About a week and a half ago, [PMMF]Rambo and I ({HV}Chaos) started messing around with a new GUI shell for Tool. We knew about Tool ++, but realized there were a few features missing inside of it that we thought would be extremely helpful to any map makers, including ourselves.

The coding process has taken quite a bit of debugging, and many builds just to get it as stable as it is, but Tool # is here, and ready to rock!

Installing Tool # is relatively simple, just place Tool #.exe inside your Halo Custom Edition directory.

Current List of Features (Probably incomplete because of all the features):
1. Detection of Haloce.exe to make sure it is installed correctly.
2. Automatic detection of 3 variations of Tool: Tool.exe, Toolpro.exe, and Toolio.exe. It uses hash based detection, so any filenames will work!
3. Guerilla-styled layout.
4. Batch Processing Work
5. Multi-threading of windows allowing you to run (for example) Bitmaps on one thread, and turn around to run Lightmaps for a different project.
6. Built-In Help file that is written to the disk for ease of access.
7. Detection along the filepaths to turn Red/Black based on the validity of the paths. (Just like Guerilla does)
And many more!

Here's the readme:

Tool # is a Tool Frontend that is designed to complement the other tools' use, as in Guerilla and Sapien.  While this tool is based heavily on the Guerilla shell design, it is not Guerilla and therefore should not be treated as such.  Written in Visual Basic .Net, Tool # is a powerful and robust application that takes care of every function Tool and other Tool variants perform.

NOTE: Tool # is currently in Beta stage.  As such, only the following functions are supported.

-Bitmaps
-Structure
-Lightmaps
-Build Map (build-cache-file)

Do know that these functions are 100% working and completed, though bugs still may arise.  Also know that all of these functions support batch mode, as in you may consecutively perform functions on a unattended basis, simply by queueing up the functions the same way you would add blocks to a guerilla tag.

We hope you enjoy this production of Tool #.  Any suggestions, comments, or constructive criticism is welcome.  To contact us, please contact the developer at ccchaos on Xfire.

Programmed by: {HV}Chaos
Beta Testing & iDeas: [PMMF]Rambo
Special Thanks to Bungie for inspiring us to use the Guerilla design.

You may download Tool # at the url below:
http://www.filefront.com/14742905/Tool--0.2-Beta.7z

Looks very promising...

OK guys we're up to Build 161 now. Here is the latest version for download.

http://www.filefront.com/14775999/Tool--0.2-Build-161.7z/

In this build, a nasty bug has been fixed. If you compile a map with missing shaders, Tool # will now create them for you with the option of a shader type and put it in yout levelpath\shaders directory. No more fussing with Tool placing shaders in the root tags folder or you having to manually create them.