Version 3.1

The Return of MissionComputer: Version 3.1

It's been some time since I updated MissionComputer, but still I've been working away at it. Now, I'd like to announce MissionComputer 3.1, which, in addition to fixing known problems from version 3.0.2, adds the ability to view and encode rlëD and rlë8 graphics for EV Nova , an Open Recent command, a search feature for the galaxy editor, and a Window menu. Along with these features, it also switches to a new, more reliable resource-management framework and intermediary format to protect against the resource-losing ‘Try Again’ errors that some users have experienced in the past.

MissionComputer features editors for a wide range of resources for all three Escape Velocity games, including chär, crön, dësc, düde, flët, gövt, ïntf, jünk, mïsn, nëbu, përs, PICT, spöb, STR, STR#, sÿst, and yëä. Resource Selector buttons make it easy to link resources without referring to ID tables, and editors offers excerpts from the official developer documentation within their interfaces. Also integrated into the MissionComputer application are an encoder for RLE sprites, a graphical tool for generating target graphics in the style used by EV Nova , a Resource Copier utility for moving resources between files in bulk, and a convertor for the Windows plug-in format.

Beyond those for which it offers graphical editors, MissionComputer can, thanks to its RDL template scripting system, provide ResEdit-style editors for every resource used in the Escape Velocity games along with added MissionComputer-style features such as popup menus, automatic flag calculation, and Resource Selector buttons.

I first released MissionComputer in December of 2001 after several months of development and testing. Since then, it has gained numerous features and grown from a simple mission editor for EV Override only to a wide-ranging editor covering many aspects of all three Escape Velocity games.

MissionComputer 3.1 is available in two separate editions: a Mac OS X version, and a Classic version for Mac OS 9 and earlier (on both PowerPC- and 68K-based computers). The new version is immediately available as a free download from my web site at davidarthur.evula.net.

What about dëqt?

Seriously though, this looks like a good update. I may actually be able to use it now instead of NovaTools

(EDIT): Wait, I just got this error when I tried to quit. I had just made a new Nova plug and was editing a new system at the time.

This post has been edited by Guy : 04 July 2005 - 06:04 PM

I'll take a look at it - did anything seem to actually go wrong, or was it just the error message?

Well it didn't ask me if I wanted to save (but I didn't want to so that was okay).

Sounds interesting... I always prefrered MissionComputer to NovaTools when editign and making MacNova Plugs, but maybe that is just because I could never get NovaTools to work.

You added an rlë encoder? Nice. In case you need to test its output, you can use my latest build of ViewRLE, I added a complete debug parser for that purpose (testing hand-written rlës and rlë encoders).

DL immediately.. no more OS 9 for me.

A note: It's been brought to my attention that as the new version of MissionComputer takes longer to open and save files than previous ones - an unavoidable trade-off resulting from the same new resource framework that provides increased stability - it can appear to have crashed while doing so, especially on slower computers and ones running Mac OS 9 or earlier.

In the next version, I'm adding a progress bar and a completion sound for opening and saving files, but for now, all it takes is a bit of waiting.

Good job. While I don't do a ton of EVN programming I do enjoy parts of Mission Computer. I do however have a question / concern: It seems to me that editing things like the ship resource are not near as easy and nice as editing missions. While editing missions we get this nice interface, complete with tabs and buttons, that is not only easy to use, but it also helps the developer out by not making him go someplace else to say add in the mission desc. When editing ship resources we get a long scrolling vertical list of values is nowhere near as nice. In fact it feels like, and maybe it is, a feature just sorta tossed on. My question is: will the other resource types get the same kind of attention? I'd dump resedit forever if Mission Computer had the same classy interface for editing ships and weapons, as it does for editing missions.

My concern mainly comes from the fact that in a few years all new Macs will be unable to run resedit and thus Nova Tools, and so far I don't see an alternative that is as well-rounded, as Nova Tools.

very neat. Im a fan of Mission Computer.

I just wonder if you could add ppat support, or that one other kind of rescource in nova files 1 (was it that deqt that Guy mentioned, or is that made up?).

Rled support will definitely replace EVNEW as my primary editing platform. (that and my best windows comp moving into my sisters place)

Ragashingo: MissionComputer doesn't have a proper ship editor yet - what you see when you open a shïp resource comes from an RDL script, and is indeed 'a feature tossed in'; RDL is a simple text-based system that gives MissionComputer passable editors for the resources I haven't got to yet, and it's certainly far better than what we used in ResEdit for the first two games.

The 'Introduction to MissionComputer' page of the help system lists all the resources for which there are real graphical editors, and I add new ones in most new versions (although this has to be balanced with improvements to the existing ones, and architectural works like the new resource framework in 3.1).

NebuchadnezzaR: ppat doesn't get used as often as most Nova resource types, but I can certainly take a look at it sometime.

dëqt is how EV Override handles QuickTime movies; given that few people are developing for Override now and it never handled QuickTime very well in the first place, I don't consider it a priority. I'm not sure which other resource type you're asking about.

David Arthur, on Jul 5 2005, 04:30 PM, said:

I'm not sure which other resource type you're asking about.View Post

He's probably asking about the csüm (checksum) resource, and I am pretty sure that you aren't going to add support for that.

Anyway, it's looking good so far, although I managed to crash it using the RLE generator followed by the viewer (possibly with the copier in between- I'll try to repeat the crash and tell you what exactly I did and what the error message was).
My only really big complaint about the program is that you can't open two editor windows at once, so you can't compare two resources. Also, when switching in from Classic applications, the windows sometimes don't actually come to the front.

Edwards

David Arthur, on Jul 4 2005, 11:56 AM, said:

to protect against the resource-losing ‘Try Again’ errors that some users have experienced in the past.
View Post

FINALLY

Man, those sucked! You would type a huge dësc, but when you hit OK it would give an "oopsie" error that you couldn't deselect to go back and command-C the text from.

By the way, was the thing where you can't deselect an open resourse editor window (not the one where you type in the name/ID, but the one where you edit the actual stats) to go copy/fix something in another window without reopening the whole thing fixed?

This post has been edited by FedKiller : 05 July 2005 - 06:37 PM

HUGE Problem:
It freezes when I say yes to the "are you sure you want to open the data files" window. It will make a blank plug, but not open the data files.
This is on OSX.
The old one (3.0) worked. This does not.
That was bold so that someone would notice.
I can force quit it, but when I right click the icon on the dock, it does say "application not responding." It is definitly frozen, as I give it quite a bit of time. I have tried this about three times, with different data files, and they can all be opened with the old program. I have not tried to open the EV data, but even if it did open, it would not help because I want to use it for Nova.
EDIT: sorry about the bold letters that make it look like I'm SCREAMING at you all, but this is frusturating! :mad:

This post has been edited by FedKiller : 05 July 2005 - 07:01 PM

One problem I've had with MC is that you can't specify the order of spobs in a system. The first 4 are of significance but also for the order in which spobs are drawn on the screen in case you're going to have overlapping spobs. MC even likes to re-order spobs that I've carefully arranged in NovaTools.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Jul 5 2005, 08:53 PM, said:

I just wonder if you could add ppat support, or that one other kind of rescource in nova files 1 (was it that deqt that Guy mentioned, or is that made up?).
View Post

I'm assuming you mean cicn which is found in Nova Graphics 1 along with the ppats. Cicns are used more than ppats (don't forget smoke trails). A pixel by pixel editor like in ResEdit isn't necessary but some way to import an image as cicn would be pretty good.

That may actually be more trouble than it's worth. For whatever reason, RB has support for opening cicns but not saving them, so he would have to have MC make the cicn by hand, which would be tedious and just as bad as, if not worse than, when he made the RLE encoder.

Please help me with my problem! I really want to try this out, but not being able to open Data Files is not helping! Would it be possible to open the Data files in 3.0 and copy-paste from that to 3.1? Wait a second, I can test that myself...

EDIT: Hey, it worked! still, I would like the new version to be able to do things for itself, plus my computer is too slow to have that many programs open (not just 2x MC, I usually have Firefox, textedit, stuffit, dropstuff, OS9, etc open also, both MC's just makes it worse )

This post has been edited by FedKiller : 07 July 2005 - 08:26 AM

No, it isnt cicn. Ill have to look at it. I think the rEVisited uses this mystery rescource to change stuff like how the outfitter and such do their borders (im pretty sure this is more than just the colr rescource).

As for ppat, i know its only used for one thing: interference pics, but it would be so very awesome to be able to create my own interference pics without having to figure out what the hell was going on with res edit.

Im glad you are continuing support of already such an awesome program, if you need any help with it, I am a very good programmer, not so much in writing code, but finding bugs, even in underdocumented stuff written by someone else. Send me a PM if you are feeling overwhelmed by anything, I would be more than happy to lend a helping hand however possible.

David Arthur++

ps. If you give me the source, I could add tabbed ship and weap pages. You might have to help me to get it to compile, ive only ever worked with borland C, and dont know how to handle the noncrossplatform stuff, so if you give me a walkthrough on how to get it to compile straight, i can fix up weaps and ships. PMing me is the best way to contact me.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 07 July 2005 - 10:22 AM

Edwards said:

He's probably asking about the csüm (checksum) resource, and I am pretty sure that you aren't going to add support for that.

The csüm resource format is undocumented, for reasons which should be fairly obvious.

Edwards said:

My only really big complaint about the program is that you can't open two editor windows at once, so you can't compare two resources. Also, when switching in from Classic applications, the windows sometimes don't actually come to the front.

Both of these, unfortunately, are here to stay unless I implement some major architectural changes which would be hard to justify - both in terms of the amount of work involved and the system requirements of the final product - unless Ambrosia persuades someone to write EV4.

FedKiller said:

By the way, was the thing where you can't deselect an open resourse editor window (not the one where you type in the name/ID, but the one where you edit the actual stats) to go copy/fix something in another window without reopening the whole thing fixed?

That's an intentional limitation, not a bug; see my reply to Edwards.

FedKiller said:

It freezes when I say yes to the "are you sure you want to open the data files" window. It will make a blank plug, but not open the data files.

Are you sure it's crashed? How fast is your computer, and how long have you given it? The conversion to MissionComputer's intermediary format only takes a few seconds on my G5, but some of my testers with G3s thought their computers have crashed, so I've already written a progress bar for the next version.

Guy said:

One problem I've had with MC is that you can't specify the order of spobs in a system. The first 4 are of significance but also for the order in which spobs are drawn on the screen in case you're going to have overlapping spobs. MC even likes to re-order spobs that I've carefully arranged in NovaTools.

This is another intentional limitation, but unlike the other ones, I plan to revisit it - the next version may support blank NavDefaults.

Guy said:

Cicns are used more than ppats (don't forget smoke trails). A pixel by pixel editor like in ResEdit isn't necessary but some way to import an image as cicn would be pretty good.

cicn is on my list of formats to explore.

I have an iMac G3 from 1998. :p. It has a 450 MHz prcessor and about 400 Mb of ram. Not really fast. I gave it a couple minutes. Probably not that much, if you are waiting for a computer to load, 20 seconds can seem like forever.... I'll try again, but my 3.0 does load it in 2 seconds or less.

EDIT: It sped up and got it done in only a little longer than 3.0 now . I timed it at 7 seconds now, but I really waited for a LONG time for the Data to load the first to third times I tried it... I will usually wait a while, because I am aware that my computer has those specs, which are not very good. Usually I will wait like 20 seconds or so, so if it "wasn't loading", there is a good chance there was something wrong.... Oh well, it works now, so that doesn't matter. Thanx.

This post has been edited by FedKiller : 07 July 2005 - 02:57 PM