At last, the final releases of EV Classic for Nova 1.0.0 and EV Override for Nova 1.0.2 are now available. A big thanks to all who helped out with either of these projects, especially orca, Dr. T, Edwards, ZP, Coraxus and Cham. And of course mburch and pac

Changes since beta 3:
- Improved sillycon.ttf
- Syncs with your iPhone (this is why the final release was delayed til now)

Further talk about the ports can be directed to the EV/O webboards.

This post has been edited by Guy : 29 June 2007 - 07:11 PM

Hey, that's right, Flash now works (while in Rosetta emulated apps, of course, it always worked in native apps)! I'd "blame" the 10.4.9 update, though.

I'm going to try that (as soon as I have time, of course )

Guy++

More to come after I test.

This is excellent. EV Classic 4 evar!

I'm honestly not sure how you'd go about reproducing the decoy flare effect in the Nova engine. I suppose you could get close with a turreted, rear-firing point defense weapon, although it wouldn't be quite the same. But really, the flare weapon type in EV Classic was just something I threw in late one night because it seemed cool, so apart from authenticity I don't think you're missing out on much.

cheers,
mcb

well, its been blessed by MBurch, so its now the "official" EV for nova.

Wow, what a surprise :). Thanks Matt, I'll see what I can do with point defence.

Take all the credit, why don't you...

Hey, you've still got work to do

But you're right, where are my manners? I've forgotten to mention that none of this would have happened if it wasn't for orca and his excellent work on SpacePort (and his putting up with all my nagging :D). Let's all have a round for orca!

This post has been edited by Guy : 17 April 2007 - 12:24 AM

@mburch, on Apr 15 2007, 05:12 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

I'm honestly not sure how you'd go about reproducing the decoy flare effect in the Nova engine. I suppose you could get close with a turreted, rear-firing point defense weapon, although it wouldn't be quite the same.

You can get a bit closer by dropping a self-destructing fighter armed with a point-defense weapon (this preserves the manual-fire aspect), but I never did work out a method of attracting missiles to the "flare".

Edwards

Perhaps a weapon that fires an invisible shot that has a submunition that is a point-defense weapon?

Dude! Flares were awesome! Made me feel like I had a quick-and-dirty anti-missile tech that I needed to attend to andbe careful with in order not to be blown up by the evil missiles from pirates. By the way, I don't think it would be worthwhile to try and reproduce the flares more or less exactly, I'd rather recommand something that would have a about the same efficiency: a slow-firing, short range, instant kill PD weapon (and of course, no ship whatsoever can be targeted by it).

And I stand corrected: you've been sighted this year now. Not that it's really enough activity for the Nova board.

Do tractor beams affect missiles?

Last I checked: No, they do not.

Some bugs:
-All ships should have armor regen. Currently none have any armor regen.
-Misn 163 shows desc 8035 at the mission start. It should only show at the end of the mission, when you reach Palshife (161). Currently it shows up at both the start and end. Also I think it was this mission set, there's some extraneous garbage characters in the descriptions. Don't remember the exact missions that had this.
-Some of the damages are wrong I think, it used to take 3 successive missles to disable a lightning, now they just kill it, so it's getting hit more than it used to. I don't remember how mass/energy damage was applied in EV compared to how it's applied in Nova, but this may have something to do with it.
-Escort Carriers aren't marked as rebel. I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be.

As for the flares, just make it a point defense weapon that shoots flares at missles. Give it a bit of inaccuracy (the flares never did work all that well), make it a rear turret, and keep it so you have to buy ammo. Max of 50.

Thanks for the port, I'm playing through everything again for the first time in at least 5 years. Of course I'm doing both rebel and confed at the same time, and I figured out a new monty python maneuver. Sit just out of range of enemy's that target only you, turn away from them, so your escorts are closer to the enemy than you are, and their weapons will hit the enemy but they won't fire. Take that anti monte python AI.

I'll let you know if I find any more bugs. Also when you think it's ready, be sure to post about this on the EV board.

Cham

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-All ships should have armor regen. Currently none have any armor regen.

This was done because in EVN the shields regenerate at the same time as the armor rather than waiting for the armor to fully regenerate first, so you end up regenerating more protection than you would have originally. I did this in EVO too (except for the Voinians which have armor regen but no shield regen). If you think it would be better if I included the armor regen too then let me know.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Misn 163 shows desc 8035 at the mission start. It should only show at the end of the mission, when you reach Palshife (161). Currently it shows up at both the start and end. Also I think it was this mission set, there's some extraneous garbage characters in the descriptions. Don't remember the exact missions that had this.

Thanks, I'll look into that. (edit): Hm, it's a mistake in the original data files. The drop cargo desc is used for loading as well. Ah well, I'll fix it anyway.
The garbage characters are probably smart quotes, I'll have to fix those (Nova doesn't like fancy characters).

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Some of the damages are wrong I think, it used to take 3 successive missles to disable a lightning, now they just kill it, so it's getting hit more than it used to. I don't remember how mass/energy damage was applied in EV compared to how it's applied in Nova, but this may have something to do with it.

Ah, now the damage calculation is an interesting one. I was investigating that due to claims I had heard once that the damage was A+B/2 rather than A+B/4 as it is in EVO. That turned out to be incorrect but I did find something else surprising about the damage calculation which I properly took into account when doing the port. I'll check out the lightning though.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Escort Carriers aren't marked as rebel. I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be.

If you mean red marking then no, red carriers were only ever added by plug-ins.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

I'll let you know if I find any more bugs. Also when you think it's ready, be sure to post about this on the EV board.

Okay, thanks for testing

This post has been edited by Guy : 17 April 2007 - 09:36 PM

@guy, on Apr 17 2007, 03:42 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

This was done because in EVN the shields regenerate at the same time as the armor rather than waiting for the armor to fully regenerate first, so you end up regenerating more protection than you would have originally. I did this in EVO too (except for the Voinians which have armor regen but no shield regen). If you think it would be better if I included the armor regen too then let me know.

Yeah I think they need armor regen. You might put it at half what it normally would be due to both recharging at the same time. But all the ships need to have their armor regen.

@guy, on Apr 17 2007, 03:42 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

If you mean red marking then no, red carriers were only ever added by plug-ins.

Naw, the escort carriers aren't tagged as rebel in the lower right of the targeting display. They're just out there flying around without being associated with any government.

Cham

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 07:07 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Some of the damages are wrong I think, it used to take 3 successive missles to disable a lightning, now they just kill it, so it's getting hit more than it used to. I don't remember how mass/energy damage was applied in EV compared to how it's applied in Nova, but this may have something to do with it.

Okay, I think this is due to an engine difference regarding what happens once a weapon takes out a ship's shields. In EV it seems to deal the remaining shield damage to the armor while in Nova it seems to deal the entire armor damage to armor. Sorry, I don't think there's a lot I can do about that.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 12:49 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

Yeah I think they need armor regen. You might put it at half what it normally would be due to both recharging at the same time. But all the ships need to have their armor regen.

Hm, you may be right.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 12:49 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

Naw, the escort carriers aren't tagged as rebel in the lower right of the targeting display. They're just out there flying around without being associated with any government.

Odd. Whereabouts do you see this happening? In a mission?

Well the smart quotes are fine on mac nova, though I think they don't work on win nova. The real garbage characters may be quite difficult for me to locate without more information.

This post has been edited by Guy : 18 April 2007 - 02:20 AM

@guy, on Apr 17 2007, 07:39 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

Okay, I think this is due to an engine difference regarding what happens once a weapon takes out a ship's shields. In EV it seems to deal the remaining shield damage to the armor while in Nova it seems to deal the entire armor damage to armor. Sorry, I don't think there's a lot I can do about that.

Hm, you may be right.

Odd. Whereabouts do you see this happening? In a mission?
Well the smart quotes are fine on mac nova, though I think they don't work on win nova. The real garbage characters may be quite difficult for me to locate without more information.

-Fleet 254 has Escort type 2 listed as 18, that's not a valid ship id.
-Tribute for all the planets are wrong. They're all at 1000, you should set them all to zero so it defaults to 1000xtechlevel as in the original EV. Currently dominating earth only gives you 1000 credits.
-For the escort carrier thing, the bug lies in govt 153, it has no Target Name listed. It should be "Rebel".

Cham

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 10:46 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Fleet 254 has Escort type 2 listed as 18, that's not a valid ship id.

Neither is 120 for the third type but the mins and maxes are set to 0 so it shouldn't cause any problems. You may notice a lot of, er, 'interesting' values in EV's fleet resources but they should all be okay.

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 10:46 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-Tribute for all the planets are wrong. They're all at 1000, you should set them all to zero so it defaults to 1000xtechlevel as in the original EV. Currently dominating earth only gives you 1000 credits.

Thanks, I'll fix that. Don't know why they're getting set to 1000. Oops, it's like that in EVO too - wonder why no one noticed earlier...

@chamrin, on Apr 18 2007, 10:46 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:

-For the escort carrier thing, the bug lies in govt 153, it has no Target Name listed. It should be "Rebel".

Hm, in the original data there actually are no strings for that govt. Maybe it's part of the disguise?

If you can remember exactly where the garbage characters are that would be great

This post has been edited by Guy : 18 April 2007 - 08:23 AM

Hmm, I seem to remember that Nova is more picky (or is it less?) about out-of-range values, even if they are not used. Though as long as there is no problem I guess there is no need to go over and meddle with that.

Yes, I think damage is carried out differently in the "EV3 engine", but some weapon damages seem to be wrong anyway (AFAIK, shields should take E+M/4, and armor, E/4+M), take for instance the heavy rocket, in the original EV data file it is 225;110, and in your port damage to armor is correctly 252, but shield damage is 225 :huh:. I've noticed such oddities elsewhere. The fact three missiles (or two torpedoes) disable a Lightning in EVC was great, especially as they are quite hard to disable without destroying them with other means (particularly useful to get money when you have a Kestrel, or just restock your lost fighters), but since full armor damage is applied too when the weapon has enough power to dispatch the remaining shielding, I'm afraid nothing can be done about that, even with rebalancing, unless you'd make the missiles do very little armor damage which would make them useless against armor intensive ships (which would be even more a treason to the original EV).

About no armor recharge: it's a design decision, and I think it's the better one: after all, since when can ships auto-repair themselves in flight? Well okay, it's the 23th century, but I think no armor recharge is the better compromise.

Anyway, I've found the time to test this a bit. For better nostalgy, play it fullscreen in 800x600 (color depth doesn't matter since all assets are in 256 colors anyway), with no parallax starfield. Here are the notes I've made:
- try to find a version of the font that does not have this validation problem: even if it does not seem to be actually harmful, it's not really satisfying to have to trust you on this (if people get used to doing unsafe stuff because they are told "don't worry, it'll work", at some point they will get something actually unsafe and will be fried; this is security 101)
- the recreation of the intro sequence in flash is indeed not really smooth on my comp, Flash not having been very well optimised on Macs and since the engine runs under Rosetta on top of that I'm not sure that's the right font in the intro, though I could be wrong as it's been ages since I last played EVC normally (I swear, trusty old Mac IIsi, soon I'll find a color monitor for you and a way to interface you with the outside world, and you'll be back alive)
- hehe, you set the starting date as if the actual computer date was the EVC release date. Clever. That way it'll never get old (like it is always a Mac Classic that was used in Futurama to represent a Mac).
- Ah. I seem to remember that the "mission computer" button used to be at the center of the zone below the planet image if there was no spaceport bar. Unfortunately, I suppose that's competely impossible to reproduce using DITLs and the Nova engine.
- could pirate planets be the target of a "emergency medical supplies delivery due to plague" (yep, by sheer "luck" I got one, on Spica for New Antigua for that matter, fortunately I already had a Courier with afterburner so this wasn't relly a problem to get there)? I remember that it took me some time to discover the pirate hideouts - a discovery better even than the Miranus one, and only when I purposedly explored the outer system for hidden stuff - and I took these well-paying missions at every chance I got, so I wonder because I think it would have made me discovered them if these could be the target of such missions, though it's possible that their rarity and the fact there are only 4 such hideouts explains the fact I did not discover the pirate hideouts this way back then.
Nevermind, turns out pirates can get Sajack’s plague too (I checked the original data file)
- no "escape pod" message?! Well, perhaps there indeed wasn't one, I can't seem to find one for the life of me in the original EV app and data files.
- is a heavy rocket supposed to destroy a Courier instantly? Apparently, no, the weapon damages do not seem to be right: one of the two (damage to shield or to armor) has the right value, but the other seem to copy the value of the opposite base data. Please refund my Courier.