I hesitate to impede on the undoubtedly important work of such esteemed developers, but I seem to have to hit a rather nasty bloc in my creative efforts. That being the non-creative parts of course. Each and everytime I try to transplant my ideas to resedit I seem to get lost in how to use it. Especially with ships and masking and such. I have studied the bible to such a degree that I think I qualify as a convert, but I honestly cant make heads or tails of it. Can anyone direct me to a website or perhaps a friendly person that could assist me with resedit, because I have a solid gigabyte or images, .mov ship animations, descs, and plotlines rotting on my hard disk. Here are some concepts and their descs. I blame 56k for my free time....

Like its smaller cousin, the Stardragon, the Kalonian Cruiser was outfitted with a dark ambient alloy that was used to collect starlight and convert it into energy. Once the mainstay of the first human starfleets, the Kalonian Cruiser has since been refitted with conventional scion lasers and a modern engine system. All of them still have their trademark dark armor, as they are no longer being produced in favor for more progressive warship designs. The sheer number of Kalonian Cruisers assembled during the early years of planetary colonization, however, ensured that the dated ship would play an important role in filling up both the Talorists' and Republic’s warfleet.

Aenolia is the largest of the three Dastarian moons. The moon and her two sisters are heavily populated and have been almost completely terraformed. The moons have larger industries than most planets in the region and are the key to Dastaria’s very profitable gases. It is because of this industry, and the unionization it has brought with it, that Aenolia and the other two moons have such a liberal population in the otherwise conservative Lymark Sector. The Dastarian moons were the only colonies in the sector that voted solidly for the Democrats in the disputed election. They have been under siege by the Talorists since the party broke away from the Republic.

The Masterick Transport is the first creation from the recently formed Iais Shipyards. The Masterick design updates the armor from the standards other freighters used to the more contemporary metals used by modern warships. Extra room has been fitted around the cockpit, allowing the owner to utilize more cargo space or install defensive systems depending on what routes the ship frequents. The new features and state of the art design come at a cost, but so far have been wildly popular among large corporations that trade with both the Republic and the Talorist Dominion.

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(This message has been edited by Jalai (edited 02-24-2004).)

You could always try contracting the actual development work to someone? You'd provide them with the renders, sprite PICT's, desc's, and ideas and then they'd program it in.

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Its not too terribly difficult, although I admit, it was easier to understand in the EV and EVO engines.

Once you've got a model, you need to somehow get it into this form:
(url="http://"http://img11.photobucket.com/albums/v34/Lindley/Example.jpg")http://img11.photobu...ley/Example.jpg(/url)

Then you need to make a corresponding mask:
(url="http://"http://img11.photobucket.com/albums/v34/Lindley/Mask.jpg")http://img11.photobu...indley/Mask.jpg(/url)

The easiest way to do that is, to render a 36-frame animation, with frame 0 being the ship pointed upwards, and keyframes at all four points of the compass, clockwise rotation. Then you use the m2s utility (included in the "Sprites" part of NovaTools----see the EVN addon page).

I'm not sure, but I think m2s might even make its own masks. Don't know how reliable they are. If it doesn't, then the easiest way to make masks is by rendering the same thing, except with the luminance of every texture on maximum (so they become pure white).

The key is to position the lighting and camera correctly prior to render. The lighting should be off to the forward-left of the ship when its pointing upwards; the specifics can be adjusted until it looks good. The camera should be exactly 45 degrees above the plane of the ship, and directly behind it. If your 3D program doesn't have an option to eliminate perspective, then I suggest putting the camera very far away from the ship, and using a large zoom factor.

Create a shän resource, and input the IDs of the pict and mask images in the "Baseimage" fields.

If you want to include engine glows, DISABLE THEM during the above renders. After you render the above----which the shän resource refers to as the base image----you can add engine glows in the following way.

1. Make all non-glow textures pure black. This can be done by disabling most of their options, like colors, specularity, etc.

2. Make the engine glows visible in the render, now. (I suggest a bit of transparency in their textures to make them look best.) The blacked-out ship will hide them as appropriate.

3. Render as above, and in the shan resource, put the resulting pict resource IDs into the Glows section.

You can do the same for running lights, shields, anything else you want to include. Most of that is straightforward. If you want to include banking, or make the ship unfold to fire or hyper, things get a bit more complicated; I'd recommend keeping it simple until you've got that much down.

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One thing you must not forget: the mask must be NOT anti-aliased, but of two colors: black, and white. Nothing more.

I am fairly litterate in plug designing (though I still have to make some real work with the Nova engine), and the first thing I say to you is: do not count on the Bible to learn how to do the things. The Bible (capitalise this holy Book) should be kept as a reference.
The second is: to actually learn, I recommand spying, examining, reverse engineer other plugs or the standard scenario, contained in the Nova data files. By seeing how they works, and having the Bible open at the same time in the text editor of your choice at the same time for reference, for the flags for instance, you can learn much.
A third thing would be: I suggest you to begin by slightly modifying little resources, only some obvious fields (price, for instance), save your mod in a plug, and check the results in Nova (yeah! now I can have as much as 999 1-credit-cost, no-mass-taking, solar panels!). Then modify some more complex tings, to save and check the results. Do not count too much on what you think it will do, regularly check that the engine will accept it. Also, rather than create something new from scratch, modify something existant until it becomes what you want it to be.
And the last thing would be: try to learn the resources in order: first you tinker with the simple oütf resource (remember: to do those odd dots on a letter, on a Mac you do alt-u, then the vowel, but on these boards for better compatibility you should write & e uml; for a ë, for instance), then you go on and modify weapons, then you try spöbs (the planets and stations), then sÿst because you will need to modify these in order not to simply modify but add a new spöb, then the other resources in increasing complexity. Keep mïsns for last.

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