UMOD is back
If you visit this site, it's obvious that you are looking for mods/mutators to download, which is why UMOD Tool is quite possibly the most useful tool for UT players in general. What it does is it basically allows you to easily install mods/mutators, and gives you more customization over your UMODs. For mod/mutator creators, the utility lets you create UMODs without the use of the ucc.exe program.
Fixing UMOD problems
For those of you who can't install UMODs properly, you can use the utility's auto-associate option so that the utility will automatically open and help you install mods/mutators. There are numerous other things that UMOD Tool does, but I'm not going to repeat everything I said in the last review. So, check that out instead and come back here when you're done to see what's new with UMOD Tool.
nonUMODs
While UMOD Tool is basically for UMODs only, the team has revamped the utility's support for regular zip files. While I probably won't be frequently using the utility to unzip files into their proper folders, the new "Unzip Sort to folder" procedure is quite useful, especially if there are multiple files in the zipped file. What this procedure does is it unzips all the files in the zipped file and place the files into their proper folders. That way, you won't have to unzip each type of files separately. The utility does it all for you and it does it quite quickly.
Other features
The team has also tweaked the Design UMOD part of their utility. While most of us won't be using this part, it's great for mod/mutator authors since it's quite easy to create a UMOD. The only cons about the "Design UMOD" menu is that the "Delta" file maker and "Readme" maker are not yet functional, though that hardly lowers the score of the utility.
Cash in the cache
There are other miscellaneous tweaks to the interface, such as sound effects, but the other main addition is the "Cache Unload" dialog. Like so many other cache managers, this one allows you to move cached files into their proper folders. Whenever you play online, and you do not have the proper file(s), UT automatically downloads these files into your cache folder. However, once X amount of days pass, the downloaded files will be deleted.
So, instead of having them deleted, you can move them to their proper folders so that you can play the map, use the skin, etc whenever you want. UMOD Tool handles the cached files especially well, allowing you to delete the files you don't want and move the files you do want. In addition to that, UMOD Tool can check whether the file is good or corrupt, which helps stop potential problems from growing.
The Swiss Army Knife for UT x5
Like their last version of UMOD Tool, this one handles UMODs superbly. Now, with the added "Cache Unload" menu and the support for zipped files, UMOD Tool is the ultimate utility for us UT mod/mutator fanatics. Even if you only download one or two mods that come in UMOD format, that's more than enough reason to get UMOD Tool. There are several items for UT that every player must have, and this utility is one of the very few that make the list.
-Peter Yu
