History

The history of the Super Mario Limitless project began with the announcement of the conclusion of the development of Super Mario Brothers X. Super Mario Brothers X was a very powerful and popular Mario level editor that was being worked on by Andrew "Redigit" Spinks. It was a fairly robust game, featuring a level editor and a wide selection of sprites, blocks, and other objects. It also had a fairly powerful layers and events system, and offered some customization of existing objects.

In early 2011, Spinks was allegedly contacted by a law firm representing Nintendo. They requested that he take down Super Mario Brothers X, the gameplay videos on his YouTube channel, and his website, supermariobrothers.org. He complied, and requested of the community not to post download links to the project.

Celarix (at the time, smc_gamer) was a teenager with an interest in programming. He was trying to figure out how SMBX worked (namely, its physics and game physics in general), until one morning, it hit him: Objects are represented by positions on a Cartesian plane, and velocity could be determined as a change in position over time. He looked into programming solutions and found XNA. He was already somewhat proficient in the .NET Framework and the managed languages it provided.

In June 2011, he announced the project as an idea to remake SMBX on an unofficial forum for SMBX and gained quick support. Joey signed on within a few days of posting the thread. A meeting was held on an IRC channel, where the name was decided and a very general idea was put together.

Coding started very soon after, with a CodePlex project and a Mercurial repository established. Celarix contributed the base code for an XNA game and a debugging window.

Celarix left the project for a few months beginning in July. He returned later in the fall, and fbrookie signed on in October. fbrookie contributed a large amount of code, and the project began to take shape. His code established quite the base for the game, and added a rudimentary physics, collision, and level structure.

Between April and September of 2012, Celarix worked on creating the world code, including formats and object specifications. Sometime in summer or fall, pabdulin signed on to the project, but due to personal commitments he could not contribute.

However, contributions from fbrookie stalled, and the project began to drift. An old user from the SMBX community approached the team with interest in joining the project, as well as a criticism of its current state. Kawata advocated restarting the project from scratch due to its complexity and aimlessness. Eventually, Celarix and Joey signed on to the idea, and Kawata joined the project and began coding. Kawata left due to a disagreement with Joey over filenames.

After Christmas, Celarix and Joey came to a realization that their ideas for the project were very different. Their ideas would work well separately, but not well together. They split the project in two on good terms, with Celarix as the sole maintainer of SML, and Joey starting his own project.

Since then, Celarix has been working on building the game from scratch, this time with a focus on planning before coding and knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. This wiki was started in March of 2012 to document the code, serve as a host for plans, and to host tutorials and walkthroughs.