Keep Update 11/09/2007

[Myhrginoc]

Greetings and Salutations! Welcome to the Contrail Edition of the Phrozen Keep News. Well, that is a bit of hyperbole, but we are excited at the flurry of happenings that are opening up on the Mac front.

Big Mac Attack
Yep, life has been discovered on D2's alternate platform, brought to you by our very own Sorceress of Subroutines Contrail! She has gifted us with a couple of nifty helpers for our File Center, plus no small amount of commentary in the Mac Tools Forum. In fact, she has been so helpful, we hired her to run Mac Tools. Contrail is now a member of our staff.
- D2 Mac -direct -txt Patcher v1.0 is the missing link between the Mac version of D2 and txt file modding. Souricette gamely (pun intended) stepped into the breach, but his MPQ Tools took a few turns to get to the end of the road and may not have been very easy to use. Contrail makes it almost as easy as editing a Windows shortcut.
- Mac DC6 v1.0 brings D2 image editing to the Mac world, an irony since Macs were always preferred by graphics artists. Now you can edit item pictures and background screens, plus certain animations, on your preferred platform.

Special Neffects
Modmakers working in D2 v1.10 have long enjoyed the extra bells and whistles of SVR's legendary D2Mod System and the many plugins available for it. Nefarius. the Archmagus of Algorithms, has been cannily crafting a parallel system for v1.11b, a.k.a. NefEx. This week he releases Miscellaneous Fixes, a new plugin for curing such bedeviling issues as buggy charm drops and irrepressible unique dropping. You can get your copy here.

For Your Own Health
Some time back, I_only_pressed_Esc wrote a fine tutorial about creating your own health and mana globes. But along the way a key resource managed to vanish into the shadows while we weren't looking. Fortunately a copy was found and added to our File Center. Get your copy of overlap.dc6 in zip form and follow the tutorial to health and mana for all.

Unholy Union
Diablo and his brothers? The four Lesser Primes? Tyrael and Natalya? No...although the last might be why she never stuck around to say goodbye after we drove Mephisto out of Kurast. We are talking about Black Omen Productions, the umbrella for two formidable code wizards and their mod projects, Nefarius and Joel Falcou. Find out the outer limits of Diablo II modding as they take control of your monitor.

Screenshot of the Week
With all the news about ever-widening Mac modding possibilities, could there be but one topic for our regularly scheduled screenie? Heck no, set your peepers on this shot of Contrail's Mac DC6 utility at work.

It has been a while since we had so much to tell you. But all things come to an end, and that includes updates for the Weekly Update. Now return to D2 gaming for another day!