First ever—May need help

As you may already know, I'm making a food stuff plug-in where you can fly a Pancake, a Carrot, a Cake, and more, use a Carrot or Cookie as a weapon, destroy a planet with a cookie, etc. I want to share a few things with you, as I may need help actually doing it.

First, I'll be making two types of cookies, and their Fire-while-cloaked counterparts. The Sugar-cookie will have a ton of small explosions, and the Chocolatte-Chipper (or Chocolatte-Chip cookie, I may make a poll about it) will have a few large explosians. The Chocolatte Chipper (possibly Chocolatte-Chip cookie) will have much higher damage than the Sugar-cookie, so keep that in mind.
Next, the Baby-Carrot (name suggestions, please {this is a missile}) will have a set number of medium explosions, and will be pretty easy to shake. The Carrot (ship, again, name suggestions?) will be equipped with 5 of these by default, the max being 15 per launcher. There will be 7 segments in this carrot, so I've decided 2 guns and 5 turrets. This question is how do I make each weapon go on top of each segment? (The guns would be the front two segments, the turrets the back 5) Is it even possible?
Now, the Pancake. It'll look a lot like EKHawkman's Avatar, if I can make good graphics with Photoshop. (Anything better?) It's not a very powerful thing, but it is strong. Hey, what better armor is there than a Pancake? (There's an outfit version, too.) I already decided I want low free Mass, low Cargo space, medium shields, and good armor. Any suggestions for exact specs? I don't want pancakes to be discredited to the fact that they're involved in a cheat, so no cheat specs.
The Cake will be a powerful vessel. It'll have good shields, bad armor, good free mass, and okay cargo space.
The Carrot Cake will have a Carrot bay, 2 Baby-carrot launchers, and 20 Baby-carrots. Otherwise the same as the Cake.
The Cheese Cake will be stronger than the cake, and will have a Cheese-cake slice launcher. 10 slices. Heavy ionization, low damage.

Also, what needs a Spďn resource, and how do I create them? I do have SpinApp5 and Mission computer, if that helps.

As I get more ideas, I will post them, see what people think, but in the meantime, can I get some answers?

For the 'segments' in the carrot, you define exit types in the shän resource. Up to 4 for guns and 4 for turrets (and 4 each for two other types). So you can easily set your 2 gun exit points but you'll have to skip one of the turret exit points.

As for spďn resources it seems you don't quite understand what they are so I suggest reading the spďn section of the Nova bible. In short, a spďn is a reference to a sprite and to make one you simply click the "New spďn" button in Mission Computer and fill in the fields. The sprite is the actual graphic which is typically an rlëD resource (though possibly PICT in specific cases).

This post has been edited by Guy : 07 March 2008 - 02:02 AM

Okay, thanks. So, how do I add extra explosions, and change the size and power of the explosion?

bööm resources control appearance of explosions. If you want to make a new explosion you'll need a new bööm, spďn, rlëD and optionally a new snd . By 'power' I assume you just mean damage, which is of course in the wëap resource along with the field for blast radius.

How do I make sprites? More specifically, what're the best applications for sprites on a Mac?

I believe that was already discussed back here. I would say creating graphics is a bit outside the scope of the EV Developer's corner but it really depends on what exactly you're wanting to do. Unless you actually want to learn how to model in 3D or create nice 2D graphics in Photoshop I'd suggest steering clear of these sorts of programs. You may want to simply browse other plugs for existing explosion sprites and perhaps have a go at recolouring one (you'd need permission from the plug's author if you want to distribute your own plug using their sprites).

I just want to make my food with the same sub-3D graphics as the rest of the Novaverse, and don't know how to use Wings3D. (Blender won't work on my computer.)

Thanks for the help! Suggestions for new features will now be accepted....

EDIT: When I said "Add explosions" I really meant "Add number of explosions" as if the weapon has a chain reaction. How do I do that?

This post has been edited by Captain Zaphod Beeblebrox : 08 March 2008 - 03:26 PM

It would be nice if the Cookies would be much like Starbridges, with classes such as Chocolate chip, Animal Cookies, Sugar Cookies, etc... Change your class by buying Outfits.

Also, I have a homemade program that might help you - it compiles my Blender-rendered images (tga, bmp, png, pcx), which are normally separated, into a giant spritesheet, eliminating tedious multiple Imports and/or Photoshopping/GIMPing. I used it for a ship plug I recently made. If you want it, you can have it.

You can also render in blender to a movie (I use .avi) and use Pic2Sprite, which takes only a few seconds. But in Captain Zaphod Beeblebrox's case, blender doesn't work on his computer anyway (although I couldn't say why that is; it's compatible with most OS's; not sure about Mac OS9).

The page I was directed to, there was only a download for Intel computers.

http://www.blender.o...ad/get-blender/

Downloads for Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and some others that I know nothing about.

Thanks. As soon as I get Finder working, I'll try this out.