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SMWMTL is a little tool coded in Visual Basic .NET and based on .NET Framework 4.6 (4.0 previously), which begin in December 26, 2018.
The main objective of this tool is to allow those who create Super Mario World hacks to centralize all the tools they use to avoid searching for each tool in your folders, and to improve the development process by increasing the time of concentration spent on the hack itself, which leads to a better productivity and creativity.
In 2016, I created my first hack, a very bad one which was created in almost two months. At this time, I only created this hack using Lunar Magic, YY-CHR, Asar and some other tools. At this time, creating a hack using those 3 or 4 tools was not difficult, so the question wasn't really asked at this time.
Several months later, I started the development of another hack, but this time more complex and polished (which were never released). For doing this, I had to get a dozen of tools that almost everyone use and since the project continues to improving and the number of files continues to growing at a crazy speed, I rapidly conclued that a tool that centralize all the tools I use was not a that bad idea, but since I was focused on continuing the development of this hack, this idea never go any further.
The idea stayed as it, until December 2018.
In December 2018, one year after the the cancellation of the previous project and one month after I lost almost all my previous work due to my hard disk broke, me and a friend started to working together on a hack (which were also never released), my friend were in trouble when he started to use all of these tools, and because he's french, he complains all the time about how difficult creating a hack was with so many tools to manage and use.
At this moment, I remembered the idea I got one year earlier and I secretly started to work on it on December 26, 2018.
Two days later, on December 28, the final build of version 1.00 (build 95) was compiled and I sent it to my friend for helping him about his complains, and we continued to create our hack. Meanwhile, I tried to release it on SMWCentral, but because of the way it was coded for launchable applications which were linked to it, the application was rejected.
And the rest are belong to the history.
Version 1.00 (Codenamed "Phoenix") is the very first release of SMWMTL, released on December 28, 2018. It have a very basic implementation of the applications that can be launched. These applications couldn't be changed or relocated, since the path were hardcoded into the application and upgradability was very limited.
It also have a very basic application launch protocol, based on CMD commands through an invisible CMD prompt, a protocol that were kept until the launch of the 2.0x releases, and being replaced with the introduction of 2.1x releases.
Version 1.10 (Codenamed "Marshmallow"), released on July 1, 2019, added a lot of improvements, such as the addition of a French version (separated from the english one) and the inclusion of the sub-menu into the main application window.
Version 1.20 (Codenamed "Skycream"), released on October 11, 2019, fixed a huge crash bug if VB PowerPacks is not installed on the system and added a french version of the Help files. A version 1.21 was planned to release on October 21, 2019 for fixing a bug but as the bug is unaccessible by the fact that the window where the bug is present is hidden, this fix version was cancelled. Sadly, I lost this version but I kept one screenshot of it on the facebook page dedicated to my YouTube channel that I closed earlier on March 7, 2022).
On January 24, 2020, the development of the version 1.30 (which quickly became the version 2.00) started.
The main objectives of this release was to unify the both English and French versions to only one single version with both languages included and a better customizability (DWMAPI support, better design).
Those versions were the first one that includes SMWMTL_Update (in his version 1.0) that can only check if an update is available. And who said "First version" means "miscoded thing", because today the only version from the 2.0x branch that can still search updates correctly without error is the version 2.07.
Those versions are also the first one to include the current main window layout, with the buttom bar, the 4-column sub-menu panel and Lunar Magic 1 Click to Launch.
A LTS version was originally planned, but was cancelled due to how bad the update system is, because it requires too many modifications to support correctly LTS variants...
Version 2.01 fixed a huge bug of settings badly defined, especially for OOBE and removed an unused DLL that causes UI glitches when program is running in english.
Versions 2.02 and 2.03 fixed several bugs (.NET Exceptions, OOBE bugs, Windows XP crashes) and did some optimizations (like reducing used space in 2.02).
Version 2.04 makes a first big milestone, because it was the only one compiled using Visual Studio 2012, after a first IDE Upgrade from Visual Studio 2010.
Version 2.05 marked a second big milestone : It was the first compiled using Visual Studio 2019 and introduced the Windows XP/32-bit end of support notification window. It also introduces several QoL changes and several other bugfixes.
Version 2.06 fixes some bugs mainly introduced in 2.05 and continued to improve the stability of SMWMTL 2.0x.
Version 2.07 is the final version of the 2.0x codebase. It introduces the final fix for the update system with 4-digits build numbers from 2.10-RC1 (Build 1000.00). This version is also the last to support ReactOS due to the unusability this platform have with SMWMTL on versions 2.1x.