Thought you'd all like to hear how it is going. (This is also for newer members who haven't seen previous posts, but there are some new tidbits for old hands!)
The big news is that the editors will officially be freeware! (w00t!) Although we will accept copies of finished plugins made with them
Tools so far:
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Resource editors: the NovaTools are essentially completed (all 23 of them). (except for a couple of new flags for ships and weapons that Matt told me about today !) The editors run inside ResEdit in system 7.0 to OSX under the cool classic thread. They are all Cookie Compatibleย. And they even include a spelling checker for the descs. EVO and EV RSSC editors are starting to be put together (3 new EVO ones so far)
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ConText and ResStore - these will become mainstays for large plugin development - they allow you to use Excel to edit plugins as spreadsheets! ConText exports resources to Excel and ResStore turns Excel sheets back into resources. Multiple plugin/data files are handled. Great for large scale changes or comparisions across many resources - ie sorting weapons by their damage and making sure they are all balanced. They are up to alpha 17!
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Port Authority is going to be EV and EVO compatible!
Other tools include:
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Mish/Mash (guess! ),
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Several sprite conversion and formatting tools( 5 of them) .
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Validation Tools: ShipShape (ship resource validator) , Mission BitMap II (new mission string mapper) & Duped (checks for duplicate resources across multiple files, will work for EV and EVO as well)
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Mysteries: LETT2TEXT and TEXT2LETT
I'll hopefully get copies to Nova beta testers. A general release date is not decided yet.
Cheers
DrRalph (and Rodger)
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R&R; Software
"EVN, what's that?"
(This message has been edited by DrRalph (edited 05-14-2001).)