Yesterday, a friend an i started screwing around with EVNEW trying to learn about making plug-ins. We spent about 3 hours but were eventually able to make a syst with a custom spob, and then did a couple of other little things. The reason that took us so long was the custom spob. We looked at the sprite and mask id's in the spin resource for earth and some other planets, and the sprite id's made sense, but the mask id's didn't really lead anywhere to where we could find. I just figured i was missing something that while it wasn't important last night, it would be in the future. So if anybody could explain this, it would be great.

Plus, my buddy used strata to design a 3-d model, but couldn't render it, so if there is a decent freeware rendering program, that would be great.

Nova's sprites are all stored as rle which is a special format containing both the sprite and the mask in one resource. For this reason the mask field is pretty much ignored - it's only there in case you want to store your sprites as PICTs which require a separate mask. By convention though, the mask ID is typically set to 1 higher than the sprite ID.

Guy, on Oct 21 2005, 04:38 PM, said:

Nova's sprites are all stored as rle which is a special format containing both the sprite and the mask in one resource. For this reason the mask field is pretty much ignored - it's only there in case you want to store your sprites as PICTs which require a separate mask. By convention though, the mask ID is typically set to 1 higher than the sprite ID.
View Post

thanks, guy.