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What is COBalt? COBalt gives TA playes and developers a rich new set of features to tap into. By modifying TA's COB handling code, COBalt adds features that, not long ago, were considered impossible. Teleportation, the ability to modify a unit's health from within a script, new operators, and many other things are either planned or already implemented. There are also newly discovered COB instructions that, for whatever reason, TA's developers programmed but did not use in any of their scripts. As a result, these instructions were unknown to 3rd party developers -- until now. There are three major components of COBalt: the development kit, the DLL and the documentation. The development kit consists of an IDE (Integrated Development Enviornment), which encapsulates several development utilities, including a script compiler, decompiler, and debugger. COBalt adds extensions to the BOS scripting language, which not only allow developers to utilitize new features such as teleportation but also give scripters more flexibility, through facilities such as c-style structs, debugging support, and symbol preservation (variable names and #defined constants are retained after compiliation). The DLL contains the implementations of the new script facilities such as teleportation, shift operators, and more. Unfortunately, source code for the DLL is not available, but documentation is provided that explains how to create a similar DLL. Additionally, COBalt provides thourough documentation of TA's COB handling code and COB files in general. COBalt also consists of several supporting resources: the patching program, TA Patcher, and the AuthKey system. Though not required by COBalt, they make things a lot easier. Finally, the COBalt project develops units to showcase COBalt's features. TCs, maps, and other mods are a possibility in the future. At this time, COBalt is in an early beta stage of development. Some components are currently in public beta testing; others are barely started. A detailed status report is viewable here. The COBalt team is always looking for people to assist us. We are selective with membership offers but invite everyone to help. Please visit the Openings page for help wanted information. If you don't see a job that suits you, feel free to email us and we'll see if we can squeeze you in. In any event, thanks for stopping by. Feel free to browse the site or visit the project summary page. |
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