As a newbie to Godot, there’s a curious question I’d like to discuss.
Most of you may remember the infamous 2000 film Thomas And The Magic Railroad and its rocky production history of how Britt Allcroft’s labor of love was shattered by executive meddling after a poor test screening, and ultimately formed into a convoluted mess that not only became a box office flop, but also brought the Thomas & Friends series toward a slow decline in quality as time progressed. In recent years however (following the passing of Britt in 2024), a group of fans are beginning to restore her original cuts using a variety of archived material that were sold from a Britt Allcroft Archive auction, and hopefully their restoration will do justice to her original vision when they release it around this year. But let’s not go off-topic for now.
What some of you may not know was that following the release of the film, there was an obscure PC print studio game released exclusively in the UK where children (and even adult fans) can create and print out greeting cards, posters, jigsaws, growth charts, and more featuring characters from the film. While the game itself isn’t anything special, it was a pretty niche product for children at the time, and it has gained somewhat of a following for fans (even outside the UK) who’ve tested the game on virtual machines that run Windows 98 or Windows ME.
But as computer systems continue to evolve, support for Print Studio was compromised as emulating it on post-Win98 operating systems either make the game crash on certain activities, or just have incompatible drivers and/or codes that prevent the game from running on modern hardware. And as much as it sounds complicated and unlikely to pull off, I’m wondering if a few experienced Godot users might find some interest to create a fan replica of that game using most of the image/audio assets from the game’s files, but with a few modifications to make the game less buggy and compatible with current hardware.
Think it’s possible to recreate in Godot? Let’s talk in the comments!
Godot doesn’t currently and probably will never support printing out of the box, you may create a GDExtension for printing with libcups.
re-creating this image editor sounds like a better task for a smaller framework like SDL where blitting directly to image data is easier and expected. And using libcups for printer support would be easier to integrate.
That’s true, unless if there’s an extension for exporting images to a PNG or PDF to workaround that sort of issue (even though it’d probably defeat the purpose of the game’s printing capability).
I think it is very feasible to recreate this, but it is of course a serious time commitment.
If, indeed you’re satisfied with PNG export as an outcome, one could use a javascript bridge to invoke a browser’s print function when this is a webgame or a progressive web app.
That would take away the necessity to integrate cups into Godot via c++ based gdextension.
I built an in-editor vector drawing tool that does PNG export as well (and the editor viewport works the same way as a built game), so I know it’s pretty trivial to achieve.
Also, I would definitely suggest your fan club try and get some collaboration from an institute like the British Library, or a similar national / regional media archive. Thomas the Tank Engine is British National heritage for sure.
I answered your question with a vague estimate: “yes, this can be done, but it will take time and effort,” and you dropped a on it, so now I am curious what type of next steps you are considering.
So do you have any experience managing a project like this?
What about the potential type of backing/collab you might find in heritage institutions I mentioned?
You could just start up a git repository on https://codeberg.org for instance and fill up the issue list with milestones.
Mind you, this is not criticism, merely curiosity… ..how do grass roots initiatives grow up to mature products?
on it, so now I am curious what type of next steps you are considering.