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First, this project isn't done yet. There may be files missing from the repo (I thought there was a copy of the BRender source in it, but I can't find it now. So either I was wrong or it's missing from the release, and I need to find out which.

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And there's also other games that used the BRender engine, some of which could never be open sourced because they depended on BRender. Well, it's open source now! So that opens them up to the possibility of open sourcing then as well. I'm asking various people and companies.

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Because it'd be sweet to have BRender's open sourcing lead to other games using it open sourced too, much like how the BUILD engine going open source lead to Duke Nukem 3D getting open sourced.

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And right now is the perfect time to continue that momentum.

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But other than this initial project, here's my current plans going forward, with the BRender and 3D Movie Maker source.

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First off, for BRender: I'm going to work on a modernized version of the code. This should be relatively minor, but basically I'm going to be getting it to compile on modern compilers, making it 64bit clean, and integrating the tools and such from the SDKs.

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The idea is to make a version of BRender that you could base a game on today, and target old systems or modern ones.

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A big part of this will be to rewrite the x86 assembly it uses to native C/C++ code, so it can be multi-platform. Porting it to other operating systems like Linux, Mac, Android, WebAssembly? On the table, but not a high priority for now.

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Next up, I'm going to be doing two projects with the 3D Movie Maker source, building on top of the BRender project. These two projects will be Chocolate Socrates and Movie Maker Plus.

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So Chocolate Socrates is a pun on Chocolate Doom and the internal code name for 3D Movie Maker. The idea is to make a modernized easy to install 3D Movie Maker, that gives you the experience of playing it back in the day.

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So this will involve modernizing the build to use current compilers, fixing compatibility problems that have arised in the last 27 years, and basically just giving a "the original 3DMM but not buggy because you're running on windows 11 instead of win95"

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That'll provide a basic version that just works, handy for nostalgia and such, easy to install on current systems without much issues.

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And the other project is Movie Maker Plus (the name comes from a failed "3dmm2" project I worked on two decades ago). This will be the improvement branch. Think like how doom source ports add mouse look and 3D accelerated graphics and such.

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For this version, I'll add new features and fix issues that have always plagued the program. The idea is to keep it compatible with old movies, but to be the ideal platform to make new 3DMM movies in.

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For this version, I'll be doing things like removing the 256 color limitation, adding better sound support, bigger textures, native video export, integrated v3dmm support, and new tools for making movies, like camera movement, direct skeletal animation, etc.

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One of my goals is to keep it as simple and easy to use as the original, if not easier. 3DMM is a great tool for making little animations in, like for classes or small video projects. (there's even an educational guidebook for that that I need to scan!)

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And while adding new features to it is neat, I don't want to make it harder to use. There's other software for that.

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So yeah. That's my current plans!

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And I didn't say it in the other threads because it wasn't the right place, but if you want to send me a dollar or two to support these plans, I've got a kofi!

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Oh, and since it's not required by the license used by these source releases, I'd like to confirm that my new work on it will remain open source.

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GitHub - foone/3DMMForever: A modernized version of the Microsoft 3D Movie Maker release

I created the repo for the Chocolate Socrates project. I decided to keep that a code name, and the public facing name will be 3DMM Forever. Nothing in the repo yet, but I'm linking it here in case anyone wants to bookmark/star it.

github.com

A modernized version of the Microsoft 3D Movie Maker release - GitHub - foone/3DMMForever: A modernized version of the Microsoft 3D Movie Maker release

Another 2 minor projects I need to do soon: 1. Explain how to install the old version of 3DMM out of the repo. There's the contents of the CD all in there, so you should be able to pull them down and play them, and they'll run on modern windows with a few issues.

There are already guides on doing this but they are based on "get this iso from the internet archive" and it'd be nice to have a version that only uses the approved Microsoft releases, so it is more legally clear that it's fine to do this.

Project 2 is figuring out the translations/audio situation. They only released the English US version, and plenty of people remember the UK version. You just need to swap out some audio files to get that version, and I think I saw permission to distribute those?

So I'm gonna ask and confirm that it's okay to distribute the Non-US versions, and either distribute them or just the audio files + a simple guide on swapping them in.

I have at least the following versions: US UK Italian Spanish Japanese I think there was also a French version? But I'm not 100% sure, and if there is, I don't have it. Maybe I can get it from Microsoft.

Anyway, going back to 3DMM Forever, my first goals are basically 1. Get it compiling, presumably on period accurate compilers/environments. Document how this is done so other's playing with the code can build on it.