Unless its going to be in the next oh month or two, (or unless it would take that long to do it) I'm wondering if anyone could provide a list of how each resources has changed and what it needs done to it to work in EVN. I know about the graphics, and switching them, will the systems be a pain? and the resources, pictures, descriptions etc. I dont need/asking for help actually doing it, I just want an idea on the scope of the effort and skills it will involve.
To not finish is worse then to not start, for you have acomplished nothing, and wasted time.

also have another quick question: Is it possible to have more then one way to win a mission in nova? Like say the standard ship cargo missions, have two optional wins, ship it as intended, or hijack it and sell it to pirates, or the ship passengers, deliver them or hold them hostage for ransom. You could do this through special failure settings, but then you could dump cargo into space and have "sold it to pirates makeing a fortune and you now have a bounty on your head!" instead of actually carrying it all the way out to the pirates like your supposed to.

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(url="http://"http://www.freewebs.com/hardslab/cheat2.hqx")Cheat 2(/url)
Cheat any way you want in almost any mac game. Even Nova.

I think it depends soley on the kind of effect you're looking for. With Fail texts still hit or miss you'll probably need to missions to get the desired results. I'd think you'd have to use two missions regardless. There's no way to accept a mission and have an alternate destination. So the only way to get an alternate mission would be by refusing a mission which would start another mission or by failing the first mission which would set ncb's making available the alternate.

If there's one thing that I wish would have been incorporated into the engine it's "if/else" statements.

I don't have any experience with ports but I figured that everything had to be copied and recreated by hand. Not the hardest thing in the world but certainly time consuming and it's just a guess but I'd imagine that most people have lives outside making Nova plugs.

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I used to jog but the ice kept falling out of my glass.
(url="http://"http://www.0three0.net/l-1551/")L-1551(/url) - The official site of RONIN and The Way and the ten thousand things

Ugh. Yeah, I figured out most of it by hand, but it is a cinch to do now. You still need to go through every resource and weed out all of the unused flags. That is what takes the longest.

What I did was have the two bibles open in the background, and open the resource in NovaTools. Then you merely move the values to their proper locations. Some resources are easier than others (Govt and Desc, compared to ships...).

As for missions, you can always use the sXXX field to start other missions with alternate endings; put those in the onaccept field. When you complete one of the missions, you should abort the other endings using aXXX. XXX is the resid of the mission to start/abort. You might also consider fXXX, which instead causes them to fail.

If you would like me to help you with the porting, email me and I could probably help you out.

Good luck!
SpacePirate

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Eat blazing electric death!
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/infernostudios/ept/")Unofficial EV and EVO Ports(/url): Betas 3 and 2

(This message has been edited by SpacePirate (edited 04-28-2003).)

Ok, were I to start this, do you have a guess how long it would take to port a plugin thats approximately the size of EV classic? and whats the most difficult part?

This has always confused me. Whats the point of spilt up resources? Is it actually necessary to have everything split up into segments, graphics, sounds, data etc, and even more, graphics 1, graphics 2 etc. I understand it from the idea with nova, updates can be made with minimal redownloading, but is there any reason not to have the whole plug contained in one file, particularly if it is already finished and there will be no updates?

And because it is MUCH smaller then the nova scenario, I'd like to have it be a complete data file replacement. Does nova require special names?

and finally, whats your thought on my doing this with someone else's work? I would obviously grant them all credit, leave it faithful, and only take credit for the small amount of work I did, porting it to nova. I will make every effort to find and authorise with the original author, but If I cant find them, is it ok to do something like this for the sake of them without them? I guess just because he's dead dosent stop them from making tv series in Gene Roddenberry's name...

(I just realized that the title screen may be a mess to convert too...)

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(url="http://"http://www.freewebs.com/hardslab/cheat2.hqx")Cheat 2(/url)
Cheat any way you want in almost any mac game. Even Nova.

Well, it is definietely a good idea to contact the original author as pistgavin should have done with his now dead plug.

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I can answer a couple of these.

Quote

Originally posted by Rick_Hardslab:
Whats the point of spilt up resources?

ResEdit files can only handle so many resources and only so large of a file (they tell me it's 16 MB but I've seen it max out on 9 MB files before).

Quote

and finally, whats your thought on my doing this with someone else's work? I would obviously grant them all credit, leave it faithful, and only take credit for the small amount of work I did, porting it to nova. I will make every effort to find and authorise with the original author, but If I cant find them, is it ok to do something like this for the sake of them without them? I guess just because he's dead dosent stop them from making tv series in Gene Roddenberry's name...

I'd say only do it with permission of the original author.

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(This message has been edited by UncleTwitchy (edited 04-28-2003).)

What if the author cant be found?

If he dosent exist well enough to be found, I wouldn't imagine he has much authority to complain.

If the author is gone, should that happen to their work too? I would think you should be allowed to preserve it, at least as long as you do it respectably. (I, or anyone wouldn't wane someone to make crap in their name, but to preserve a work would seem honoring)

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(url="http://"http://www.freewebs.com/hardslab/cheat2.hqx")Cheat 2(/url)
Cheat any way you want in almost any mac game. Even Nova.

Quote

Originally posted by Rick_Hardslab:
**What if the author cant be found?

If he dosent exist well enough to be found, I wouldn't imagine he has much authority to complain.

If the author is gone, should that happen to their work too? I would think you should be allowed to preserve it, at least as long as you do it respectably. (I, or anyone wouldn't wane someone to make crap in their name, but to preserve a work would seem honoring)**

Just as you said, you wouldn't want someone to make a crappy plug out of your hard work. Just because you're preserving someone else's work so to say, doesn't mean they'd appreciate how it was preserved. If their work is still available it's because at one time or another they wanted it to be. Just because they're not available doesn't mean they no longer exist. Maybe they stopped using a particular email because it became too inundated with spam or they started going by a different interent alias. You simply cannot deny the creator authority because you can't find them. It's their property and unless they have specifically released it with the intention that it's up for grabs, it will remain that way. I'd say if you choose to use works that you've failed to find the authors of, make it known in the plug when it is finished and ask for creators to step forward to take credit. Just be prepared to pull content if the author asks - unlikely, I know.

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I used to jog but the ice kept falling out of my glass.
(url="http://"http://www.0three0.net/l-1551/")L-1551(/url) - The official site of RONIN and The Way and the ten thousand things

Quote

Originally posted by Rick_Hardslab:
**What if the author cant be found?

If he dosent exist well enough to be found, I wouldn't imagine he has much authority to complain.

If the author is gone, should that happen to their work too? I would think you should be allowed to preserve it, at least as long as you do it respectably. (I, or anyone wouldn't wane someone to make crap in their name, but to preserve a work would seem honoring)**

Copyright law makes no exceptions for situations in which you can't find or make contact with the owner. Unless someone has specifically waived copyright protection or the work is old enough to have become public domain (which won't be true of anything EV-related, since the standard period is fifty years after the author's death, longer in some countries), they retain full ownership of their work, and you can't take control of it without their permission.

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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url) | (url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/")EV-Nova.net(/url) | (url="http://"http://www.evula.com/survival_guide/")EV Nova Survival Guide(/url)
Truth! Justice! Freedom! And A Hard-Boiled Egg!

first off, I absolutely intend to give the original creators complete and total credit for creating the whole scenario. In fact I will port it to nova verbatim, and include their original read me. I will not change any of their in game credits, and the entire amount of credit by me will be a footnote after the end of the readme thanking them for creating the game, telling exactly what I actually did (made the scenario nova compatible) and offering them the chance to contact me and have whatever changes made they want. I would include a seperate and optional plugin, but created solely by me and endorsed by me, but not the original creators that makes the game play better in Nova, adding tactfully things new in nova not possible in EV.

One reason I'd like to port it is because it was a very good plugin, one of the best I've played, and among other things it made use of carriers that most had literally over adozen fighters each, and it clogged systems easily and would be nice in Nova with higher ship max.

Because the emails I have are several years old, I consider it highly likely they would be dead, and the creators would have outgrown EV and couldn't be found. I dont want to say which it is though unless I can first get an idea of wether I am capable of the task, I want to be positive I am going to be able to, and will finish before I offer to someone that I might start. And ether way I think its an interesting debate on the morality and legality of continueing someone else's work.

I would consider it more similar to quoteing someone like in a term paper (you all remember and hated doing that right...) You use something they created. A study, a catch quote, an assembly of information, and you say exactly where it came from, who originally created it, it isn't yours. You dont ask authorization in these cases, and in some casses the source can be anonymous. Like with citeing sources, you make no money, they dont not make any money, and they get free prestige, but risk potentially defameing missuse. I think it would be ok, but I still want to know the thoughts of other plugin developers as they are the "kin" of the concerned party.

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(url="http://"http://www.freewebs.com/hardslab/cheat2.hqx")Cheat 2(/url)
Cheat any way you want in almost any mac game. Even Nova.

Just thought I should answer some of your questions.

Nova does not require special names, so long as they are in the Nova Files folder. The only exception is Nova Music, and MP3 containing the title music.

As for the title screen, if you email me, I could send you a plug with all of the base values for the title screen for classic EV games. The worst part of that is taking all of the individual button swing things, and putting them into one sprite.

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Eat blazing electric death!
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/infernostudios/ept/")Unofficial EV and EVO Ports(/url): Betas 3 and 2

Quote

Originally posted by Rick_Hardslab:
Because the emails I have are several years old, I consider it highly likely they would be dead, and the creators would have outgrown EV and couldn't be found. I dont want to say which it is though unless I can first get an idea of wether I am capable of the task, I want to be positive I am going to be able to, and will finish before I offer to someone that I might start. And ether way I think its an interesting debate on the morality and legality of continueing someone else's work.

If they have not 1) explicitly given you permission, 2) explicitly given blanket permission to the entire world, or 3) been dead for more than fifty years (more in some countries), you would be breaking the law. If you're not making money from it, you may escape severe penalties, but no responsible site will carry your plug-in, and you will be violating both the recognised legal and moral rights of the creators.

Quote

I would consider it more similar to quoteing someone like in a term paper (you all remember and hated doing that right...) You use something they created. A study, a catch quote, an assembly of information, and you say exactly where it came from, who originally created it, it isn't yours. You dont ask authorization in these cases, and in some casses the source can be anonymous. Like with citeing sources, you make no money, they dont not make any money, and they get free prestige, but risk potentially defameing missuse.

The difference here is a matter of scale. Quoting within your own original work a few lines from a source usually counts as "fair use" or "fair dealing" depending on your country's laws, and is permitted. Quoting an entire work falls into a different category entirely.

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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url) | (url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/")EV-Nova.net(/url) | (url="http://"http://www.evula.com/survival_guide/")EV Nova Survival Guide(/url)
Truth! Justice! Freedom! And A Hard-Boiled Egg!

(This message has been edited by David Arthur (edited 04-30-2003).)

David,

what is the legal status if you only modify for your own use? I have ported almost all my EV and EVO plugs, and EV and EVO themselves, to run in the Nova engine. But I haven't uploaded anything for other people to use. Nor would I without asking permission first.

Among other things, people can and should still download the original EV and EVO games, and register them. But I like to play around, and also I like an inertialess ship.

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