As a service to the community, Molly Rocket, and some of the kindly folks from the forums, periodically release development tools to the public.
We hope you find them helpful... but please be sure to read the accompanying license (or explicit denial thereof, in the case of public domain releases) and make sure you understand it before using anything from this section!
TabView is one of those programs that took an hour to write but ended up being used widely by game developers. I have no idea what the appeal is, but for some reason us game developers love to dump text files and then view them with collapsible indentation! That, plus instant F5-refresh and the ability to ping the TabView window with a WM_USER message to force it to refresh make it a handy little utility to have around. And at 5K, how can you go wrong?
CDep is a public domain build utility designed to minimize the amount of information necessary to specify which files are necessary to build a project. It was written by me (Casey Muratori) and then added to by Jeff Roberts of RAD Game Tools when he started using it for his build process. It was never intended to be released to the public, but some folks in the forums asked to try it and there was no good reason not to put it out there, so here it is.
I honestly can't recommend it as a good build utility at this point. It's built around a great core concept (that you shouldn't have to specify what files are part of the build), but it falls down severely in its lack of a real language with which to specify other important build instructions (move these files over here, invoke this special command, etc.) But, maybe somebody will take the central idea, now that it's out there, and fix the language or build a better version that everyone can enjoy! If so, please release it into the public domain too so we can all use it!!
Also be advised that the source code is pretty heinous. It was created back when I still thought OOP was a good idea, so there's a bunch of gratuitous objects that exist for no reason and which make the code more complicated and difficult to understand. Apologies in advance for that.
3DSMAX's polygon tesselator is pretty much broken. It can't handle complicated sets of splines (especially not when there are holes, or multiple contours). This plug-in adds a very simple modifier called "Casey's Tesselator" which, when added on top of a spline object, will tesselate it using SGI's open source implementation of the OpenGL polygon tesselation function. This implementation is very robust and seems to handle everything the MAX built-in tesselator cannot.
Unfortunately, although I have released all of the source code that I wrote in this project into the public domain, I obviously cannot release the plug-in itself and the tesselation code into the public domain because the tesselation code is covered by SGI's Open Source B license. Please read that license in detail to understand the licensing terms of the plug-in and accompanying source code, because it is the most restrictive license governing any part of the program.
Two of the folks at RAD Game Tools donated this sweet piece of code to the public domain! It's an .h/.c file combo you can use to turn off CPU throttling on Win32. This is essential to do if you are trying to get accurate profiling results for things like performance tuning or memory bandwidth testing.
CMirror is a very simple versioned backup utility that manages to be extremely useful by picking the right things to (and not to) do. It is designed such that all you do, pretty much ever, is type "cmirror" when you're done working. It then figures out what needs to be done and does it with minimal intervention.
Some nice features: repository stored in simple files-on-disk form, so you can easily browse and access old files without running cmirror; automatic execution of external programs prior to checking in new files; maintain versioned backup even when away from the server, then add all versions back to the server when reconnected; easy-to-use but powerful wildcard support for controlling which files are included for various operations; and many more goodies.
