For those interested, I've returned from a 1.5 month driving tour of the US and have begun revamping some EVx related tools:

Pilot File Editor 3.0b: I've spent the past week messing around with the latest build and haven't found any bugs. I still consider it beta, but will post a link tomorrow for those interested in open testing of it.

The rest of the things I have are based of of applescript tools I made over a year ago to help me experiment with a more advanced EV related project. I don't know if anyone else would be interested in them, but they do exist....

EV Stripper 2.0: This utility "mines" EV and EVO data files and plugins for resource names. For example, it will create a series of text files with a list of govt, ship, syst, spob (etc) names. Why? Well, I originally wanted some text files containing a bunch of govt, syst and spob names for use by another application I had made (unfinished). The applescript apps I made work, but I've found applescript to be unreliable on veriable machines, so I updated things.

EV2SS2.0b: Long before R&R; software started work on tools for Nova, I made some applescript utilities that would read EVO data files and export the data to a text file that could be read by a spreadsheet. Martin Turner expressed interest in an updated, reliable version of the applescripts, so I've worked to translate the utility and add some versitility. Currently, it is 90% effective in that it exports some resource types correctly, while it screws up on others. I know the problem, so it's just a matter of sticking in an "if...then" statement.

SS2EV: I haven't started on this, but it is the complement to EV2SS, taking a spreadsheet file and making a resource based on the info in it. Once EV2SS is finished, it should be relatively straight forward to make this (many of the same subroutines)

I will post a link to these utilities tomorrow. If I don't hear any complaints, I'll submit things to the EV download sites.

-STH

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Ok. Here's the link. (url="http://"http://www.hellskitchen.org/~seant/EV")http://www.hellskitchen.org/~seant/EV(/url)

-STH

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Thank you! Those look really cool! Off to download...

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(url="http://"http://bbspot.com/News/2001/03/perl_test.html")Test Shows 99.99% of High School Seniors Can't Read Perl(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by diddlysquat:
**Thank you! Those look really cool! Off to download...
**

Thank you. I was beginning to think no one cared (sniff).

If I feel energetic when I get home from work, I'll try and make something that will take a correctly formatted spread sheet and make it into an EV/EVO plugin.

-STH

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Quote

Originally posted by seant:
**
EV2SS2.0b: Long before R &R; software started work on tools for Nova, I made some applescript utilities that would read EVO data files and export the data to a text file that could be read by a spreadsheet. Martin Turner expressed interest in an updated, reliable version of the applescripts, so I've worked to translate the utility and add some versitility. Currently, it is 90% effective in that it exports some resource types correctly, while it screws up on others. I know the problem, so it's just a matter of sticking in an "if...then" statement.

SS2EV: I haven't started on this, but it is the complement to EV2SS, taking a spreadsheet file and making a resource based on the info in it. Once EV2SS is finished, it should be relatively straight forward to make this (many of the same subroutines)
**

Sounds great. ConText and ResStore work like this for EVN, and it does make for a completely new way to manage a large plugin. When you can put all the ships up in a spreadsheet together you can compare them and rank them easily, which makes it eaier to say give them all fair prices. It was an excellent idea.

My biggest problem was when Excel decided to delete empty fields from the ends of lines when writing the text files, if they happened to contain empty strings (happens more in EVN). So I add and extra 'EOL' field whcih is "•" to protect the resource fields when Excel writes the text files back out again. I also had to protect quotes, returns and tabs in descs and strings so that Excel didn't misinterpret them.

Good luck! Hope it goes well.

Cheers
DrRalph

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NovaTools are coming.

Quote

Originally posted by DrRalph:
**My biggest problem was when Excel decided to delete empty fields from the ends of lines when writing the text files, if they happened to contain empty strings (happens more in EVN). So I add and extra 'EOL' field whcih is "•" to protect the resource fields when Excel writes the text files back out again.
**

Would it be possible to get a spreadsheet as exported by your software? I'd like to see how much work it would be to make it so my software will correctly import the format you're using, as I'm sure your editing software will be the standard for a long time.

-STH (seant@phair.csh.rit.edu)

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(This message has been edited by seant (edited 08-16-2001).)