RPGMaker Trans v2.06 released, now open source

Hey, I actually managed to keep one of my self set arbitrary deadlines. RPGMaker Trans is now open source, and hosted on Bitbucket. So, noticeable changes:

1. Bug reports should now go on the Bitbucket issue tracker - much more useful, and it has the same sign in requirements as the blog, so not any harder to use (well, probably).
2. Downloads are now served by Bitbucket instead of Dropbox.
3. RPGMaker Trans now has an icon.
4. RPGMaker Trans license changed to GPLv3.
5. Technically, RPGMaker Trans is now fully cross platform. To run on another OS, you need Python 3, PySide and BeautifulSoup4, and then run rpgmakertransmain.py in the source. The value of being cross platform is questionable, given that RPGMaker is only on Windows.
6. If running RPGMaker Trans from the source distribution (emphasis: not the binary download), you can now try the undocumented and probably untested CLI (command line interface; useful for people who want to script the translation process). Start RPGMaker Trans with the --cli option and you'll get help on what the parameters should be. This will be added to the readme soonish, but I only just remembered about this, and I'm not going to put off launch to document it.
7. And finally, the blog gets a new theme. It's a suitably momentous occasion.

 Enjoy. I've still got a few more things to push into the repository (e.g. my initial attempts at VX support), but this should be enough for a good enough release.

EDIT: I initially put the wrong binary on the website. If you're one of the 10 who downloaded it and get the error "TypeError: Type str doesn't support the buffer API", please redownload.

Starting to move to open source

Well, it's been a long time coming, but soon (hopefully within the next month or so), RPGMaker Trans will be open source. Good new for those who care about this sort of thing, which probably isn't many of you.

There's been a lot of issues moving to open source; the biggest practical one was that early on I had some help from a real-life friend of mine who did not (and still does not) want to be identified. Practically, that meant that I wasn't able to release his code as open source, and without that, RPGMaker Trans would mostly not work. However, I've recently got in touch with him and he is now satisfied that his code is no longer present in the current RPGMaker Trans codebase, and hence does not object to it being open sourced.

So the current stuff that needs doing before open sourcing:

1. Documentation: Full documentation won't be available until some way down the line, but at least partial documentation needs to be there if open sourcing is to have any value. Module level documentation is now done, and for the first open source release this will do.
2. Deobfuscation: Some code is... slightly obfuscated. No real reason for it, but it needs to be fixed.
3. General tidy-up: I don't think I'll be following pep8 too strictly (for those who know it), but the code is really ugly in places. A quick spring clean would be nice. I ran autopep8 over the code and I think I'll call it a day. Some pylint based stuff will happen later, but not now.
4. License: I've not yet decided on the license. I'm leaning towards GPLv3, but I've not yet decided. Decided that the license will be GPLv3.
5. Project Logo: I need one of these. I used to have an icon for RPGMaker Trans, but it was rubbish... I've got a logo now. Still pretty bad, but honestly, there's only so many ideas for a 'logo for translation software'

 And for posterity, a list of things that have already been done:

1. Removing code that cannot be distributed openly
2. Migrate from Bazaar to Mercurial for version control
3. Setting up hosting at Bitbucket
4. Saner source organisation

Please don't direct link to Dropbox files

Reasons? Basically, if I release a new version, your link becomes out of date and it's annoying to get share requests for files which no longer exist. Couple that with the fact that the update checker rather means that anyone downloading a direct link would have to come to this page and get the new version anyway... and yeah, direct links aren't so good.

So if you want to share stuff RPGMaker Trans, great, but link to this page please.

RPGMaker Trans v2.05 Released

A minor release. Changes:

• Fixed a crash with opening a zip file where the patch was not included in a subdirectory
• Crash reporter now has a button which copies the traceback to clipboard and opens up the bug reports page

Why the slow progress? Well, I've actually been looking around at RPGMaker Trans usage, and every time I see people redistributing prepatched stuff, sometimes in direct contravention of the original authors wishes, I lose motivation for this project. I'm aware that in making a tool such as this I can't really stop it from happening, but it's still frustrating.

Bug Reports page

So I've added a special page for bug reports, to try and get some order into this site. Link is just below the download link, so hopefully it's noticeable. There's some instructions on the bug reports page about information that is useful for me to fix bugs.

RPGMaker Trans v2.04 Released

Another new release. Two things:

1. Support loading patches with a UTF-8 BOM
2. Support saving patches with a UTF-8 BOM (via an option)

For those who don't know what a UTF-8 BOM is, it's something Microsoft invented to identify UTF-8 documents. It's almost universally not recommended for technical reasons, but certain text editors on Windows require it. Of course, using a UTF-8 BOM on editors that don't require it could break those editors, hence why it's an option and not enabled-by-default.

Microsoft: Breaking standards since (insert some arbitrary date here)

RPGMaker Trans v2.03 Released

So apparently, there's a bug on the specific version of cx_freeze that I used. I'm not sure how to trigger this bug, because it didn't show up for me, but if it does show up you can't use the patcher at all.

Anyhow, the workaround seems to be using an older version of cx_freeze, so I've done that, and hence v2.03 is released. If you have v2.02 and it works for you, there's no need to upgrade. Otherwise, grab v2.03 and hopefully it will work.