...
The functionality of the game is not so easy to change. You need to get ahold of the source for the game. AND a MajorBBS or WorldGroup Development Kit, with borland, and pharlap. These are all very old programs, which are not all that easy to come by.
If you're lucky enough to have the source, and the kit required to compile it, you're set! All you need to do now is learn C, figure out Sean's code, and start building your custom TA. Good Luck!The source is not generally available at this time. There's an old (broken) release of 5.6c which a few people (including myself) have tried to work with. It's futile. There's a large chunk of this source package which is precompiled. This is done to preserve license data. Unfortunately, that's not all that's in there. The main loop is in there, as well as a handfull of core routines. For instance, the routine which tells monsters how to select targets in combat. It's in there, and it's broken. You cant edit it. I spent hours working around the bug in the code, and i ended up with an unstable game. My recommendation is not to pursue this source, and instead try to get involved in the community, make feature requests to Elwynor (the current owner of TA) if you think there's need for change in the engine.
What's in the msg's?
Each MSG contains a few sections of game data, I'm going to try to break down what file contains what data for you, so you don't need to look through all of them each time youre looking to make a change.
...