The History of the Toolset Making: Interesting Facts

Today I browsed through the DVD on which I stored all my tools, starting with the very early ones and ending with the latest editions of the latest tools. I found some interesting facts which even I have forgotten in detail, so I decided to create this thread so that the history won't actually be forgotten. This thread may be interesting for modders who are interested in the history of tool making (well, maybe someone cares to check this out - it's gonna be fun and somewhat funny, I promise)

1. The roots of the World Builder (ToEEWB)
Well, not many of you may remember this, but before the successful and well-known today tool called the ToEE World Builder, there was another tool written by me - a tool which some of the hardcore modders may possibly still find in their archives (if they're as diligent as me in backing things up, that is ), a tool that was so controversial that caused a lot of arguing on the boards in its time, and yet a tool without which the ToEE World Builder (ToEEWB) would have never existed, at least not in the form that exists today.The tool I'm talking about was called the ToEE Mod Studio, and sometimes referred to as the ToEE Modding Studio. Later, when I invented all the 6-letter contractions like ToEEWB and ToEEFE, this tool was dubbed the ToEEMS. Unfortunately, at this time this tool was already dead and officially removed from the Co8 boards.

When I just started modding ToEE, one of my first accomplishments was the creation of a way to spawn creatures and objects through heartbeat scripts of other objects (hey yeah, it may sound ridiculous today since it's really nothing special when you have the power of MOBs and all that, but back at that day it was a really big breakthrough because Co8 Mod v3.0.4 and older didn't have virtually any new creatures because of a lack of way to spawn them; the whole history is available here for whoever's interested: http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1062)

Anyway, I didn't want people to deal with the scripts directly, and that's why I wrote a small tool called the SpawnerMod that allowed to alter the scripts automatically to create "spawners" that would spawn critters and other nasties and goodies at heartbeats. However, the tool turned out to be rather complicated and many people managed to spoil their ToEE installations due to the misuse of this utility. Therefore, it was soon remade.

However, at this time I had bigger plans going, and the new version of the SpawnerMod was actually integrated into a unified editing environment which was named the ToEE Mod Studio. The studio had actually a bunch of good features, some of which are actually not even included in the current ToEEWB (they were never the top priority) - it could edit protos and their descriptions, modify MapList.mes, edit InvenSource.mes and starting equipment, and, of course, work with the so-called SpawnerScript which was a new way to spawn critters thru scripts using a nice GUI. It also had the so-called "MOB Analysis Tool" which was mostly used by me to try and discover the then-mysterious Mobile Object Format which was used to store map objects. (Note: this format is widely supported today in ToEEWB and its supplementary utilities)

Some of the screenshots are stored here (scroll down to see more of them) so that you can see what the Mod Studio was like. I can't help saying that these screenies resemble the modern ToEEWB so much that you can sometimes think that ToEEMS was just an older version of the World Builder (which was to a certain, even if very small extent, true). Consider comparing the following screenies:


ToEE Mod Studio protos editor


The same protos editor in the latest version of the ToEE World Builder

However, even though the ToEEMS looked all nice and packed with good features, I was all alone in the development team. People rarely provided the oh-so-necessary feedback, and times were rather hard for me (real life was really pressing back then) so I couldn't find enough time to test the thing myself. After a prolonged period of absence from the boards I came back only to see that people tried to cope with the various problems that ToEEMS presented before them, and often they were unsuccessful. I found workarounds for most of the problems, sometimes I even compiled special releases of ToEEMS just to fix a specific bug for someone (I recall recompiling ToEEMS for Allyx once, but I don't remember why). I understood that it couldn't go on like that.

At that time Dulcaoin (a modder who I respect very much) decided to join my efforts in making the toolset better, and after a thorough discussion we decided to start a new tool. Even though at first we didn't plan to reuse the codebase of ToEEMS to avoid the old bugs, I decided to keep the old interface style and kept some other, mostly "stylistic", elements. You can probably see many similarities in the interface by looking at the screenshots, and by that you can tell that ToEEMS, even though it was a failure, was still a "granddaddy" of the World Builder.

The new tool, the World Builder, went public beta after a few months of development, and had virtually double the number of features ToEEMS had. Those features included real object spawning (no more SpawnerScripting, we were talking real MOBs at the time), sector editing, and much more. Due to the immense help in both development and testing that I got from Dulcaoin, Sapricon, Shiningted, Allyx, Cerulean the Blue, and many more people (even Steve Moret himself agreed to answer some tough questions!), ToEEWB became a success that ToEEMS failed to become (thanks, guys!). Some features, however, were never recoded (like the InvenSource.mes editor, or the starting equipment editor) due to the lack of time and the presence of other priorities, and were, therefore, forgotten. However, the lack of these features was easily compensated by the Phalzyr's ProtoEd ability to edit both TAB and MES files.

What I'm trying to say here is that, even despite the failure of ToEEMS, I still respect this tool as a "tool that started it all". It helped define both the interface and a great many of code elements that later turned out to be reused in ToEEWB. It simplified the development of yet another editing environment, and it made it possible to make ToEEWB whatever it is today. Everything that succeeded in ToEEMS, went straight into the World Builder, and whatever failed, was rejected without regret.

The notification about the official removal of the ToEE Mod Studio (as decided by three developers of the World Builder - yours truly, Dulcaoin, and Sapricon) still exists on the boards. It is dated October 2nd, 2005 and is available here: http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2449

All that remains are the screenshots, an entry in my DVD archive dating back to 2004, and of course a successor toolset called the ToEE World Builder. The rest, as they say, is history.

Some more screens of the ToEEMS to look at:


Description editor in the Mod Studio 2004 b1


The inventory editor - a feature that never made it to the World Builder

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2. The irony of the ToEE Front-End (ToEEFE)
Another ironic utility that got publicly released is the ToEE Front-End, or ToEEFE, or Toffee, as you know it. The irony here is that a few years ago, I could have never imagined that the thing will get a public release as something that's no less than a whole front-end. To tell the truth, the thing was never even meant for a public release, and was made with a rather "egoistic" purpose - to simplify the game launch procedure and make it possible to run the game with another module folder in mind.

The ToEE Front-End (back then it was called just the "ToEE Startup Tool", so you could now say it was ToEEST ) was started at about the same time when the ToEE Mod Studio got its first public release. I had some tough time testing the thing and, once I understood that feedback will be very little, I decided to optimize the way to start the game in a window with a different module folder in mind. It was kind of boring to copy folders from one location to another every time I wanted to switch between the normal game and my "debug installation" which I used to test the Mod Studio (and which I wasn't afraid to break since I could always restore from a normal game install), and use the switch "-window" etc. every time, so I clearly needed a tool that would do it all for me in a jiffy.

So, I wrote the ToEE Startup Tool. What it did was adding a few switches to the ToEE command line (-window and -mod) and modifying the data folder temporarily so that the debug installation was launched instead of the normal game. The tool restored the folders back to normal upon quitting. Whenever I needed a normal game installation, I just used a standard ToEE shortcut to launch it.

Here's what the ToEE Startup Tool looked like (you can call it the very first version of the ToEE Front-End ):



Later, as Drifter released his cool patches for temple.dll, I decided to include the options to switch them on and off easily into my Startup Tool (I always preferred to do things the GUI way, you know).

After some tinkering with it, I thought it turned out to be a quite decent front-end for the game. A front-end, I thought? Heck, why not. I removed all of the old debug folder setup code from it, fiddled with the interface, and named the new thing "The ToEE Front-End". The utility got publicly released on the forums and was quite widely accepted by the players, and that's why I decided to go on working on it and provide public updates for it as soon as I add some feature that I may find handy.

Another ironic thing is that the original ToEE Startup Tool, to a certain extent, had this "multi-module" functionality since it tinkered with the folder structure of ToEE and launched the debug module I made. It was, however, removed from the ToEEFE 1.0 and 2.0 because it had limited functionality and could possibly be useful only for developers to keep a separate debug mod of the game within one installation. The multi-module functionality was restored in a much wider sense as you know it today (as an ability to launch multiple mods from the same game installation) only in the version 3.0 of the front-end, because it was rather tricky to code (it was OK for one fixed module, and got incredibly tricky once generalized for any possible mod).

Today there's the fourth installment of the ToEEFE front-end series available for download (version 4.0), and a separate KotB-specific version in private development (released only to the KotB team at the moment), and it's very difficult even for me to believe that this massive, complicated tool started as a small utility that was never meant for public release. In fact, I remember myself saying: "This small thingie is a junk, I will never show it to people". The history has proven that the thing will work out totally differently, and I'm only glad to see this.

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NOTE: This thread will be updated in some time with some more interesting facts.

And sorry if you didn't find it interesting... this thread is clearly not for everyone.
- Agetian

 

Nice read . . . sort of a trip down memory lane. Seems like every worthwhile endeavor has its shakey beginnings. That's just the nature of things. :thumbsup:

 

Damn good stroll down memory lane

Its a pity that when I showed up, the Mod Studio essentially was touted as a 'flawed and bugged tool' and so I never used it (though I used the 'spawn by heartbeat' method straight from your thread, Ag, and a generic mob created by Mod Studio that I think was downloadable on one of Dulcaion's threads). In hindsight I probably could have got a lot of value out of it. Do'h!

 

Thanks for sticking this, LordSpike!

Thanks for the nice comments, guys! I'm glad you liked my historical overview. I'm digging up some more fun'n'funny stuff for you, so expect an update soon.

<<Ag thinks to himself: D'oh! Now I became a historian... >>

Yeah, I can still remember that MOB file - back then I didn't know how to build a MOB from scratch so that it won't crash the game, so instead, I found a way to patch the Tutorial Map 1 chest so that it became invisible and acted as a generic spawner object. What Mod Studio did was: it placed this MOB near the starting point of every map and added a special prototype to protos.tab which was a copy of the chest, but invisible and with the spawner script attached. It made one proto per map, so that each proto would have its own script specified for heartbeat (right now I'd just say that it was a dang bad waste of valuable prototypes ). Then, it created predefined script files for each map which you could fill with spawning code. The SpawnerScript functionality of the Mod Studio even allowed you to add the most common elements into those scripts through the GUI (and it was the part that was the least glitchy, too).

Thinking about it right now, Ted, I don't even know if it would have been a good experience for you - it could have been, but there's also a chance that it couldn't have been, if you know what I mean. Due to the fact ToEEMS wasn't coded properly (especially the "loader" part, which loaded the protos, descriptions, and handled other stuff), there were people it "liked" and there were people "it didn't like".

I remember Allyx never managed to launch ToEEMS without crashing it in a very weird way, while personally I never experienced such a problem and was even unable to trace how it could have possibly happened. I recompiled ToEEMS for him with some changes but I don't remember if it helped or not.

On the contrary, I rarely had problems booting ToEEMS up - it always started up correctly for me, even though I managed to crash it a couple times _after_ it booted up.

ToEEMS was good, in my opinion, for its idea and for the initial coding of this idea. I'm sure that, if you guys (Ted, Allyx, Cerulean, and everyone else who helped me out with testing ToEEWB) came to the boards earlier and/or had more time to work with ToEEMS when it was alive, maybe I could have just corrected all the bugs there and enhanced the functionality to reach the current ToEEWB level. However, now we can just think about it and guess how it would have turned out...

But at the same time, I still think it's good that I recoded at least 85% of ToEEMS from scratch when I wrote ToEEWB - that loader thingie would have surely be a tough one to fix, so it was even easier to recode it.

- Agetian

 

Good job, krunch! I don't recall ever seeing the v1.0.0 release thread, if you find a working link to it it'd be nice to see it (I didn't find it even in the Negative Energy Plane), although I do remember that the Co8 Mod was referred to as the "ToEE Fan Fixes" in the very very old times, e.g. here's one of the older threads with an early release: http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=190)

- Agetian

 

o MY gawd the very first Co8 mod came with cookies...

Thats just creepy :blink:

 

Well yeah I read that, u belligerent canine but I originally made the 'have a cookie' crack here at Co8 because it was something that was said regularly over at Massassi Temple (my old stomping ground when I lived for Jedi Knight mods) - I never realised that bit of cyber-lingo predated me here.

And I never associated it with the cookie recipe in the manual at all. So there.

 

I don't think I ever visited the forum again after they got rid of the official site. Meh. They cut us loose long ago.