A few days ago I released a new version of GemRB, which included more than a year’s worth of effort from various volunteers. Read more about it here.

While some of the changes do stand out, it occurred to me that I’ve been working on this project for the past 10 years. I’ve sent first patches around this time in 2007 and got commit access soon thereafter. It started way before that though — I’ve learnt about the project from the HappyPenguin site that was tracking releases of open source gaming projects and with each release I’d read the changelog, pop into IRC or the forums and get a feel for the status of the project.

At the end of 2007 I’ve just had enough of the waiting (these are my favourite games after all) and decided to help speed things along. One of the first things you do in most RPGs is build your character, so that’s where I started and immediately found a bunch of bugs or differences from the original engine. This is all handled by the python GUIScripts, which was the project’s way of unhardcoding the original GUI. So an easy to understand piece of high level code that’s a great place to start. And then it just snowballed from there as I got to know more of the code and community …

A lot has happened since! Comparing GemRB of 0.2 days to now, all but one game are completable (versus zero back then), most subsystems are on par with the originals or better, there’s more polish, more exotic platform support, first substantial mods, a trivial demo and the whole project is more professional. From just having a SourceForge page with SVN, we moved to a dokuwiki instance on our own domain, git@GitHub, continuous integration (Travis and Appveyor) and periodic static analysis. Some indie studios were even looking into using the engine throughout the years.

Of course, there’s still plenty of work to be done, be it researching and reverse-engineering, programming, testing, building/packaging, creating art, promoting … open source projects of this scale are rarely finished. Even though we’re inching our way to the fabled 1.0 release, that will hardly be the end of it. Come and join us for the ride.