Is Camoto and Malvineous still active?

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Hisymak
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Is Camoto and Malvineous still active?

Post by Hisymak »

Hello. I was wondering if Malvineous is still (or will be) actively working on Camoto Studio, or he stopped all his work or even totally abandoned it. I could not see any activity on Camoto Studio during the last year at all, and I was trying to contact Malvineous with e-mails, but he did not respond to any of them. I only saw Malvineous being a little active on the Modding Wiki.

If Camoto has really ended, I'm guessing these may be the main reasons for it:
1) Development of a universal modding tool for many different games is really very difficult and exhaustive work. There are many various and unique file and level formats to consider, and it's really hard to make the libraries and UI work with all of them in a unified way.
2) There are no (or very few) people who would actively use Camoto studio to make real and playable mods or level packs. The modding community is not very strong nowdays and there is either very poor interest in making mods for the DOS games, or the people who are interested do not have time.
3) He simply does not have time.

I personally found Camoto when I was looking for a level editor for Hocus Pocus and Vinyl Goddess from Mars, my most favourite platformers (apart from Commander Keen, of course). I was happy it supported both games, but the level editing support was very poor and incomplete, it could only edit the tiles and not the special objects and events, and UI was quite hard to use. Then I decided to make my own editors for both games. I easily overcame the problem 1) because instead of a universal tool I just made a program which was specialized for one particular game, so I did not need to bother with universal libraries and instead I could fully concentrate on the game-specific elements.
I wonder if this could discourage Malvineous from continuing his work, because he could see somebody already did the same work and better. I was asking him on his opinions on my programs but he was not very speaky and seemed uninterested. On the other hand I think that was already AFTER he ended work on Camoto.
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Commander Spleen
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Re: Is Camoto and Malvineous still active?

Post by Commander Spleen »

He's still around but is often busy with other IRL priorities. Last I heard a large part of Camoto was being rewritten from scratch due to increasing maintenance difficulties, so it may be a long time before we see a new version.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Re: Is Camoto and Malvineous still active?

Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Hisymak wrote:I was trying to contact Malvineous with e-mails, but he did not respond to any of them.
I emailed him in at the end of October 2016 and pretty much instantly got a response from him. So I suppose you either used the wrong email address or your message didn't make it past the spam filters.
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