3.0 Status

This is just a quick update before the new year to outline where things stand with regard to RPGMaker Trans 3.0

1. Ruby Parser: Pretty much done. It needs one modification to it to be complete, but that should be easy.
2. Patch file format 3.1: Done. There's a lot of features here, but the most prominent are that patches in 3.1 format have proper support for comments, are file agnostic (so a translation can be shared between multiple files), and don't have translations jump around (if a translation is in a given file at a given place, it will remain there). One feature is missing, which is for translations with no context.
3. VX Backend: Pretty much done. The only feature that requires implementing is translation of embedded scripts. This isn't too difficult, but it may not make the 3.0 release.
4. GUI/CLI separation: Previously, I had a single executable which could in principle handle both GUI and CLI modes. In practice, Windows broke the CLI when running from an executable, and given most people use RPGMaker Trans on Windows, that pretty much killed it. So the GUI/CLI have been separated out, and so there will be two executables available from now on; one handles the GUI mode, and the other the CLI. The CLI should be handy for scripting etc.
5. Frontend: Still working on embedding the backend into the frontend. Nothing too technically demanding, just annoyingly time consuming.
6. (editted to add) Unpacking: Also need to bake in the support for unpacking a VX game. It's implemented, but needs reworking for the RPGMaker Trans frameworks. 
7. (also editted in) Windows Support: I use Linux for development, and so I do need to add in Windows support. Mostly this is just packing up runtimes and stuff, so hopefully not too bad.

So, unfortunately, RPGMaker Trans 3.0 will not quite make it for 2014. But it should make it within the first month of 2015, which is something.

Towards 3.0

So, I'm heading towards RPGMaker Trans 3.0. I had previously hoped to get it out this year, but not sure if that deadline will be met. The reason?

When starting to integrate the prototype VX support, I have become honestly confused as to why RPGMaker Trans hasn't blown up in more spectacular ways. Like eating parts of patches. There's a rather major race condition in the 2k patching engine, and I just don't get how it hasn't caused problems...

In any case, I'm going to be spending a little bit of time reworking the infrastructure of RPGMaker Trans, so this kind of thing doesn't happen. Fortunately, Python now has the asyncio module, which is geared for this sort of thing. It would have been really useful back when I started the Version 2 rewrite, but back then it was the world of Python 2.7 and it was a completely different landscape back then...

And for anyone not reading between the lines, 3.0 = VX support.