This time last year, I was putting the finishing touches on the Map Viewer, a proof-of-concept clone of the RPG Maker 2000 game engine that had taken me 9 months to write and almost worked perfectly. (Almost.) Then I switched away from it towork on the editor. 12 months later, I’ve got barely anything to show for it. School and work have been getting in the way all year.
And I’ve been thinking. I don’t have any real reason to keep the whole project to myself anymore. Any income I might have earned by selling the finished product would be nowhere near what I’m making at the programming job that keeps taking time away from working on the editor. And development’s going far too slowly with just me working at it alone. So… I’m not going to anymore. Over the next couple weeks, I’m gonig to clean up the code a bit, (because frankly it’s in an embarrassing state right now,) set up a SVN repository on the turbu-rpg.com server, and officially convert project TURBU into an open-source project.
Merry Christmas, everyone. You’re getting a look under the hood of the engine, and (hopefully) faster development. It won’t be easy to contribute. I’m well aware of that. All coding is being done in the Delphi language, and relies heavily on the Generics features introduced in the most recent release, so nobody without a copy of Delphi 2009 will be able to contribute code. (At least not all that easily.) But anyone who wants to will be welcome to help out in any way they can, and I’ll still be doing the bulk of the coding work. And hopefully I can get a few talented coders to join forces with me and we can get development going strong again.
Here’s to a strong 2009!