To all DM's Toolkit users--
Well, everyone, it's been a while since you've heard from us regarding the Toolkit, and we have an announcement to make.
4e came out at kind of a bad time for Mad Letter and myself, in terms of Toolkit timing; both of us have just entered college, and are taking mostly higher-level courses, so we're swamped with work and haven't spoken more than a few times since school began. Since November-ish, the amount of progress I've made on coding new stuff couldn't be closer to “nothing” unless I actually deleted all of the code, and Mad Letter hasn't touched the website in months.
So, at this point, you're probably saying “So what does this mean for us?” The answer is: quite a bit, actually. Effective immediately, we're going open-source with the Toolkit. I was really hoping that he and I would be able to keep this closed-source until we had version of all the Creators up and running, and then release it for whatever tweaking people would want to do once we had something to be proud of, but unfortunately it looks like we're not going to be able to work on it for the foreseeable future, and we'd rather have someone out there besides us work on it than to have it languish entirely.
There are a few things that won't change—due to the agreement we have with Excelsior, if you want the Toolkit packed up in a fancy installer, you'll have to send it to us to distribute it. Also, bug reports will still go to
dm.toolkit@gmail.com, and we'll try to keep the website updated with bugs found. We will be hosting any versions for download that people are willing to send us; we'll take any tweaked versions and integrate them into a whole so any improvements made are shared among all Toolkit users; we have time for that much, at least, and we owe it to the community to do so.
What is changing? First off, the Mac people should be happy; since we're releasing the source, I now have no problem with just putting up a .jar so Mac, Windows, and Linux users can use it equally. The source code will be available for download on our site as soon as we can put it up (which may not be for a few days). If you want assistance with deciphering the code—since it was in the middle of a re-coding when I had to stop work on it—you can PM or email us all you want and we'd be happy to help. We're not abandoning the project by any means, just opening it up to other coders and artists so they can make progress where we cannot.
The code will be released under the GNU Public License, which means in a nutshell that (A) this is still the DM's Toolkit, so you can't change that or try to take credit for the whole thing; (B) you can't change the code a bit and charge for it, so this is going to remain free no matter what; and (C) you have to keep the license if you make any changes.
Thanks to everyone for all the support we've received since the very first suggestions of an idea were made three months before 4e went live. Thanks to Scott Rouse, who got our project the green light when many other electronic projects stalled and died. Thanks to everyone who hung on and cheered us on when we kept saying “We can't work on it.”
So break out your residuum, everybody; we're casting a
raise dead on this project, and you're invited.
--Eldritch Lord, chief programmer, with Mad Letter, head artist
