We have a special purpose ship editor for EVO called ShipWrite. ($5 shareware)
(url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")http://www.sutherlan...o_software.html(/url)

What is it?
Shipwrite is a tool for viewing, editing and creating ships for plugins to use in EVO.

What does it do?

Creating a complete ship for EVO requires up to 14 separate resources to be created, all with specific numbering conventions. Shipwrite makes it easy, all you have to know is a single ship ID number and ShipWrite takes care of the rest. It provides a complete editor for ships, including:

• An animated sp•n (sprite) resource editor and preview, which shows a spinning ship sprite so it is easy to get it going.
• Views of all the ship graphics and the ability to load them from PICT file, PICT resources and even PICT resources in other files (as well as the clipboard as usual). All associated strings and text can be edited in the same window.
• Prompting popup menus for all the ship fields where it will help to have an idea of what are sensible numbers to use. For example the turn rate field has a pop up menu to suggest a range of turn rates. The weapon fields have a pop up menus with a list of all the standard EVO weapon ID numbers. The Government field has a menu for the standard groups etc. The user can quickly make a working ship and then modify any fields manually as they please.
• Only the ship ID needs to be specified, all other resource Ids are allocated automatically.
• A quick visual check is available to see whether the ship resources are complete, or if any are missing.
• Graphics can be saved out of a plugin into PICT files and PICT resources.

ShipWrite can open existing plugins, create new ones from scratch and it is also a safe ship viewer. ShipWrite can open a plugin file in read only mode so no accidental changes can be made.

so can you edit the sprites of ships with it? And Does it do the Spďn for you? I mean if you put in one graphic, will it make the other graphics at different angles?

That would be awesome. I'm sick of making ships in graphic converter.

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"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

Quote

Originally posted by Azdara:
**so can you edit the sprites of ships with it? And Does it do the Spďn for you? I mean if you put in one graphic, will it make the other graphics at different angles?

That would be awesome. I'm sick of making ships in graphic converter.

**

We use RayDream to produce the 36 little ship pictures as separate files, then we use Pict2Sprite to make the sprite pict file/resource and the mask file/resource. Then ShipWrite uses these two files to make the spin resources as well as animating it in the editor.
So... you still need to make all the graphics at different angles. Sorry There is an example ship with the ShipWrite download. so you can see what I mean. If you want to try Pict2Sprite, which is a separate program, let us know.

A special purpose ship editor that only edits ships!

Seriously though, has anyone tried it yet? I would find that to be a useful tool, although EV Formula calc is invaluable. It would make a great alternative to EV Edit.

Rodger, are you guys planning on making a bunch of little mini-apps to edit everything? That would be neat.

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"Apple does not recommend allowing an elephant to operate a Mac in any environment."

Rodger, are you guys planning on making a bunch of little mini-apps to edit everything? That would be neat.

(/B)(/QUOTE)

Actually yes. We've developed a few small special purpose apps. So far we have 'Mission Control' to edit missions ( It is under development and not quite ready to release yet) and we are working on 'Outfitter' to work on outf and associated resources. 'WeaponSmith' is still vapourware

We'd like to help beta test EV3 so we can work on our editors in parallel with EV3 development. (hint hint)

Never fear, Andrew said that data on EV3 will be released early so that plugin makers can get a head start. I think that would apply to you.

I've just downloaded ShipWrite, and I am very impressed. For beta software, it is doing just great. Hasn't crashed yet. There are a few points though. However, I'll email you those.

To everyone else - this program has some problems, but I would definitely recommend it. Once the bugs get ironed out, I think it'll be pretty good.

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"Apple does not recommend allowing an elephant to operate a Mac in any environment."

Pretty good, although I don't think the 'Save' button works.

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Marge: Pointing to Circuit board in Robots opened head
See Homer, that's why your robot didn't work!

(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/ubb/newsdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number;=20&forum;=*EV/EVO+chronicles&DaysPrune;=25&article;=000024&startpoint;=")The Tides of War(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by the Necromicon:
**Pretty good, although I don't think the 'Save' button works.

**

Thanks,

The code is still beta, and it defaults to read-only when it opens existing files. You have to tell it to allow editing, otherwise the save doesn't work.
This is a basic safety precaution for now, but it is also useful when opening plugins which you just want to poke around in without any chance of an accidental save, so it may stay.

Also, thanks to those of you giving us feedback on the editor, it ihas been very helpful and we'll make it a better program as a result.

In case it isn't obvious, click on the preview and other graphics to access/alter/update them.

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It seems pretty cool, though there are some minor issues:

The weapons menu only shows EVO's weapons. Can you let it read weap resources from plugins?

There are some bugs regarding sprite display, especially in larger plugins.

When you scroll down descs, it stays scrolled down when you switch to another ship or another desc.

The listing of ships seems kinda random - can you add features to sort them?

Aside from that, ShipWrite seems like a superb program.

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"He's probably the least qualified person ever to be nominated by a major party... What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?"
- Ron Reagan, son of the former president, on George W. Bush; a (url="http://"http://www.votenader.com")Ralph Nader(/url) supporter.

AIM: ColdFusion117

We have worked on Shipwrite a bit more and now have v1.1b1 to try out. It adapts to govts and weapons found in plugins and allows for bigger sprites and so on. We will have the changes for EVO v1.0.2 soon.

ShipWrite 1.1b1, Aug 2000
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Shipwrite is a tool for viewing, editing and creating ships for plugins to use in EVO.
page: (url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")http://www.sutherlan...o_software.html(/url)
file: (url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/files/shipwrite11b1.hqx")http://www.sutherlan...ipwrite11b1.hqx(/url)

ShipWrite is freeware to sensible bug reporters or constructive idea contributers, it will be shareware when released (perhaps as a package with Mission Control and Outfitter).

Changes:
ĽNew enlarged animated sprite display - rearranged the screen generally to still keep inside a 640x480 display area. Display on main screen is now 200x200, the absolute max sprite size is 256x256. Sprites larger than 200 will display, but they will be clipped just for this display. The second Sprite screen animation is still 128x128, but it will just clip extremely large sprites with no harm done. It is sufficient to check the sprite is working.
ĽNew Sprite background is lighter to help show mask errors. We used a Chandra X-ray telescope image of a supernova remnant, Cassiopea A.
ĽFixed non-square sprite bug.
ĽNow adapts to new weap and govt resources in a plugin to make the pop up menus reflect weap and govt overrides in the plugin. Standard govt and weap names etc are built into ShipWrite.

Not Fixed Yet:

Ľ Still only one ship open at a time, opening multiple ships at a time will take a little while - we are working on it.
Ľ Updates for v1.0.2 of EVO are coming as soon as possible, to allow for built-in outfs.

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Awesome

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M A R T I N • T U R N E R