TA Mutation

The ultimate TA mod switching and unit managing utility, TA Mutation has opened up a whole new world of TA flexibility. It's popularity has prompted me to give it it's very own dedicated page.

TA Data Viewer II v1.2 (released 3/21/2002)
Full Install (145 kb)
Installation: Run the exe, it will be installed in a folder named create a folder named TADV II in your TA folder
Uninstall:    Simply delete the folder, TADV makes no changes anywhere else

The ultimate tool for viewing TA statistics. You can view comprehensive unit data, list weapons along with composite properties (e.g. damage/second), landscape feature properties, and just about anything else you care to.

The data is displayed in a convenient table format, and you can easily sort the entries according to any of their properties by clicking the column headers. Plus you can easily export the complete table (or any subset of it) to a tab-delimited or html file, or in any custom format you desire.

The program is completely driven by simple configuration files (much simpler than those in the original TADV) so that you can view just the information you want, in exactly the manner you want to see it. Be sure to read the included documentation for a complete overview of the features and config file format, there are some nice features that you might not discover on your own.

New in this Version:

• More robust file parser
• Optional ShowUnusedTags=1; config file setting to automatically display all tags that aren't explicitly displayed already

3DO Builder+ v2.1 (released 10/6/2000)
Full install (3077kb )
Installation: unzip to a temporary folder and run Setup
Upgrade ( 338kb)
Installation: unzip into your 3DO Builder+ directory, overwriting duplicate files.
NOTE: this version of 3DO Builder+ was compiled with Visual Basic 6 instead of VB5 like the previous versions. If you don't have Msvbvm60.dll and the other VB6 libraries installed on your computer then you'll need to either get them from Microsoft or use the full install
OpenGL (347kb) 3DO Builder requires that your computer supports OpenGL. If it does not then you can unzip these reference drivers into your windows\system folder to give your computer complete OpenGL support.

THE TA unit modeling program. You still can't create models from scratch with it (at least not easily), but it's easier than ever to tweak your units to get them looking exactly right.

Newly updated and better than ever, v2.1 has all your favorite features, plus some brand-new abilities and bug fixes, including:

• Optional fix for the 3D textured view, Builder eats almost twice as much memory when it's enabled, but it makes the textured surfaces appear correctly on every system I've tried (including those with voodoo3 boards).
• New TA perspective mode lets you look at your units in the same pseudo-3D perspective as they'll appear within TA, no more repetitive tweaking to get your unit to look just the way you want it to.
• Fully debugged model cleaning tool will remove all duplicate vertices and degenerate faces with just a few clicks, often halving the size of your .3do file and removing that much more lag from TA.
• The ability to create faces with more than four sides from line segment or polyline loops (useful since many 3D programs don't support faces with more than four sides).
• The ability to delete individual faces from an object, which can come in very handy when using segments of an already textured model piece that you've copied from another unit.
• much, much more...

Be sure to read the history file for a complete list of new features, a lot of them involve clicking or dragging while holding down a modifier key. Very convenient once you know about them, but hardly something you're likely to stumble across.

Script Piece Checker (released 10/6/2000)
Full Install (122kb)
Installation: create a folder named ScriptChecker in your TA folder, then extract the contents of the zip file into it

A handy little utility that will scan any ufo file for scripts that refer to missing model pieces. Hopefully this will help remove a lot of those annoying bugs that cause TA to crash right when you're about to make a massive comeback and slaughter your opponent (You ever notice how TA never seems to crash when you're losing?).

CobView (released 10/6/2000)
Executable Only (17kb ) NOTE: this program requires the Visual Basic 6 libraries. If you don't have Msvbvm60.dll and the other VB6 libraries installed on your computer then you'll need to either download them from Microsoft or install some other program that includes them(such as 3DOBuilder)
Installation: create a folder named CobView and unzip the contents of the zip file into it.

Based on Kinboat's unreleased COB Viewer code, CobView isn't as useful now that Ted Berg has released his awesome JBrain java-based script compiler. However this is nevertheless a handy tool for those occasions when your script refuses to work when you know it should. You can finally see once and for all whether it's your fault or the compiler's (assuming you can read assembly).

CobView will decompile a .cob file into commented assembly language so that you can see exactly what the compiler is doing to your code. Not only that, it will also display the address of each line of code within the .cob file, allowing you to (relatively) easily fix any section that the compiler couldn't handle by using your favorite hex editor.