the same problems. Luminous said something to the extent of "Leave this place and get back to your so-called 'normal lives'", and then dropped the SMBX IRC chatroom. A few days to about two weeks passed and the only people left in the chat were Vandarx (an op), Spitfire (a common network user), CaptainTrek (a network administrator), and ddashlover (just a normal user). On August 25th, 2010, CaptainTrek decided to form new SMBX forums (trekweb.org/smbx-forum) on his server (TrekWeb.org), and Redigit supported by crowning it as the new official forums. Vandarx and Spitfire were the new administrators. ddashlover changed his name to fallingsnow and became a moderator. He also brought Blaarg in, and he became a moderator as well. Skittlez12 (now known as just Skittlez) was there as a mod too. Around the same time, the SMBX splash page was updated with a new video showing the Ice Flower and linking to the new forums. This confirmed that Redigit was still working on SMBX.

SMBX 1.3
The official SMBX forums were alive again thanks to CaptainTrek, and in October of 2010 Redigit released SMBX 1.3 to the public. This included many new features such as the Ice Flower, quicksand, and a lot more NPCs. It even contained some unused stuff, like the frog suit graphic Knux found a few weeks ago. Despite popular belief, Redigit did actually start working on SMBX version 1.3.1 after 1.3's release. In one of his playthroughs of The Great Empire, he mentioned working on SMBX's multiplayer. Later, though, this was cut short.

Trouble on the forums and abounding of SMBX development
The SMBX community was doing fine until December 2010 when CaptainTrek's server failed, causing the loss of most of the forum's data. A backup could've been restored but he chose to instead start the forums over again. During this 2-3 week period in which the forums were gone, many users fled to Knuckles96's forums, causing it to grow. The official forums were put back up for a while until January where CaptainTrek wanted to take a break. It was during this time that Redigit officially announced that he halted work on SMBX (we all kinda knew it was over anyway) and that no new forum would earn the title of "official". Some people were still skeptical because he had a record of "quitting" in the past. It was in January of 2011 that Redigit began work on Terraria, back when it was called ProjectWorld.

Nintendo's lawyers call and SMBX deletion
The SMBX forums were put back up in January and lasted until the beginning of April. CaptainTrek was tired of running the forums and was going to bring them down for good. Redigit came into the SMBX IRC chatroom and officially announced that SMBX is by his a "for his a", and the now commonly accepted belief was that SMBX is finished. This left Knux's forum and fallingsnow's forum to be the only SMBX forums left. However, people didn't think any of them were expecting what was about to happen.

One Saturday morning, Reborg (a fellow Terraria alpha tester) asked FutureNyanCat2002 on the IRC if he had heard what happened. He said that he hadn't and Reborg told him the whole story. Redigit came on later, and then posted the following:

"Last Friday I received a call from Nintendo's lawyers asking me to remove Super Mario Bros. X from the site and delete all SMBX videos from my Youtube account. They also asked me to transfer SuperMarioBrothers.org over to them. I have complied with their first two wishes, but I do not want to lose SuperMarioBrothers.org. It is a good Mario fansite, even without Super Mario Bros. X. They were going to decide on that and get back to me. I was waiting to hear back from them before I made any statement about this, but the rumors needed to be cleared up. I have a lot of respect for Nintendo and never intended to cause any problems for them.

I am going to ask that you guys refrain from posting copies of SMBX on the internet, as it goes against Nintendo's wishes and could make things more complicated for me."

It was an unfortunate time for SMBX, lots of great content was lost. Some people think that Redigit was trolling (which isn't an illegitimate claim, Red is in fact a troll at times), but here are some fun facts that can prove that otherwise.

Redigit actually told Terraria testers at length what happened and how weird it was. First, he did not receive any written communication or email. This was all done by phone. Second, they called him on his cell phone. That's unknown, how they got his cell phone number, but he could've put it in privacy policies somewhere on one of his sites. Third, this was done by a (local?) Seattle law firm (Redigit lives in Indiana). However, this law firm is legitimate as far as I know and you can take a look at it if you want. This could have been a prank call but there are doubts that because the call he received was from the actual law firm listed above. Even if Redigit was trolling he wouldn't have removed every single one of his YouTube videos. He's even said that he wants SMBX still on the internet for people to use. This was not the "end of SMBX". SMBX had ended months before, but that only means development has stopped.

It was at this point that Redigit stopped all affiliation with SMBX. He was done. Terraria was nearing publicity and he had better things to worry about. This was the end of the official road of Super Mario Bros. X, but there's still more to this story.

Future of SMBX
During one of the TrekWeb blackouts, fallingsnow ended up making his own SMBX forums. These are the ones mentioned in the current #smbx which has now lost all ops except for Spitfire and fallingsnow. People also started to make their own spinoffs and other level editors/games, like NSMBX, Super Mario Limitless, and SMB:R (in that order). Also, there was the SMBX 1.4 (Don't confuse with the SMBX-38A also known as SMBX 1.4 too) - was most known for being a fake around YouTube. It would be the next version right after 1.3, but because SMBX development was stopped, nobody was able to continue the original project and thus resulting in there not being a "version 1.4".

Super Mario Bros: Remastered (SMB:R)
Super Mario Bros: Remastered (SMB:R) (a.k.a. NSMBX ) had the most publicity in the months of June-September 2011, so it developed the largest community of the smaller spin-off forums, despite not having much progress beyond what was publicized. This large community eventually merged with Cloud's forum amidst controversy about whether or not it would merge with Knux's forum and became SMBX Revived, but continued to grow and was (post and traffic-wise) the second-largest SMBX forum. After merging with Cloud's forum, SMBX Revived became the most active forum, beating Knux's forum.

Unfortunately, the project was canceled in January of 2012. NSMBX Forums were kept as a backup discussion platform which was sometimes used while the official SMBX forums server was down. In September 18, 2016, the owner of NSMBX Forums announced the closing of forums with locking current state for read-only.

SMBX 1.3.0.1
In December 2013, SMBX Community came into SuperMarioBrosX.org which was maintained by Joey Miller.

This update made by Joey and Valtteri just cosmetic updates and fixes of the included graphics, music, and sounds. Technically it's still the same SMBX 1.3. Because development was abandoned by Redigit without opening the source code, the community has made many attempts to hack the SMBX binary in various ways: a replacement of hardcoded graphics and some string data; Reverse engineering and DLL-Injection which lead to the founding of the LunaDLL project (later known as a LunaLua). In the 2017~2018 years, the site and other things were transferred to Kley and other people.

LunaDLL
On May 9th, 2013, a user named kil3 released a hack of SMBX which extends the possibilities you can do with SMBX. This was an attempt to continue the life of the SMBX engine even without source code. With LunaDLL it is possible to have almost any low-level modification of SMBX core, adding new things and manipulating existing stuff. Based on this extension there are released such projects as A Second Mario Bros X Thing: Analog funk" and Superb Demo Sisters.

Visual Super Mario Bros. X (VSMBX)
Visual Super Mario Bros. X - project by Aero (also known as AeroMatter or GhostHawk) founded in March/April of 2012. The project is created using VisualBasic.NET on .NET Framework 4 platform. The goal of VSMBX is to first recreate SMBX and then add on new features and content with far more flexibility. VSMBX will be open source (starting December 25th of 2014) for everyone, and anyone to create versions of their own that fit their needs and the needs of others and share them on this forum, on the VSMBX forums at vsmbxforums.prophpbb.com (now no longer available) where anyone you want can download. VSMBX will be primarily designed for Windows, unless or when popular opinion gravitates to cross-platform support. On August 4th, 2016, AeroMatter announced discontinuing on his official discussion thread.

Moondust Project (initially known as PGE Project)
On 12th February 2014, the Russian user Wohlstand first time joined the SMBX community (At that moment he was a student in the third course of MSTUCA) where he created his first post where he announced the beginning of his SMBX engine research works and future works on the "New cross-platform open-source SMBX engine", and also, he announced invitation of volunteers to help him with the project. He was greeted by community members who replied differently to him about announced plans: some people supported him, but some people expressed doubt. Wohlstand's topic wasn't liked by Joey the forum administrator who closed it and said that it's not necessary to spread false hopes in the community. At the same time, Wohlstand created his own site (initially located at engine.wohlnet.ru address) where he published his research results and project development news.

Later, Wohlstand's topic got been open back in the condition the title will be changed to "Wohlstand's SMBX research" because its initial content was related to the ongoing research work. Additionally, Joey added the shameful red notice into the main post's text which has been removed as soon as Wohlstand presented his first prototype of the editor for his future project, initially named PlatGenWohl and later named PGE Project.

At the same time, on 15th February 2014, Wohlstand founded his own forum focused on his project.

Initially, the new-baked Editor was a utility for level viewing and making huge screenshots until in August 2014 the full-functionality editor has been presented. Since that moment, Editor is able to open, save, and create compatible levels for SMBX. Somewhere in April 2014, Kevsoft has joined Wohlstand's work and majorly helped him in Editor's development.

Near to the end of 2014th year, Wohlstand began the work on the engine itself, and later, he presented its prototype. While the main engine of the project is in the long-term development process, the Editor and helper tools were accepted by the SMBX community for use as an alternative and more advanced toolkit to work with SMBX levels and episodes.

LunaDLL with Lua (LunaLua)
LunaLua - is a continuation of the LunaDLL project started by Kevsoft in September 2014, adding the Lua scripting sub-system which allows extending SMBX with user-friendly and flexible LUA scripts. LunaLua is also a platform that Wohlstand uses for some researches of SMBX which uses in Moondust development. LunaLua and Moondust Project are being developed by the same community (PGE Community, later known as WohlSoft).

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 several new features. Before recent times it was believed to be a fake. On September 13th, 2015, Snoopy Tour made a post with a link to Baidu where the Unofficial SMBX 1.4.1 was published, but people didn't believe 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 couldn't get it to work. 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. Theere is a big set of new in-game objects has been added into this project, majorly extended functionality of the world map, and also, game has its own scripting engine called TeaScript (its language is similar to VisualBasic).

The staff of SMBX forum has restricted publishing of SMBX-38A levels and episodes (explained by the fact that SMBX-38A before 1.4.2 making a lot of troubles to international users, for example, it required to switch regional standards into Chinese, otherwise, game won't launch at all). Because of that, the SMBX-38A related community standed at Wohlstand's forum where it stay in present, even after the SMBX-38A restriction was cancelled on SMBX forum later.

Super Mario Bros. X2
Super Mario Bros. X2 (SMBX2) - is a mod of SMBX 1.3, extending it by combining the LunaLua framework, PGE devkit (mainly for use of PGE Editor), and a brand new launcher that uses Qt and WebKit (later replaced with QWebEngine), founded by Horikawa Otane in December 2015 (before then there were early preparations done in a secret). The goal of project to present the ready for use toolkit to users. Also, to clean up the loose set of LunaLua add-ons and the PGE Project development kit (later renamed Moondust Project), which users had to complete themselves. It started to positioning as the mainstream version SMBX renders vanilla SMBX 1.3 obsolete, even though it's still used as the main core, it was hacked, extended, and modded with the LunaLua framework.

Since SMBX2 was founded, LunaLua is no longer released as a standalone framework as it continued development as a main component of the SMBX2 project. This project introduces a lot of new in-game elements and the powerful lua scripting system which gives a wide creativity possibilities.

Initial team had Horikawa Otane, Kevsoft, Hoeloe, Wohlstand, and Rednaxela.

Current state
As of now, SMBX Community now is staying at SuperMarioBrosX.org. SMBX is still in demand, and constantly receives new levels, graphics, and even episodes.

Since 2016 year, SMBX community got multiple chat servers on a new-created Discord platform. There are most notable of them:
 * Discordhaus (one of very first Talkhaus community servers)
 * Codehaus (initially named Discodehaus), created as a successor of the Skype group named Codehaus, created to discuss various topics related to programming.
 * In January 2016, the main SMBX community discord server has been created.
 * In Augist 2015, the SMBX-38A related Discord server has been created.

At the same time, around October 2016 year, Redigit has contacted to Joey, and there is a hope that Redigit possibly will give him SMBX source code, however, that didn't happen because of high business of Redigit at his main work and on other things.

In 2017th year, Kevsoft announces his leaving from the development of LunaLua, SMBX2, and PGE Project.

Near to middle of 2018th year, Horikawa Otane leaves the SMBX2 project. It's possible that's because of the Willhart user incident who stalked her maniacally (for what he was declared as a persona-non-grata at all chats and forums of SMBX community and Talkhaus). However, at the last time she had lesser care on SMBX community until she disappeared at all.

Around 2017~2018 year, the SuperMarioBrosX.org and all related resources has been transferred to Kley and other people (Aero, Marina, Pseudo, Panda).

On December 2019, Wohlstand announced that he will majorly reduce his activity at SMBX2 development to focus on his own projects (first off, Moondust Project development). Wohlstand explains the fact of his SMBX2 participation steals a lot of time and energy which he could spend on development of his main "child" in a face of PGE Project. Later, Wohlstand starts the work on gradual rebranding of his project into Moondust Project.

On January 2020, the long-awaited SMBX2 Beta 4 update has been released. Users waited 3 years for it. Before some months to the release, there are preview versions of project was out: the special release for the MAGLX3 level contest, and its leading update called "SMBX2pal" in honor of Pal the pully character from A2XT romhaks serie.

Source code
10 years after its last release in October 2010, On February 2nd, 2020, the original source code of SMBX 1.3 was finally released and published on GitHub under the MIT license. The source code was given to Kley by Redigit at end of 2019 year, however, the publishing was been delayed, because Redigit was likely concerned about legal issues, and was busy with other works.

Founding TheXTech
TheXTech - a platform game engine written in C++, is a full port of SMBX 1.3's original Visual Basic 6 source-code, created by Wohlstand one month after the original SMBX's source code was released. It was released to the public on March 14th, 2020, and has two purposes: providing an accurate, free and open-source, cross-platform, implementation of the SMBX Engine that allows old levels and episodes created for the original game to be played by reproducing its behavior and getting a more convenient research model for developing the Moondust Engine. Additionally, it has many functional extensions and improvements such as PNG support, GIF recording, Dynamic Resolution Support instead of being locked to only 800x600 (including Widescreen), improved player input options (including rumble support), LVLX, and WLDX formats support, using the MixerX audio library, sounds.ini and music.ini support, custom player calibrations support, fixing a bunch of vanilla bugs while providing the option to re-enable them back if needed, etc. Unlike the original game, it has support for multiple platforms far beyond Windows for x86, including (but not limited to): Linux, Mac OS, Haiku, Emscripten, and Android. Windows x86_64, and ARM64 builds were also provided.

Some of the known tested platforms include:
 * Windows for x86, x86_64, and ARM64
 * GNU/Linux for x86, x86_64, 32-bit & 64-bit ARM — Including the Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi 4B, and Pine64 Pinephone
 * Android
 * Original & New Nintendo 3DS via Homebrew — special thanks to efforts by ds-sloth
 * Sony PlayStation Vita via Homebrew — special thanks to efforts by Axiom

Links

 * Original SMBX history page
 * Current SMBX community site and forums
 * Collected SMBX:R Source code package (VB.NET)
 * VSMBX Official Thread
 * A2XT Project at Talkhaus