2021: Results

As the year of 2021 is coming to an end, it's time to look back and reflect on what's been done this year. It is a no doubt milestone year for the Grand Theft Auto franchise in all aspects and, unfortunately, not everything went well. Aggressive behavior of Take2 towards the modding community and the remastered trilogy release fiasco are not what we, the loyal fans, expected to see. My personal biggest disappointment of the year is the Take2's decision of taking down the re3 project and suing the team behind it. I really hope that the case will get resolved in a favor of the defendant party.

To me the year was full of hard work and to my satisfaction I was able to achieve some of the goals I had in mind. Here goes the three main areas I was focusing on.

First of all, my oldest project - Sanny Builder - has turned 16! It's hard to believe but I've been developing this tool since July 2005 and still full of ideas. Speaking of which, some of them were finally implemented. Sanny celebrated two new versions this year: 3.7 in January and 3.8 in August. The editor got the dark theme (among many other cool themes, thanks to the contributors!), an ability to find and highlight declared constants (which I described in this blog), an integration with the command documentation portal. Also we are now finally able to compile the main.scm for Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories opening the door to changing the storyline in those games. If you would like to know more, start from the changelog and follow its links.

The documentation portal I just mentioned is Sanny Builder Library. Started as a trivial command list a year ago it has turned into a full-featured portal serving hundreds of users and providing information about script commands in 9 different games across classic, mobile and remastered releases. I spent almost half a year on developing and maintaining this website and it would not be possible without other people contributing to it and inspiring me. There is still a lot of work and I hope to see more people joining us. The library and its content is crucial when it comes to my third project of the year: CLEO Redux.

As many other things it was a spontaneous idea. Sanny 3.8 just came out as I got an email asking if I can make CLEO for re3. Everything came together nicely. I had some extra free time from my other activities, was fresh on specifics of GTA 3 and GTA Vice City after working almost every day on Sanny Builder Library and what's more important I felt more prolific in the Rust language which I've been studying for more than a year by that moment. I was itching to use it in my projects and made a few successful attempts already (the Sanny Builder's language service was one of them). There could not be a better project for Rust than a very low-level library such as CLEO. Surprisingly it only took me a few days to make a MVP version running compiled scripts in re3 and reVC.

CLEO Redux is by any means my pinnacle project now as it perfectly combines everything I enjoy working with: Rust, GTA, memory hacking and scripting languages (specifically JavaScript).

And here comes my small surprise announcement: CLEO Redux expands to the GTA HD universe! It should receive its first HD era title support the following year. See this teaser video: https://youtu.be/qR5J4daUVZw

Among the other things happened in 2021, I can briefly highlight the following:

- I launched a Discord server for CLEO and Sanny Builder and everyone is welcome to join our discussion here: https://discord.gg/d5dZSfgBZr 

- CLEO Redux was a runner-up in the mods contest organized by the LibertyCity portal.

- I got my very first patrons supporting me here on Patreon. Thanks a lot DadlyPrey, BroXe and Junior_Djjr. 

My special greetings go to MatiDragon, Vadim M., Vital, wmysterio, XMDS. You guys rock! Keep up the good work!

I wish everyone happy holidays! Be happy, well and stay tuned for more updates in 2022!