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Thanks, TZ!

GodzFire wrote:Strat, Vinyl, and Baak, which Myth tools did you do in the past? I'm always interested in seeing if anyone that made oldies like Bartok or MONSEdit, etc would still even be around.

All my stuff is currently stand-alone PC apps, only one of which is semi-public. One of my Fall/Winter projects this year is to combine the functionality of a couple of them into an on-line tool that any mapmaker can use.

I created an extensive film "cataloger and renamer" that also did chat extraction (example here) into both text and UTF-8 HTML color-coded niceness. We (the OoH) play so many 3rd party maps that I got very deep into cataloging the map plugins along with the films themselves. This is currently a stand-alone PC app that isn't released to the public - my plan is to include this as an on-line tool someday(tm) and slap the data in a db.


I dug in even deeper a few months back and made a tool (parts originally written in Perl a million years ago with the new stuff written in Python - now converted to PHP (my fave language for years)), that analyzes a multiplayer map plugin for all kinds of extra stuff that is all too easy to miss when building maps (at least for me). Things like: (1) proper # observers for each team; (2) matched # units on every team *for every unit type* - down to the level of detail including: difficulty settings, trading settings, invisible units, etc.; (3) checks for Assassin and Hunting units that are marked as "targets" properly; (4) matching game flag/ball settings for teams; (5) some more stuff and lots of other things I keep adding. This tool allows me to check my multi maps for things that are incredibly tedious without it, which is part of why I wrote it - the other part is to incorporate it into my map cataloging and do things like list all the unit trading combinations for each and every map and stick this info into a huge database. This one is my "uber tool" that I plan to make available on-line for any Myth II mapmaker to use (I may or may not take the time someday to make it usable for Myth III, but I am following a priority list so it doesn't become The Neverending Project - I want stuff that can be used first and then will add additional details later). It's fun to run this tool on maps and find subtle errors like mismatched Assassin targets or a missing unit on one team. Also fun to run this on the Myth II base tag files and find the map errors that were corrected in subsequent patches - and one that remains that doesn't actually affect anything (there are two "observers" for one team (I forget which one now) on Gimble that are on top of each other so it looks like just one when you open it in Loathing - doesn't affect the game, but interesting nonetheless). Right now I've dubbed this tool "Sanity" but am also debating using the name suggested by Vinylrake of "Ferret" - we'll just have to see what it ends up as.


I've also got an "automatic film saver" that avoids the dreaded "all saved films are identical" bug that can still happen from time to time and allows you to let your computer save the films even if the host restarts too fast. In addition, it includes a "plugin synchronizer" to keep our PC players in-sync with our large list of plugins (here's the text list) we play each week. This one is also on my list to make cross-platform, but not as high a priority as the others listed above.


Those are the current "biggies" in my workshop besides wrapping up some long-overdue map/plugin projects.

Baak, i'd love to see the autofilm saver and plugin syncer on the mac. I'd be willing to help code it. Lemme know if you want any help.

TarousZars wrote:Baak, i'd love to see the autofilm saver and plugin syncer on the mac. I'd be willing to help code it. Lemme know if you want any help.

I would love to see the autofilm saver for the Mac as well. I took a couple of weak stabs at it last year using RealBasic but was probably going at it the wrong way because I kept getting hung up. I think the problem I kept slamming into the wall about was how to figure out from outside myth (a background process) when a film was 'done' (completed) - e.g. Myth appears to update the system time-stamp of the current 'saved' game as the game is being played so you can't just look at the date-time of the current game and see if it has changed since the last time you checked the saved game. Baak figured out the gory details of how to do it at least in Windows, I was just too lazy to spend that much time on it (or too dense to understand his wizardry), I decided it was much easier to just click 'save game' when I want to save a game.

For Myth tools, I don't really have any to my name. I created a BattlePlan insync reporter for our Order (we generally have dozens of 3rd party maps and plugins in our 'battleplan'). The BattlePlanReporter compares your MythII plugin folder to the BattlePlan (text file) that baak creates and lets you know if you are missing anything. This was a Mac OS 9 knockoff of a small part of Baak's insync utility. [The OS X version had problems I think]

The other specialized mapmaking editing tool I wrote I haven't finished "yet".

Vinyl's Battle Plan Reporter has kept our Mac players "in sync" over these past few years most excellently.

What I plan to do is yank the logic out from the hideous code (this was one of those evolved-over-countless-late-night-spontaneous-coding-sessions based on information gleaned one iota at a time kind of things - i.e. it's a vast plate of spaghetti! ) and then lay it out.

I was debating doing it in Java for the heck of it, as well as the possibility of doing something like Tcl/Tk on top of whatever. It's all kind of fun.

The last thing I started doing with the plug-in-sync side of things was making a separate list of the same plugins that includes size (in bytes), mod time (not sure about this timestamp for the mac), and an MD5 checksum of the entire plugin. What I do in the current version of the app is check against the name/size/date first, and if these don't match then I compare against the MD5 code (jic they do have the real plugin but it's datestamp got tweaked) - if the size is diff the MD5 will be diff, so it's really only an extra check against the date - in other words, you could probably just do the name/size/date and that'd be enough 99.999% of the time. Because it's very time consuming to build a checksum of 1 GB of plugins, I only do the comparison "when needed". The app has a switch to build the list and then I post it. I'm going a final makeover of the C++ version of this app and then plan to try it in another language.


I created the film auto-saver originally because we had situations where even though we were pressing "Save Film" we ended up with 12 of the exact same films - sometimes a film from the last match. I've forgotten now, but it has to do with the "reco" tag value in the film header not incrementing or something, and thus it overwrites all saved films with the same old one. I've seen this happen even when your recordings folder is empty at the start of a Myth II session. Weird stuff.

Off the top of my head here are some basic notes on the design of the film auto-saver portion:

* The auto-saver acts like a tape recorder and thus works best when started before you start Myth and exited after you exit Myth - I put up a warning if you are starting it improperly (you could end up losing a film if you start it after starting Myth).

* The main loop goes like this: (a) Copy the "Last Recording" file to a temporary file and keep track of its "header checksum" - this is a checksum of the film header minus a few bytes here and there that constantly change. Every 3 seconds check the "Last Recording" file and if it's the same header (therefore the same game), copy it to the same temporary file. I have two temporary files that I flip between, because...

* (b) As soon as the "Last Recording" header changes (I also check the file size on top of this), that means our previous copy is complete (this is why I check every 3 seconds - 5 or 10 is probably sufficient but I want to be *sure* I capture a snapshot of the completed film before another one starts), so I copy whatever temporary file is done into a new "Savegame xx-xx-xx" file - this is the saved film.

* NOTE: I create a near-unique CRC32 checksum of the complete film (I leave out portions of the header that differ between players - and the bizarre "extra X bytes" that shows up sometimes on Macs - all these details I would have to dig out for others to look at) - and I use this checksum as the new "reco" tag value to make them unique. Thus if the CRC32 of a film is 3F6911A8, I make these four bytes the reco tag value in the film header.

* Since we now have a new "Last Recording", it is being copied into my second temporary film file and the comparisons continue. Once it is apparent we have yet another new Last Recording, we will start overwriting the first temporary file and so on...

* There's some additional stuff in there for renaming an "old" Last Recording at start up and lots of other details, but this is the jist of it off the top of my head.

dreaming of a finished OAK:

amber,vegas and model importing to pc would be incredible...
with fear more advanced on pc's and classic being almost a thing of the past
what really mapmakers need is to bring all those applications to pc so you don't need at all to go to mac classic...

for example you do a unit on poser in a pc, then you have to index in photoshop and export the bmps to a mac, then amber and then bring back to a pc to fear with all monster flags available...
it's kind of a nightmare

also same thing with models...

carlinho wrote:dreaming of a finished OAK:

amber,vegas and model importing to pc would be incredible...
with fear more advanced on pc's and classic being almost a thing of the past
what really mapmakers need is to bring all those applications to pc so you don't need at all to go to mac classic...

Well that would be peachy for Windows users, but lots of Mac mapmakers (or ex mapmakers) no longer have access to classic mode either - the last few iterations of Macs haven't supported classic mode applications.

I also thought Windows Fear was already more complete/uptodate than the mac version?

WHATEVER gets created, I would just strongly urge that it be cross-platform or at least platform agnostic (Java) so that we don't restrict the abilities of any platform of mapmakers. The pool of people making things for myth is small enough already, and there enough cross platform dev environments (java,php,perl,etc) around to pretty much eliminate the need for platform specific apps.

I think Oak is supposed to be cross platform.

vr- I think that was written from a pc modders perspective entirely, earlier we've been the ones to not have access to even half of the apps and I think carlinho's just wishing for a full set of tools for pc as well. Most of us pc:ers have been campaigning for crossplatform tools since the bungie days of myth, and I'd hate to see the other half of the mod community miss out now..

Myrd- Yeah, that's what I've heard as well.

GodzFire wrote:I say finding a way to extract stuff from Myth 3 that are unique to that game. Of course it would be for Mac.

Besides that all the Myth tools I have left are mostly updated:

Amber 2.0b6
Mythed 1.0a2
Patchwork
SoundBlighter
Tag Extractor 1.0
UnTag 0.2b
[cut]

I think it would be irresponsible of me not to mention my old collection of Myth TFL and SB tools for the Mac. This is the bulk of it, a good deal of what's left out are silly auto-typers and the newer programs because I stopped list-ifying those awhile back. I have multiple versions for many, just sitting there collecting virtual dust (resize if necessary):

Bungie's various tools (Fears, Loathings, Extractors; Vegas, and TagEdit)
Tag Extractor
Amber
MacJade
reDirector
Plugin Patcher
Singtonet
Film Difficulty Level
Bartók
LocalFetch
Dead Tags
Head Edit
MONS Edit [10 old versions also archived]
CORE Edit
PROJ Edit
PRGR Edit
LPGR Edit
MEEF Edit
stli Edit
Weather Edit
Header Editor
Twisted Mytal
R.P.A. program pack
Ichor
Brimstone
Mythed
Myth Extractor
Myth Inspector
MeshApp
Despair
MythTech
Textura
MythMaker
Mesh Inspector Gold
CLUT Utility
Myth Data Extractor 0.1d4
Sprite Splicer
apathy
Spite & Malice
Shade
The Fallen Sounds
Myth Keyboard Localizer
Myth Chat Extractor
Vanity
Myth Film Cataloguer
LANKing
MythDifficulty
Myth II First Aid
OmniPatch-Apply
Antero
WRATH
FixMythFilm
Film Fixer
Ultra Film Fixer
Myth Autotyper
Myth 1.3 AutoTyper
Plugin File Type Fixer
Myth2 QuickConvert
->File/M2SB
Make MythII Maps/Films
TextToPlug
PlugToText
MSTP
Plugin Placer Pro
MythFilmEdit
ArtiX, Chaos, and newer programs from Tarous Zars
[various Myth Apple Scripts]

Now, as you might have noticed, I don't have SoundBlighter in there (Patchwork is M3 so I don't care much). Is SoundBlighter a Mac tool, Godz, or PC, and do you know where it's available?

Welly wrote:Now, as you might have noticed, I don't have SoundBlighter in there (Patchwork is M3 so I don't care much). Is SoundBlighter a Mac tool, Godz, or PC, and do you know where it's available?

yes and yes.

Try http://hl.udogs.net/files/Uploads/%20User%20Uploads then go to /Killswitch's Uploads folder

Ah thank you Vinyl! also I really appreciate that you still have my dirigible hosted.

I couldn't resist so here are some of the "newer" mac utils I catalogued:


UnTag___KillSwitch (Malcom Sanders) .04, .03, 02b
SoundBlighter___KillSwitch (Malcom Sanders) .01alpha rel. 4/29/05
Malice 2___KillSwitch (Malcom Sanders) 2.0 beta 8/16/04
GeomView___KillSwitch (Malcom Sanders) .03 beta 6/10/04
Chaos___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) 0.3.2, 0.3.1
HeadEditX___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) 0.6.0
ArtiX___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) 0.1 or b5, betas 4-1
MythTypeChanger___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) [2 different icons]
MonsMorale___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) 1.1
MonsInventory___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) 1.1
Plugin Lister___Tarous Zars (Mike Oldham) v6, v5
Ooh Battle Plan Reporter___Clan OOH
Myth II Dialog Editor___Myrd of Project Magma (Alexei Svitkine)
MythBrowser___Kel (duezm@ils.unc.edu) 1.81
MythChat___ActiveX of Clain Plaid
M2 FileType Droplet osX___Chaotic Software 2.0.2

Anyone got some other mac programs laying around?

It sure is creepy being that wierd collector guy of the community...

Welly wrote:Ah thank you Vinyl! also I really appreciate that you still have my dirigible hosted.

Not a problem, it's a bizarre but fun unit. I was thinking of possibly including it on a very unconventional unit mesh on a "new" ffa map I may never finish. Unless you have any objection of course, and I would credit both Bungie and you.

Welly wrote:Anyone got some other mac programs laying around?

I don't have download links for them but there's a list of 58 Myth mostly mapmaking related Macintosh applications at the myth graveyard. I probably have most of these on my HD somewhere so if there's something you don't have pm me.

Welly wrote:It sure is creepy being that wierd collector guy of the community...

It may be a small community you are part of, but you are most definitely not the only 'wierd collector guy'. The entire Myth graveyard is just articles and stuff I collected from (mostly) dead Myth sites. But instead of 'weird collector guy' or 'creepy' I prefer to use words like 'archaeologist" or 'preservationist' or 'librarian'.

Ok Welly, I took a closer look at that list of Myth related applications you published and holy cow! there are tons I don't have! I thought my collection of 87 myth apps was fairly complete but obviously not.

If you actually have copies of any of these in your possession and wouldn't mind sharing (I can set up a place for you to ftp them to if that would be easier than emailing them), I don't seem to have the following applications and would love to have copies to add to my collection:

M2 File Type Droplet
Myth Chat
Myth Browser
PluginLister
MythTypeChanger
Head Edit X
PRGREdit
HeaderEditor
TwistedMytal
B.P.A. Program pack
Mesh App
Myth Difficulty (is this the same as Myth Film Difficulty?)
Myth Extractor (is this the same as Myth Data Extractor or Extractor?)
Vanity
Myth Film cataloger
LanKing
OmniPatch
Myth 1.3 Autotyper
PluginFileTypeFixer
->File/M2SB
Make Myth II Maps/Films (is this the same as the Film re-editor?)

thanks.

vr

[quote="Welly"]OmniPatch [Andrew Sumner - IronDuke, can't believe you don't have this!]

Ok, I did have this on my hard drive, I just hadn't cataloged it in the tools section of mything.org. False Alarm.

[quote="Welly"].. what is Film re-editor?][/color]

I honestly don't know. Today I can't find a reference to it anywhere. Maybe I made it up.