Ambrosia Garden Archive
    • Ambrosia Garden Archive

    • Some questions.

       EV Developer's Corner
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      Why?

      I have a few questions regarding certain aspects of the game engine.

      First of all, why are some of the engine limitations so low? Why only 16 simultaneous missions? Why only 16 asteroid types? Did Matt Burch just one night decide that he wanted to screw with our heads by imposing creativity constraints with asteroids?

      Second of all, why do resource IDs start at 128? Why not simply have them start at one?

      I had another question, but I forgot it. I'll post it here when I remember. 😄

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      The limitations are not low if you compare them to EVC/EVO. That was the standard in which they were prepared, against. Again, a protest here from me on the fact that the EV3 engine was prepared specifically as a sequel for the other engines, as well as just for the ATMOS scenereo.

      They start at 128 because, among other things, 127 and below are reserved by the system in general (I believe) and because the Nova engine refers to resources by an index number starting at 128.

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      Thanks. Another question, and this may sound dumb: is there any particular reason that the Nova data files are organized the way they are? For example, why are düdes grouped in the same file as öops, ränk, spöb, and s˙st resources? Any particluar reason, or is it just random and arbitrary? Would it break the game if I put düdes and flëts in the same data file (which would make a lot more sense)? Furthermore, why is all the data scattered across 23 different files (if I counted correctly) instead of one big überfile?

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      Which resources are in which files is completely arbitrary, but they are scattered across all those files for a very good reason: The Macintosh resource fork format has several limitations on size, including a limit of about 3000 individual resources in a single file, and a total size limit of 16MB, regardless of how few resources are in the fork.
      With a bit of luck and prayer, you can condense Nova Datas 1-6 into two files, one for descs and one for everything else, but ResEdit will crash if you try to edit them, and adding any more resources to either corrupts the entire file (each file has around 3000 resources, although neither one is more than a couple meg). However, it would not be possible to combine the graphics files, as most of them are near the 16MB limit.

      You can find a great deal more information on this in this thread.

      Edwards

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