I've been delving more into using EVNEW to modify EVN in the past hour or two, and have some questions regarding creation/modification of various things, as well as resource queries.

I have the Resource Bible and the EVN Reference spreadsheet and have been referring to them where necessary.

Without further ado, here's the questions and points.

The EVN Resource Bible. It's plagued with weird accented character errors and half the links don't point to anything in particular, plus there's a bunch of stuff I want to read up on and can't find anything about it. Is there a similar guide that's a little better laid out and easier to get to grips with?

Is the only way to find certain graphics (like outfit screen/description pics for outfits) to open up the data files and dig around in them?
I looked through the Bible and couldn't find most of what I needed to make new outfits (my capacitor laser turret and fake id have graphics in the outfit screen that are clearly not a turret weapon or an id card for example)

Is there any sort of "dummies guide to making EVN plugins" that will enable someone to sink their teeth into plugin creation a little more quickly? I may have suddenly contracted The Dreaded Stupid, because for the life of me reading the details on how to make plugins and what half the different resources do and how to use them is like reading a Unix manual in Chinese. I still don't know what the hell an rle8 is or why it's different to an rleD and what the difference is between pers and char. Bonus points if it's a guide that presumes you're using EVNEW.

Other than the EVN Reference spreadsheet, is there any numerical index of what the in-game graphics are?
The reason I ask this one is that I've so far only been able to duplicate the appearance of a planet in space and in the landing screen by copying the pic number, I can't do the same for outfits.

In a similar vein to the above question, is there one for sound effects and one for descriptions?

Hopefully I'm not the only person that's been wanting to ask these questions, because then this post will be of even more use. If anyone wants to talk to me about this on ICQ, it's 13819089.

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Check out the Guides section of the (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/addons.html")EVN Addons page(/url). There are a number of different forms of the EVN Bible there including PDF and HTML. The accented characters when referring to a resource type are supposed to be there. I'm not sure why, but that is how mburch made them – maybe for fun, maybe to be sure the names were unique, maybe to let you know he's referring to a resource rather than just using a word.

There should also be some plugin making guides there but to answer the questions you've mentioned:
Every outfit must have its own picture. If you want to use a picture already existing in the data files you will have to copy it and give it a new ID. The ID of a picture associated with an outfit is 6000+the index number of the outfit. The index number of a resource can be found by subtracting 128 from its ID. So if your outfit is ID 387, the ID of the picture should be 6259 (6000+387-128).
An rle8 is an 8-bit (256 colour) version of an rleD (rleDs are 16-bit). They're only there for people with older computers which can't handle 16-bit graphics very well.
A char defines how a new pilot is created – what ship and system to start the player in and how the governments of the game like the player and stuff. If there is more than one char you will be allowed to choose which one to use when creating a new pilot.
A pers is a specific ship the player may meet in the game. This ship will display a unique name in the target display to identify it from other normal ships. The pers may have special attributes such as extra weapons or shields than a normal ship of its class. Also, it can display a specific message when you send greetings to it.
I don't think any index of graphics/sounds/descriptions currently exists but I can tell you that all sounds a referred to by their index number (meaning you can use the same sound for multiple things), and anything that needs a desciption (other than mission texts) must have one specifically created for it (so if you want to use an exisiting description for something else you will have to duplicate it and give it the appropriate ID).

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(This message has been edited by Guy (edited 04-30-2004).)

Thanks for clearing some of that up.

I guess part of my problem is the fact that I have a million and one other things going on while trying to work on stuff, so sometimes I don't get the time to really study the guides. I just downloaded a few more guides regarding plugin creation from the addons section, and managed earlier on to successfully (aside from outfit screen graphics) create some new weapons, a fake ID for clearing my legal record, a couple of test paintjobs, and a reactor, as well as a new system and two stellars.

I loathe number-juggling though and unfortunately doing stuff like graphics for this game appears to require quite a bit of it.

Though when I mentioned the odd accented characters, I meant they were weird errors as opposed to the regular accented names which I've seen used on the board, for some reason some of them read like "sp•n" "shŠn" "bššm" "•ntf" and the like. I know which ones are which, it's just a weird little glitch in the version I downloaded I guess.

To further expand on your answer about rle8 and rleD, what are they used for?

So far I know the shan are the ship's animations, and the pict are static images like in the outfit screen, the landing screen, etc, so what are the rle8 and rleD for?

Here's a list of the settings I'm still unsure of.

cicn (Not a clue)
colr (Not a clue)
intf (interference?)
misn (missions)
oops (disasters?)
rle8 (8-bit graphic resources...for what though?)
rleD (16-bit graphic resources, for what?)
roid (asteroids)
spin (Not a clue)
str (Not a clue)
str# (Not a clue)

The other ones have either been explained, are obvious, or I've found out through tinkering.

I really want to learn how to modify this game, it's got a great amount of modification potential, and on a side note, a Freelancer mod for EVN would be cool, and an EVN mod for Freelancer would be absolutely awesome, imagine piloting your monster of a Raven in full, glorious 3D towards a gigantic Auroran battle-station. Though I doubt ATMOS are going to release the meshes for the ships and stations any time soon, which kinda sucks because they're works of art.

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(This message has been edited by Deadweight (edited 04-30-2004).)

rle's are for ship animations? Shan is for specifications on ship animations. If I remember right from the hand has done just a bit plugin things

The 'errors' in the bible are because MAC and PC uses so different font formats or such and most of the 'things' have special characters in them, like shän ^^;

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Sounds like you did get a bad version of the EVN Bible. The copy that comes with the mac version includes a short description of each resource. I'd recommend (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl/EV_Nova_Resource_Bible.html.gz?path=evn/guides&file;=EV_Nova_Resource_Bible.html.gz")this one(/url) – an html version with easy navigation.

However, a few of the resources you mentioned aren't Nova specific and so aren't included the bible.

cicn: Small images used for things like target brackets, arrows on the map and the x2 symbol that appears when you hit caps-lock. No need to look at these unless you want to modify the existing graphics.

rle8/rleD: These store all the sprites and masks for Nova including ships, weapons, and planets.They're basically just a compressed version of a normal PICT but one resource will hold both the sprite and the mask. Any graphic that requires a mask will be in this form.

str: A single string of text. These are used for storing the names of ships, outfits and the like as well as messages that may appear on the bottom of the screen.

STR#: A collection of strings. In the Nova data files, instead of making a whole bunch of str resources, all strings of a specific kind will be grouped together and stored as one STR# (eg. all ships names are found in one STR#). The str resource is usually only used to override a specific entry in a STR# resource. So if you wanted your plugin to change the name of a ship you could just create a single str resource with your new name (and give it the right ID) rather than having to make a copy of the whole STR# resource. See the section called "Patching STR# Resources" of the Nova Bible for more info on this.

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(This message has been edited by Guy (edited 04-30-2004).)

Guy, it's STR, not str. Also, the umlauted charatcers are there because Apple reserved any combination of four lowercase and capital letters. I don't know about numbers or anything smaller or greater than 4.

Here are the 6 Nova-specific resources you asked about:
()cölr - The cölr resource contains various universal settings for the game's graphics, such as the grid color and select color in shipyars/outfitters, some fonts and such, and the progress bar color/size (making it fill the whole screen is so cool...). Many of its resources relate to the main menu.
()ďntf - The ďntf resource, surprisingly, stands for interface! It controls one type of status bar (with the shields/armor/etc.) on the right of the screen. Which one depends on what ship you're flying. If a ship has an inherent government (combat or attribute, doesn't matter), it uses that government's set status bar (which refers to the ďntf resource).
()mďsn - The mďsn resource is indeed for missions. Read the Bible, because the mďsn resource is far too complicated for me to explain well.
()oöps - The oöps resource is indeed a disaster. However, it is a disaster in the price of jünks , not space.
()roďd - The roďd resource is indeed an asteroid. It has things such as the "armor", what kind of/how many asteroids come out when it's destroyed (if any), and the jünk that comes out when it's destroyed.
()spďn - The spďn resource is an extremely simple shän resource; all it has are references to the rleX/PICT resources, the number of rows, and the number of columns.

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(This message has been edited by orcaloverbri9 (edited 04-30-2004).)

Guy: That's the one I have, funnily enough. It must be a discrepancy between the character sets on Mac and PC, (I'm on the latter) as mentioned by dzeron.

What's the difference between the shan and the rleD? I want to understand the exact nature of each resource so I can get to work on plugins more quickly.

Edit: Has anyone else noticed that every time you open a desc in EVNEW it chops off the last letter/character in the description text? That's highly annoying.

(This message has been edited by Deadweight (edited 04-30-2004).)

EVNEW is still in beta so you aren't allowed to complain yet about its faults. I love EVNEW personally, and can't wait until it gets updated, upgraded and expanded (will it? when?)

As for the shan and RleD resources, the RleD resource is the set of images of the ship spinning around and the shan is the data part of ship creation (where the ports are, etc). Another resource you need to know for this is spin, how the graphics are implemented into the game. It's confusing, i know.

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ok, I've got the shan, rle8 and rleD roughly down (though I haven't tried making a totally new ship graphic yet, just pointed the shan towards an existing ship's rleD), I'm still a little vague on the spin resource.

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Sigh An rle is like an animated GIF (examples: :rolleyes: :eek: ). It contains a bunch of "shapes", which are frames. It just has the graphics. Period. An rle8 is 8-bit and rleD is 16-bit. The shan resource tells Nova which rles to use for what purpose FOR SHIPS. It's fairly complicated, since you have to do different things to achieve different effects. Consult the Bible.

omeomi, what do you mean by "how the graphics are implemented into the game"? Technically, the graphics are implemented into the game via the spin, shan, rle8, rleD, PICT, cicn, intf, and colr resources, as well as various fields in other resources that tell it which graphic to use. You see, your statement is somewhat vague. A spin is used for misc things such as boxes or junks, as well as weapons, spobs, and asteroids. They are also used for things like buttons and the main menu logo.

Hope this helps.

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The programmer's code of entomology: there's always another bug.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who have friends.
Windows users: stop asking for plugins. (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW/")Make one yourself.(/url)
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(This message has been edited by orcaloverbri9 (edited 04-30-2004).)

Some time ago, I posted (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/webboard/Forum9/HTML/005007.html#ZachaPedro01-12-200409:50AM")this(/url). Enjoy.

The resource type names (cicn, s˙st, rleD) are all 4-chars long, as they are stored on 4 bytes (see my topic about the limitations of the resource fork), even those that appears to be shorter, such as str or snd actually have a space at the end.

Yeah, it's a f*cking discrepancy between character sets. As a French I'm used to it. To avoid this in these boards, we try to write an ä with ä, it will show up as ä (not to mention it's faster to write for you).

Spďn is the basic version of shän, it just tells where to find the image (and mask if in a PICT) and the size of each frame, that's all.

For the problems in EVNEW, make sure you have the latest version.

Don't forget, Deadweigth, that PC plug deving is very recent, even after the release of WinNova it was thought plug deving would keep being done on Macs. Only very recently aprosenf (may the Gods bless him forever, think to thank him often) made a PC plug editor and put it open beta (state in which it still is). Therefore, plug-maker helping material is still Mac friendly only, if it exists at all (there is much more for EV(O)). The best way to learn so far is to open the data files and see how things are done, a plug is just something that adds to the data files (while being easily removable), overriding resources with the same ID.
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(This message has been edited by Zacha Pedro (edited 05-01-2004).)

A word on the resources that go into a ship:

Shďp: This the actual data part of the ship, which holds such information like speed, shields, etc, and also what graphics the ship uses.

Shän: Stands for sh ip an imation. It compiles the sprites, engine glows, lights, and other elements into one resource, and animates them as specified. The shďp resource calls upon this for graphics.

RleD and Rle8: These are the sprites of the ship, the glows, the lights, etc. all separated. Instead of a tiled frame view like normal sprites, these create a small layered spinning animation, which saves space in the plug-in. RleDs are 16-bit, and Rle8s are 8-bit. The shän resource calls upon these, and PICTs can be substituted for them, which are easier to work with but make the file size much larger.

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Quote

Originally posted by Deadweight:
Other than the EVN Reference spreadsheet, is there any numerical index of what the in-game graphics are?
The reason I ask this one is that I've so far only been able to duplicate the appearance of a planet in space and in the landing screen by copying the pic number, I can't do the same for outfits.

EVNEW does have the handy dandy 'Save As Text' option. You could dump all of the Nova graphics files as text and make your own reference spreadsheet.

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Hey, Deadweight. It sounds like you are able to create your own images. How, and what program? (I checked the FAQ for this, but I couldn't find it).

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