Care for an 80% solution?

[masonwheeler]

In the announcement, it says that none of the code has been written yet. How'd you like to change that?

I have a game engine that, over the last several years, I've been working on to accomplish most of the same goals as the stated goals for this project. It's almost complete now, but I've been very busy lately and haven't had too much time to put into it. I'd gladly accept help from the PGD community to bring the project to completion.

Basic information:

• The TURBU engine was originally designed to be a clone of RPG Maker 2000 and 2003, with stronger scripting capabilities to reduce the limitations inherent to RPG Maker's system. It's written in Delphi XE, with backend rendering handled by SDL and OpenGL.
• It uses a plugin system for its basic functionality: the game engine and the battle engines simply implement a defined interface, meaning that other engines could be written for it when the current one is finished.
• Almost all gameplay functionality is working, with the exception of the battle engine and the ability to play movies.
• Scripting is provided by a custom Pascal scripting engine I wrote, but it's not all that good so I'm currently in the process of converting it to DWS. I am a contributor on the DWS project, and several of my contributions have been things designed to make it work better with TURBU.
• The editor can currently create and edit maps and scripts, and import any RPG Maker 2000/2003 project. Database editing panels are still in the works.
• Like the game engine, the editor is a plugin host. It hosts an expanded version of the game engine inside the editor, with additional functionality for editing. This means, among other things, that the developer is able to playtest the game inside the editor.
• The project data is stored in a Firebird database, accessed through DBX.
• TURBU is currently Windows-only, but I'd love to make it able to run on Android as well.
• Sound is provided through Disharmony, a custom sound engine written in Delphi that handles many common wave and music formats, which I modified to hook into libmodplug for extra playback capability. I have the source to it, but I'm not at liberty to share it at the moment. I might be able to change that if I talk with the project maintainer, who has lost most of his interest in continuing to work on Disharmony. This would have to be extensively reworked to make it cross-platform, as Disharmony uses DirectX's sound and music APIs as its backend.
• All code is available on Google Code under MPL 1.1 at http://code.google.com/p/turbu

As you can probably tell, there are still a number of things that would have to be done to make it work cross-platform, such as getting DWS to run on non-Windows systems and coming up with a more portable music player, but most of the basic game engine is already in place. If you guys would like to short-circuit a few years of grunt work, here's one option for you...

Mason