This version of ESMB solves the notorious "No module name 'src'" bug that has been an issue since the beginning. Anyone should now be able to download and run from source. I have tested this on MacOS, Win10, and Ubuntu 20.04. Thank you so much @Harald-Berghoff!
The following is a copy of my reddit post here
ESMB Year 2 Review
It’s been a relatively quiet year for ESMB. The last release was Beta 0.4 on 15 November 2019. It finalized the architecture of the design and code of ESMB that will be used going forward. I began developing functionality for NPC creation and editing, and mostly completed the GUI for that part during the lockdowns. Most development slowed or stopped as my classes moved online, but in May I graduated with my B.S. in Computer Science, concentration in Software Engineering. Since then development stopped entirely as I packed everything up and moved across the country to start working full time.
What is ESMB?
Endless Sky Mission Builder (ESMB) is a click and type mission building tool to create content for Endless Sky. It’s aim is to give anyone a quick and easy way to create missions for the game
ESMB is not dead
After the move I had no place to set up my desktop and development environment. I didn’t have a desk until a couple months ago, but now that I do, I’m looking forward to getting back to work on this. I love this project, and I’ve gotten to learn and practice new technologies that I never got to try during college.
Coming Soon
- Carrying forward the design and architecture of ESMB already created, I am going to be rewriting everything in C++, using Qt for the GUI framework. The single biggest limitation for further development of this project was Tkinter. Not only is the framework hard to work with, resizing the window tends to break things, every widget has to be built from scratch, and Tkinter is unreliable for MacOS because of how python and the TCL library are organized on that OS. Best of all: Qt looks gorgeous, supports themes a lot better, and has a drag and drop widget creator that will speed up development appreciably. Finally, the C++ codebase will hopefully attract more PRs and help from the pool of people interested in working on Endless Sky.
- To facilitate this I am upgrading my PC, using the old parts to build a server box that will host the Jenkins build server for this project. This will allow me to build a free, professional CI/CD pipeline for ESMB, in addition to bringing back MacOS support. Executables will be appended to each release, and I may switch that to installers later if that’s a possibility.
- Documentation will be moved to its own repository, potentially as a GitHub Site. The wiki features are okay, but no one seems to use them, and you can’t PR the wiki. This will allow anyone to PR tutorials, better documentation, etc.
- A new C++ conversion branch will be created in the current repository, and once the conversion is done will be merged onto master, replacing the current code and bringing the version number to Beta 1.0. The NPC code I created was just for the GUI, so it will not be included.
Thank You!
Thanks to everyone who has downloaded and given feedback, opened PRs, and helped make Endless Sky and ESMB what it is today. I look forward to working with you all next year. Stay safe, stay healthy, and let’s make 2021 Endless Sky’s best year yet!
Where We Are Now
The build server has been assembled, and is almost ready for use. Once I have some storage in there I can configure Jenkins, and then it's off to the races! If you want to follow the progress, the repo now has a project page, located here