strange and unnatural bedbugs plague my innocent tc...

Hello,
I have been playing Ev for years. My favorite was the original, and I remember well the switch to EVO, the brief addiction, and the sense of dissapointment at leaving behind my hot-rodded Defender... I picked up Nova a year or two ago, and am now in the midst of a largish project that I've had planned for a very long time.
Back in my EVO days, I planned a TC based on a set of novels I have written. The place is unique for EV; it is a scifi setting that doe not have postlight travel, set entirely within our solar system. This obviously requires a number of basic changes to the game, but so far I havent had too many troubles with this.
Anyway, I recently got my hands on mission computer, and set off on a journey to actually create this scifi universe. I am currently getting to a reasonably advanced stage, but I have at last encountered a bug that I cant seem to figure my way through.
I've been loading one of my primary ship files regularly into Nova, and starting it up to see the ships in the actual game environment. This also lets me pinpoint glitches pretty early. Unfortunately, a file I've never had trouble with before has suddenly begun to give me trouble.
I will put my ship file in the plugins folder, start up the game, and once the second screen comes up, I get this error message;
"trouble loading spin resource from pict, Resource 141 not found" Then it gives me; "Assertion failure, sprite 1583 N/A"
Ok; so, I checked through my file in 'duped', and I couldnt find duplicates that werent intended to be there to replace existing nova ships. I looked through the nova files and I cant find what spin it is trying to load from a pic. As far as I know, Nova seems to load everything from RLE8 and D resources except for menus, title pages, and status bar stuff... I cant seem to find a resource 141 that would be problematic here, and why should it say something is missing if I am only adding things with a plugin?
I have tried making a copy of my plug and deleting files that I have added since last time I sucessfully loaded it, and it doesnt seem to be working. I figure the program must be having some trouble with the menu screen graphic or something, but I havent touched that in this file; it's just a ships file...
Any suggestions from you more experienced "pluggers" would be appreciated,
Thanks,
-Capt. Zil (aging piratical menace)

Could you post a debuglog? To make one create a text file called debuglog.txt and put it in your main Nova folder. Then copy the contents of the file into a post. This might help with the diagnosis.

This post has been edited by Ant'Iglias II : 30 April 2007 - 08:43 AM

will this work with a .rtf or only a .txt file?

I used Windows, but have had a similar error come up throughout plug-in development. It is, for me, related to graphics. I check a few things. First, if I have 15 RleD resources, I must have 15 Rle8 resources, and vice versa. Second, every RleD that a shan references must exist. Third, every image that a spin references must exist. Fourth, every ship must have a shan.

It may not solve your problem, but it works for me. Also, I am able to just create blank Rle8 resources to correspond with the actual-image RleD resources.

Werhner

You don't have to have an rle8 for every relD. You can get by the the latter alone, not so sure about the former.

It needs to be a .txt file. If you have extensions hidden, make sure you don't accidentally make it .txt.txt, or it won't work. Every ship doesn't have to have a shan for Nova not to crash, but it will cause weird things to happen when you see the ship, as it appears to resort to using whatever 128 uses, except it won't turn. Mildly amusing once you figure out once is going on and realize that you just need the shan.

As for your problem, double check any resources that use spin graphics, like weapon sprites, explosions, planets, asteroids, etc, and make sure they all point to the correct spins.

Ok, I havent got the debuglog to work yet, but I'll start going through the graphics files also.
Thanks guys.

Well you are really shooting in the blind if you go through the graphics files before you get that debug log. It should be called "debuglog.txt" and stuff should be written to it when you start Nova...

@jacabyte, on May 1 2007, 09:03 AM, said in TC; basic technical help:

Well you are really shooting in the blind if you go through the graphics files before you get that debug log. It should be called "debuglog.txt" and stuff should be written to it when you start Nova...

Hmm? It's been a while, but those aren't generally difficult bugs to deal with if you have the data. I was using a debuglog anyway, but it wasn't really necessary. I think it's an omission error.

@Capt. Zil: If you can't get the debuglog working, try ConText and search for 141. I found it a very useful tool.

allright, thanks, I'll look that one up.
(As far as shooting in the dark, I havent added all that many files to the plugin since the last time it booted up ok. I'll look up that dev tool though; it will probably save me some advil in the future...)

BTW; as a thanks for the advice, I thought I'd share a variant on a very familiar ship...
This is an old pic I did in photoshop a long while ago; I wasnt putting together plugins then, and wanted a pic of Voinian Frigate (which is still one of my top three favorite EV ships). I couldnt find any sort of pic, so I made my own, using various textures, folding and shaping them and placing them on as an outer shell.
The background is a hubble photo, from space.com if I am not mistaken...
Anyhow; nothing to do with my plugin, but I figure y'all might enjoy this.

Attached File(s)

• V_Frigate_Space1.JPG (53.67K)
  Number of downloads: 50

Very nice.
PS or 3D?

It looks like PS, the lighting doesn't appear to be from the star in the background.

@capt--zil, on May 2 2007, 06:52 AM, said in TC; basic technical help:

<Awesome Voinian Frigate Pic>

You, sir, are a God at graphic design. The frigate looks even more friggin' deadly than it did in EVO.

me wants it

Could someone help me with my jaw? It seems to be pinned to the floor.

Not bad, but it looks a little bent and the background doesn't work well with it. Needs a darker background, one without a visisble light source.

I'd say it's pretty dang impressive for purely 2d.

Yeah, it's pure 2D; I'm no good with the 3D programs. I am trying to master the shareware program I have, but I havent got anything decent yet. I do everything in photoshop. In fact (yes, I know you guys will groan) I have been making sprites in photoshop, which I will readily advise is NOT a good way to do it. Nevertheless, I have been so far a 2D "one trick pony".
btw; the bug turned out to be a shan reference to a shield glow spin that wasnt there. I didnt know that would actually keep Nova from starting up, but you learn something new every day...
Come to think of it, I dont actually like shield glows so much, I may not bother having any in my TC...

@joshtigerheart, on May 2 2007, 05:57 PM, said in TC; basic technical help:

Not bad, but it looks a little bent and the background doesn't work well with it. Needs a darker background, one without a visisble light source.

Yeah, you're right. It actually is bent and somewhat out of whack in several dimensions. I just like the character... I can change backgrounds pretty easily though, but yeah, you've got a good eye...

Sorry about the multiple posts (between classes here), I started a smallish 'crew' plug after being given good direction in the "whither nova" post. I intend to have this as part of my TC, but might as well create a stand alone plug version of just this feature, anyhow; I made multiple versions of each crewman, and created a cron that will start a misn to give the player an option to pay to keep up crew morale, or they get 'degraded' to the lower outfit. My only problem is that if a player has multiple different crewmen, as it stands, he will have to do this "mission" for each crewman at slightly different intervals depending on when they hired them in the first place, and that could get annoying; I would like to have a 'catch all' misn that will put all of their crew back to 'starting morale'; but I dont know how to make the misn apply to more than one outfit if they may or may not have any of the other crewmen in the set.
Can I do "if-then" statements with the Nova engine?
-thanks

What you could do is have an invisible mission for each version of each crew. When you buy a crew it starts the corresponding mission. Aborting this mission will remove the crew, grant lower version, and start corresponding mission. The cron could then simply abort every mission (in ascending order) - if the mission isn't actually running then nothing will happen and there'll be no worries. This is assuming you can only have one of each type of crew member - if you could have more, say 10, of each type then the cron would need to abort each mission 10 times.

Of course I don't think there's any way you could make the required pay from the one resultant mission be dependant on how many crew members you have.

No, the pay will probably be set for the main mission; it isnt such a big problem, the text will say something like "You buy a round for the whole bar" or "you treat your crew to a visit to all the spacer-dives" or something, with a set price. If you are buying for everybody in the place, the price will be similar whether you have two crewmen with you or six...
Thanks for the help, I'll see if I can make this work.