I noticed that in nova, all the rleD resources have even indices. Do bad things happen if you use odd ones? Also it's my understanding that the rle8 resources are for graphics really old computers. If I make a new plugin, how much reason is there to include them?

Think I figured out my own question, at least for the first part. I'm using EVNEW and it appears that the mask images are automatically stored at ID+1. Not sure if the mac programs do a similar thing.

This post has been edited by Keldor Sarn : 22 January 2008 - 08:34 PM

I believe even numbers are for the sprite, and odd for the mask, and novatools/mc just combines them, but I'm not 100% sure.

rle8's are practically useless except in very specific circumstances. I wouldn't worry about them unless/until you get an email about your released plug asking why the graphics don't display (or it crashes or whatever it does), then you could release an update to your plug that has them.

Apparently, Nova was coded with sprites and masks combined into one rleD, but it is entirely possible to split them into two. Thus, ATMOS only used even-numbered resources in case they decided to go back and add a mask that was separate from the sprite. Apparently, this makes it easier to fine-tune the graphics.

Or so I've heard. I could be dead wrong though.

In Escape Velocity and EV Override , the sprites and masks were stored as separate PICT resources. By convention, the sprite PICT was given an even number, and the mask PICT the following odd number; there was no need to follow this, though, beyond the fact that doing so made it much easier to keep track of the resources.

EV Nova still supports this format, and used it in the early stages of its development, but also supports RLEs. Both RLE formats combine the sprite and mask in one resource — it isn’t possible to separate them — as well as doing some compression. Almost all sprites in the game’s scenario were written in RLE format, and plug-in developers are advised for various reasons to do likewise.

Since RLEs combine sprites and masks into one resource, the ‘mask’ field in the spďn and shän resources is ignored if the ‘sprite’ field points to an RLE. In order to avoid having to change the values in every spďn and shän resource when they converted the PICTs to RLEs, ATMOS gave each RLE resource the same ID as the sprite PICT that preceded it, and simply deleted both PICTs. The ID of the former mask PICT was left in the ‘mask’ field, but this doesn’t matter since that field is ignored. This was only done because they were converting an already-existing scenario; when you’re creating a new plug-in, there’s no reason whatsoever to leave the odd ID numbers blank.

This is all a very long way of saying that you can give your RLE resources whatever ID you like, and ignore the ‘mask’ field entirely.

(As for rlë8, it is just the same picture as rlëD, except in 256 colours rather than thousands. Given that very few Macintoshes capable of running EV Nova are still set to 256 colours, and the Windows version of the game apparently uses rlëD regardless, you can probably omit the rlë8 entirely to reduce the size of your plug-in.)

@david-arthur, on Jan 23 2008, 08:48 AM, said in RleDs Rle8s?:

(As for rlë8, it is just the same picture as rlëD, except in 256 colours rather than thousands. Given that very few Macintoshes capable of running EV Nova are still set to 256 colours, and the Windows version of the game apparently uses rlëD regardless, you can probably omit the rlë8 entirely to reduce the size of your plug-in.)

Wow. That's incredibly useful! Thanks.
wonders why no one else mentioned it...