SourceView is a new product to be offered by Lebeau Software. It is a standalone source code viewer and basic editor. It has searching and syntax highlighting capabilities for many common file formats that are used by software developers. Lebeau Software designed this application for its internal use, but because it is being used on a daily basis for various tasks and has proven to be very useful to Lebeau Software, it has been decided that it should be released publically for other software developers to use.
Version 1.0.0.3 of the ICQ Chat Player is under private beta testing. This version adds support for multi-file chat sessions.
These are ICQ .cht files that contain only a portion of a larger chat session, and as such do not contain information about the users that participate in the chat, or the duration of the chat.
This new version of the player will be able to play back these files. The user list can be determined dynamically while the chat is playing.
Unfortunately, the duration of the chat is not available in these files, so the player will instead display the overall percentage of the file that has been played.
The ICQ Chat file format documentation is being updated with new details that were discovered while updating the ICQ Chat Player.
Version 2.0 of the TMSAgent VCL component is under public beta testing. This is a major redesign over version 1.5. This version contains many enhancements and bug fixes.
Version 1.2 of Agent Clipboard Reader is under public beta testing. This new version now allows the user to choose their desired spoken Language and TTS engine.
In addition, this version now allows users to choose MSAgent character files that are installed in folders other than the default "Windows\MSAgent\Chars" folder.
The Microsoft Agent Characters file format documentation is almost complete. This new release is a major update, identifying many data fields that were previously unknown to me in earlier releases.
Also, the compression algorithm used by MSAgent has finally been decyphered. Consequently, the complete ACF and ACA file formats will be included in this new release as well.
Using the knowledge gained by writing the Microsoft Agent Character file format documentation, Lebeau Software has been working on developing its own cross-platform library for processing and rendering MSAgent file data. This library is going to be the core processing unit for the below products.
By developing its own processing library, these products will eventually be ported to non-Microsoft platforms (Linux, Mac, etc), allowing MSAgent-compatible characters to be designed, compiled, and used without relying on Microsoft applications and tools, thus opening MSAgent to new marketplaces that have been previously unexplored by this technology.
MSAgent Web Browser Plugin
Microsoft's implementation of MSAgent is an ActiveX-based technology. That limits its use in web browsers to Internet Explorer, or Netscape with a separate third-party ActiveX plugin installed. Lebeau Software will be reviving an old web browser plugin project that was started several years ago for supporting MSAgent in Netscape natively, without any other third-party plugins needed. This project was abandoned when another company released its own plugin first.
Lebeau Software will be updating its plugin to support the IE, Netscape, Opera and Firefox web browsers, using a generic interface so that a single plugin can cater to all of the browsers without requiring separate specialized versions for each one, or different scripting types for different browsers, etc.
MSAgent Character Editor Replacement
The Agent Character Editor (ACE) that is provided by Microsoft is currently the only software publically available for producing MSAgent-compatible files. Lebeau Software wishes to produce an application that will do everything that ACE can do, and more. ACE only supports 256-color bitmaps, icons, and WAV audio files. Lebeau Software's editor will also support importing of PNG and MP3 files, and maybe also importing and real-time rendering of common 3D file formats (3DS, 3DX, Lightwave, Wavefront, X3D, etc).
Many MSAgent characters currently available have animations that are created with 3D rendering software (3D Studio Max, Hash Animation Master, Truespace, Xara 3D, etc), so it would be beneficial to authors to have an ACE-like editor that can render their 3D wireframes models in the same software that compiles the final MSAgent data files.
MSAgent Recovery Tool
This will be a standalone application that displays the inner workings of Microsoft Agent data files, and contains an ACD file generator.
Unlike other third-party viewers that are already available, Lebeau Software's recovery tool will not be using Microsoft's own MSAgent engine at all. It will be processing the raw file data directly. This will mean that performance of processing the information will be faster and better optimized, and will not require commonly used programming hacks to make the official MSAgent engine do things that it was not originally designed for. In addition, since this will be a self-contained application, it will be able to run on machines that do not have Microsoft's own MSAgent engine installed.
ACE uses ACD project files to organize the bitmaps, icons, sounds, and layout information that authors define when creating their custom MSAgent characters. The recovery tool will be able to reverse that process, extracting the original bitmap, icon, and sound files from MSAgent data files and then generating suitable ACD project files for use by ACE. This product is meant to be used by MSAgent character authors who have lost their ACD project files and need to restore them from their compiled data files. Lebeau Software recognizes that such a product presents possible copyright infrigement issues. Which is why the recovery tool will be the very first shareware product offered by Lebeau Software. The evaluation version will not support displaying or extracting the images and sounds from MSAgent data files. These are the key pieces of an author's intellectual material. Authors will have to provide Lebeau Software with proof that they actually own the characters they wish to process, and will have to purchase a licensed full version to allow their data files to be converted to ACD. The licenses will be encrypted and tied to both the specific character being converted as well as to the character's author, and may also require online validation. This is so that licenses cannot easily be distributed or hacked by software pirates, or falsified to allow unlicensed users to convert characters that they do not actually own.
Also, neither the evalutation nor full version will allow processing of Microsoft's own MSAgent characters (Merlin, Genie, Robby, and Peedy) under any circumstances.