Topaz 1.0 Public Release

Introduction

Topaz is a tag extractor for Myth 2: Soulblighter. It will open, sort and list the contents of any Myth 2 plugin file or monolithic tag. You can then extract any individual tag to a separate file. I decided to write this program when I discovered that Fear would not extract certain tag groups which I felt were necessary for the creation of quality maps.

Distribution

In an effort to maintain version control, I am not allowing Topaz to be publically distributed directly from your site. You may, however, link to the Vista HTML page which hosts Topaz. If you disregard these instructions, you will be asked to immediately remove the application from your server. See the included software license for details.

Using Topaz

Topaz is a very simple application. To view a plugin file or monolithic tag, click on the File menu and select Open. Once a file has been selected, Topaz will parse the contents and alphabetically sort the tags into groups. Each of these groups contains one or more tags which can be saved to a separate file by choosing Extract from the Edit menu or hitting Ctrl+E on your keyboard. The actual editing of these extracted tags is performed by other applications.

Registry Entries

Topaz adds a small number of registry entries to maintain a list of recently used files. If you wish to remove these entries, you can find them under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Vista\Topaz with the Windows registry editor. Exercise some caution, registry editing is not for the novice user.

Contacting the Author

At this time, I don't see any reason to add support for plugin building or tag editing, since Fear is perfectly capable of conducting both of these operations. As such, Topaz never actually modifies any files. If, however, there is some feature you would like to see added to Topaz, please feel free to contact me at the address below. I'm also interested in bugs, crashes or any other problems you might encounter while using Topaz.

E-mail me at matt_barry@usa.net or visit the Vista web page at http://vista.i-craft.net/.

Matt Barry (Pythos)