There seems to be some interest in EVN editors and whats
happening. Here is an outline of what I have done and am
planning, and a little bit about why....
Since Matt has never developed an editor for EV (to my
knowledge anyway) it is up to 3rd party developers to step
in and fill the gap. Matt did however provide the famous
Bible which is what attracted me to the game in the first
place! However 3rd parties can never really know how EV
works at the detailed level that Matt does, so this makes it
difficult from the beginning to provide a totally integrated
editor for the EV games.
That said, there are several programmer/players who have
developed and are continuing to develop tools to make
editing EV easier.
After attempting a ship editor 'ShipWrite', and a mission
editor 'Mission Control' the Nova team asked if I would like
to have access to the Alpha version of Nova to help me
develop editors for EVN more quickly. Naturally I jumped at
the opportunity!
I have had to absorb a lot since December! (most of which I
can't tell you!) But early on it became clear that I could
help speed up the development of Nova by providing small
tools quickly. I have made a number of EVN resource
validators and checking tools, and these have proved fairly
effective. In addition the editing of basic EVN resources
is slow with ResEdit TMPLs, not just because of hex flags,
but also with all the 'rules' that need to be applied to the
format of the entries.
Soooo, I saw that while I might take some months to develop
ShipWrite II, MCII, WeaponSmith II as Carbonized/Appearance
applications, there was a need for a good interim solution
that might even be of lasting value. ResEdit plugins.
ResEdit was designed to be modifiable from the beginning,
but the tools to do so have not been generally available for
some time. I have dug up some old compilers and linkers and
can now build a nearly complete set of EVN resource editors
for ResEdit as plugins. So instead of trying to make EVNEdit
- a new ResEdit for EVN, we are making ResEdit into a proper
EVN tool in the other direction.
As you can see from the older EVEdit, editing a complex set
of interlinked Resources without screwing up is tricky!
ResEdit was written by good programmers and they solved
most of the resource management problems and so on. So I
can lever off that and add just code to handle our new
resources. This makes a much more stable, bug free general
EVN Editor. Best of all it is available to the nova team
almost immediately - where as new application level editors
are some way off as yet and would require far more
debugging before they could be safely used.
Now it is true that ResEdit won't run native under OSX, it
will run under the Classic Shell though. But frankly I
don't care! I'm not planning to run OSX on my personal mac
for quite some time to come. 
With ResEdit and my
plugins, anyone with a color screen and system 7 or newer
can work on or just browse through EVN resources, that gives
a much greater access to a wider audience. I'm even still
going to make non-carbon PPC versions of my application
level editors so you can use them under systems back to 7.5
as well.
Best of all the ResEdit plugins will be free! And if Apple
isn't handling ResEdit anymore I'll just include a copy with
the plugins.
Don't forget, the ResEdit plugins are one quick solution,
more sophisticated editors are also on the way, they will
just take longer,thats all.
Cheers Ralph
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(url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")R & R Software(/url)
"EVN? What's that?"
