Open-sourcing Trains & Things (and our other projects)

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Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects.

As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had.

The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/
Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored on GitLab, which includes: Dog Fight and Trains & Things repositories. Our smaller projects are stored on GitHub.

So lets talk about Trains & Things. On GitLab you will find two repositories for Trains & Things:

Trains And Things Assets is the the first which includes all the raw assets we have developed for Trains & Things. Mainly, Blender and Krita files.

Trains And Things is the second and likely more interesting repository. This includes all source code and exported assets. It includes everything needed to build and run Trains & Things. This repo also is where we track the issues/tasks to be done. There is also a JIRA export here which listed our future plans for Trains & Things should it have taken off, such as support for Aircraft, Trucks and Boats (this is where the 'Things' part of Trains & 'Things' is from)!

There is a branch in each repository for each version of the game we have released. Master branch is the development branch which includes the latest version of the game. Here we currently have the next version of the game which is ready to go, except the China map needs finishing and the water shader needs fixing to look as good as it did when we had the game running on Godot 3.0. We intended to mark this as version 1.0 and leave early access, but this is where we have stalled due to the reasons listed above. To help get past the issue of waiting for Godot 4.0 and GDScript 2.0 stability, I also have a special branch called engine_upgrade. This branch exists as an attempt to update to the latest version of Godot (although I have been locking it to certain commits of the Godot master branch to help me do this in steps). This is really where we could use the help to get version 1.0 out the door and to leave early access.

My general approach for working in the engine_upgrade branch is: First, fix the C++ code to compile. Second, work on fixing the GDScript as much as possible (porting from GDScript 1 to 2 really). Rinse and repeat every few months until the game actually will work again.... I have yet to reach this point and doubt I will.

Some of you will be thinking: does this means I can get Trains & Things (and your other games) for free? The short answer is yes! But it will require effort as we only ship and sell binaries on steam and/or itch.io. You will have to build the binaries from the appropriate repos yourself. We will continue to sell our games so if you do want to support us financially for all our hard work please purchase our games from the appropriate store. If you want to help move the development of Trains & Things forward (or any of our other projects) you are also welcome to submit pull requests. I have mentioned the state of where we are in the hope that some of the community might be keen to help get version 1.0 reached.

 


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