EVONE is progressing quite well, and version 1 of the program itself (all editors are plugins) is done, until I decide it needs another feature or one of the editors requires more support.
All features of the program are fully functional, including its registration system. The final registration scheme is as follows: EVONE will be available to download for free and will function as a 30-day demo. During the demo, EVONE will be fully functional, and users will be able to create and save as many plugins as they want to. When the demo expires, however, EVONE will cease to function at all, and the user will have to register in order to keep using it. EVONE's registration fee will be $10.
One of EVONE's exciting new features is complete file recovery in case the computer crashes. When a file is opened, EVONE automatically creates a temporary copy of the file. To prevent file corruption, all writing is done to this copy of the file, and when the user chooses save, the changes are then restored to the original. Also, every so often (can be set from once every 15 minutes to once a minute), EVONE will save the file hierarchy to the temp file. Remember that the main feature of EVONE is the ability to organize your plugin into folders of your choosing, such as organizing weapons and ships by government. Every time EVONE is started, it offers to recover any file that was closed incorrectly. The user can then choose to either restore from the backup, or discard it.
I am currently working on the mission editor, which is progressing nicely. The editor's interface is now complete and work has just started on reading in the specified resource and setting the many fields with the correct values. While I was working on this, I noticed something very interesting about the AvailRating field in the misn resource. First, it is important to note that, as defined in the templates, the AvailRating field is a DWRD, or short, just like almost all of the fields in the misn resource. What I noticed was that, in Nova, the combat rating Frightening is defined as 51,200. This is great, unless you want to require the player to have a combat rating of Frightening in order to play your mission. Doing this is impossible, because a short can only hold values up to 32,767. Just to make sure I hadn't missed something (and to make sure it was not actually an unsigned short), I typed 51,200 into the Avail. Rating field in NovaTools, and sure enough, the value doesn't fit in the variable. (I closed the resource and opened it again and the number given was around -14000.) This isn't a big problem, just an interesting note, unless you wanted to require a Frightening combat rating...
If people are interested, I was thinking that when I was done the misn editor, I would release basically an alpha version of EVONE as a mission editor, while I worked on the other editors. If people would prefer to use a more thoroughly tested version, I will wait and release a Public Beta later on, with one or two more editors. Comments?
I have recieved an amazingly large and positive response from the plug developer community, and I would like to thank everyone for their interest in EVONE.
Jeffrey - Arios SoftWare
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(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/upcoming")EVONE 1.0.0 - the plugin editor for EV/EVO/EVN(/url)
