Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.
Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).
EV-Edit workability, 5 questions
Perhaps I'm completely missing the boat, here (perhaps I'm also posting on the completely wrong forum), but I'm unable to decipher this, and the documents dealing with these things have been no help at all, so I've resolved to come here.
For starters, I've never made a plug-in. Rather, what I do is play plug-ins, and if I find bugs in them, I fix them and keep playing. If I think something might be better some way, I change it and just play this plug-in myself for my personal use, I don't redistribute it or anything.
However, something puzzles me. When I open plug-ins with EV Edit, and say, open the stellars area, it will show all the stellars relevant to the plug-in. There are some that are brand new, and some that are of course in the normal EV. However, many of the stellars in the normal game that don't show in the plug data are indeed in the game when you play it with the plug. My question is, if there seems to be no connection at all when looking at the plug data, how exactly does the game place everything perfectly when it is being played? That being said, I have another question. In the game, some ships may have proton turrets or what-not, but these things haven't been changed in the plug at all, so they are nowhere to be found in the outfits or weapons section. When I go to look at the ship in the plug data, the slot where it should have something like a proton turret shows "ignored" and whatever number of proton turrets the ship should have. Of course, if I save and go to play the game again, the proton turrets cease to exist. So how can they exist and not exist at the same time? Finally, similar problem with weapon sounds, the numbers in the plug are exactly the same as in the normal game, 200 to 223, and many, if not most, of the plug's weapon sounds are set to 223, yet in the game they make the sound they are supposed to. If I open the weapon and just close it, doing nothing else but saving it, of course one will hear the forklift sound.
It almost seems to me that the best guess should be that this plug was made with a different editor altogether, because this just isn't making any sense at all to me. Could this be the case? And if so, could someone direct me to what I should be looking for?
My next question is fairly simple, but I guess it partially depends on the answer to my first question. Simply put, why make a plug-in? When I have made a "plug" for personal use, what I simply did was copy the EV Data, modify it however I wanted, and simply moved the original someplace safe, renamed my "plug" to "EV Data" and fired away. Seems one hell of alot simpler to me, though I think I can envision the arguments against doing this (if one isn't organized like myself, then they'll lose the original EV Data and be forced to re-download, and so on and so forth...). I mainly do this because the issues discussed in the first question bother me, but of course, if these issues were resolved by some editor that didn't work that way, of course I wouldn't see it as a problem.
My next question relates to shield recharge. I understand that everything seems to be based on the number "30", like, how long the weapon lasts, how far it goes in one second, and so on. However, applying this to shield regeneration seems extremely silly. If the number's high for a capital-type ship, shield boosters are too useless. If the number's high for a fighter-type ship, shield boosters are too good. The setup just seems kind of dumb, in my opinion. Recording the shield and armor values as variables and giving a regeneration rate as an actual NUMBER (I.E. 15 shields per second, or whatever) just seems to be alot more reasonable. Of course, I wouldn't expect everyone to change the game just for me, I just find it extremely irritating and would feel stupid if I didn't mention it.
However, if the previous wasn't irritating (minor issue, doesn't matter in the long run), this is. Why do my fighters only get half the ammunition that they're supposed to? =( One thing I like better about EV Classic (and quite possibly the one thing that makes EV Classic a good game as compared to Nova, which is garbage) is that computer vessels' weapons have longer range. The developers sure got this one right, but I have no idea what happened with Nova, but fortunately, it's not my intention to discuss that. Why can't my fighters have full ammo? That's all I want to know. It might not be so bad if the half ammo was at least rounded up instead of down. You can be sure that any plug that allows me to sell manta bays is a good one for me, because I want mantas that can fire missles.
Finally, while you can set the amount of credits that personality characters in the game have (plus or minus 25%), where do you set this for the normal everyday ships that you're encountering in the game? I can't seem to find this anywhere, at least not in EV Edit, or is the number completely arbitrary based on the cost of the ship? Even that I'm not so sure of, because some huge capital ships give me no more than 1000 credits, every single time. I don't know why. Either way, arbitrary numbers based on the vessels' original prices are, well...too arbitrary. It's way too easy to earn money fast in basically every game I play where all the ships give money, and it's no fun raiding ships when they have no money to give. Neither option seems any good.
Anyways, I hope you can answer my questions, I've tried my best not to be too rude. Thanks for reading!
From what I've heard, and what I found out when using it, EV-Edit can be quite buggy. I recomend that you switch to Res-Edit or MissionComputer. Also, which program are you running, EV:C or EV:O?
In my few weeks of experience with EV-Edit, I have lost everything in my plugin so many times, it isn't funny. System 7.5 on an LC040 didn't help much.
Most people generally use Resedit, Resorcerer, or MissionComputer. EV-Edit is a bit newer and easier to use, but isn't as powerful as either of the others. I use Resedit most of the time; EV-Edit has some bugs in it and I only ever use it when I'm sure it's not going to screw up my plug. You should be able to download Resedit and guides to using it at this page.
Plugins are a lot more compact if they're just changing or adding small stuff. If I remember right, EV Data is almost 1MB, which can be a pain to download if you can find another plug that eliminates unnecessary data and is 24k.
They could have dealt with that in any of many ways, but that's just the way they decided to do it.
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to here, but I think you mean how the mantas won't always fire at certain targets at certain ranges. This is just a characteristic of being AI-controlled. You also see a lot of capital ships and Rapiers not firing their torps at you unless you're in a capital ship.
This is set in the dude resource flags in Resedit. I'm not sure how EV-Edit handles it. I would check, but I'm using a PC right now.
I hope my responses were at least somewhat helpful.
Quote
I have ResEdit for a long, long time. I don't use it because I've never been able to understand it, and the documents didn't really help me. I used EV Edit because it was understandable. Someone would need to give me alot better information than this to help me out with this one. =/
In response to someone's earlier question, this is about EV CLASSIC. EV Nova is a waste of time unless the EV Classic port of Nova has been made such that the Classic universe is EXACTLY like it is in...EV Classic. Can anyone confirm this?
Has nothing to do with what you're saying at all. It's rather simple. If you look at a Confed Patrol Ship, you can buy it normally with 2 missles. When you encounter Confed Patrol Ships in battle, ones launched as fighters will indeed have 2 missles (ones that are just wandering around at the time have a random factor like other ships such that they might have more). However, if you launch your own Confed Patrol Ships as fighters, they will only ever have one HALF of normal maximum ammunition, which would be only 1 missle. I'm not sure what more there is to say about that, other than that it is extremely irritating.
Verden Leafglow, on Oct 26 2005, 03:53 PM, said:
I have ResEdit for a long, long time. I don't use it because I've never been able to understand it, and the documents didn't really help me. I used EV Edit because it was understandable. Someone would need to give me alot better information than this to help me out with this one. =/ View Post
Heck, if I can learn ResEdit, I know you can.
If you haven't already, DL The EVO Bible Annotated Edition, get familiar with it.
Open the EVOBAE. Then open a copy of whichever plug with ResEdit (you don't want to dig around with your original plug file in case you mess something up). Have both in windows side by side, not overlapping. Then using the EVOBAE for reference, open the Resources in your plug, and start digging. It just takes time, and a little going back and forth between Resources. The rest is up to you. You can do it.
If this makes no sense, I apologize, I'm a bit fuzzy. I hab a code id by doze.
It could quite possibly be a bug. I don't really know, because I never went in for fighters in EVC. If it is, I don't know how to fix it.
Also, although it can seem intimidating, ResEdit is actually quite useful for editing plugins. If you are looking for something with a bit more ease of use, I recomend MissionComputer. It's simple to use and I've found very few bugs. You can find it under utilities in the Nova addons page.
What fighters are you haveing this problem with? I can check up on those types in my EV Data files to try and find out what gives.
Ace Rimmer, on Oct 27 2005, 11:03 AM, said:
What fighters are you haveing this problem with? I can check up on those types in my EV Data files to try and find out what gives. View Post
There is no problem with specific fighters, you can make a fighter bay for any vessel you feel like and launch them from your own ship, and they will always have 50% ammunition.
Okay, well I've downloaded and tried Mission Computer, and it fills in the "holes" I mentioned earlier, but however confirms that the bounty earned from ships is an arbitrary value based on the ships' original costs. And the docs for ResEdit simply aren't helping, I shouldn't need to say that it is flawed reasoning to say "since I can do it, you can do it", because this is well-applicable, here.
This post has been edited by Verden Leafglow : 27 October 2005 - 02:08 PM
What types of ammo?
Ammo...that is to say, any ammo. Missles, torpedos, some arbitrary new weapon that you come up with that has some kind of ammo loading mechanism and requires that you buy ammo to fire it. Your fighters always have half in Classic.
Maybe it has something to do with the "Runs away when out of ammo" field. If I were the fighters, I would save half my ammo in case I get stuck where I have to fight my way out. But I dunno. I never noticed the problem.
And about your EVN:Classic question, Im pretty sure it does. Except theres a few features that Nova doesnt have that Classic did (decoy flares). It still uses the Nova engine though.
Eegras Studios, on Oct 28 2005, 12:17 AM, said:
And about your EVN:Classic question, Im pretty sure it does. Except theres a few features that Nova doesnt have that Classic did (decoy flares). It still uses the Nova engine though. View Post
First, on the EVN:Classic, I've checked it out, it sucks extremely badly, so I'm not going to bother.
As for the fighters having half ammo, how could you NOT notice? The only reason I haven't brought it up until now is because it isn't until now that I've had some kind of genuine interest in making a plug-in, and I don't much like posting because I have a messed up attitude on the internet so I like to keep quiet as a lurker because it serves myself and everyone else better. This is something I've noticed since I first ever played EV Classic, it seems almost impossible to miss. Just compare launched computer Confederate Patrol Ships with yours...theirs will launch 2 missles, yours will only ever launch 1. And P.S. I do have the most updated version of EV Classic, in case that might have been brought up.
There is nothing you can do about the bounty bit, true.
Doubling the ammo of fighters would be a simplistic plug to make. If you had problems using Mission Computer, download EVONE (Google it) and try using it instead.
There has yet to be a graphically user friendly plug editor that gives you the flexibility of ResEdit. Just like there's a lot more you can do writing in the C programming language, than in, say, RealBasic; the things you can do in ResEdit transcend the capabilities of any plug editing software, and more importantly, ResEdit doesn't hang as much/ not work.
If you're having trouble, check out some of the pinned topics in the EV Developer's corner, and look through the ResEdit tutorials for building plugs.
Hamster2, on Oct 30 2005, 07:15 AM, said:
There has yet to be a graphically user friendly plug editor that gives you the flexibility of ResEdit. Just like there's a lot more you can do writing in the C programming language, than in, say, RealBasic; the things you can do in ResEdit transcend the capabilities of any plug editing software, and more importantly, ResEdit doesn't hang as much/ not work. View Post
Werd.
Hamster2, on Oct 30 2005, 03:15 PM, said:
If you're having trouble, check out some of the pinned topics in the EV Developer's corner, and look through the ResEdit tutorials for building plugs. View Post
Doubling the ammo of fighters doesn't exactly solve the problem, though. If I do this on a general scale, then fighters I'm fighting against have twice the ammo. That wouldn't work too well in all situations. The other option is to create a new ship type that is exactly the same as the other fighters, but that only the player is using. There's a couple problems here. First, if the player captures an enemy ship that uses fighters and uses it as his own ship, he's back to the original problem. Secondly, what quite often I'm sure some of us do is capturing fighters to refill our stock for those 1 million a shot lightnings or gunboats or whatever it be the case - it wouldn't be possible because it would not be the same type of ship. While it's true that this wouldn't be a problem for patrol ships and mantas, I've often given these armor, because (quite ironically), basically the ONLY thing that EV Nova got right is giving all ships armor and the capability to be disabled.
As for building plug-ins, Mission Computer is working out fine for me for the most part. When I first started university I initially wanted to go into computer programming, but after being in it for about a year, it was quite obvious I didn't understand it worth a damn. I've been doing fine in all my other courses, however. Res-Edit is just at that point that is too much for me, so I'll use what I can understand.
Verden Leafglow said:
As for building plug-ins, Mission Computer is working out fine for me for the most part.
If you run into any problems, feel free to drop me a line - with everyone interested in Nova only, the editors for the older games generally don't get as much attention.
Actually, I have had one weird problem, it's like a magic finger that destroys any system I choose to touch.
For example, I think for the NGC-6484 system (I think that's it...the one just left of Atropos), I had to modify something. Specifically, because there's another government to the West (you know what I mean, I know there's no such thing as "West" in space...), I decided I was going to use this as a battleground to make the game more interesting (I previously modified the original EV Data and place larger amounts of Rebel/Confed fleets in same systems and increase the normal ship numbers to around 10, so that there's actually something occurring in the game, and the player actually feels threatened. Normally, there's nothing happening, and the only "opponents" I've ever run into are the random pirates...(P.S. completely out of context, I often see posted around that Rebel Destroyers and Confederate Frigates often both get disabled at the same time...but I've played and played the game over and over again (without game mods), and I always find the Confederate Frigate winning, most likely because of the extra 50 shields. They cost more money anyways, so this is how it should be, I'm just wondering if my sightings are anomalous, am I getting a genuine case of fluke randomness, or are all of you just getting fights where the Rebel Destroyer is initially facing the Frigate, while the Frigate is turned the other way, and that delay time makes for the tie in the end? I must find a solution to this riddle, because my observations being different from the forums' 100% of the time is just plain weird...).
Anyways, back to the point. I added ships and dudes to the system, and here's what happened (adding fleets to other systems was done using EV-Edit without problems, this is the only system I changed with Mission Computer and I haven't changed a system with it, since).
There is a jump-line that goes from Sol to the system in question. However, you can't actually jump from one to the other. If you click on the galaxy map, the line disappears and re-appears constantly. When you move over a while, the line to Sol will disappear, but then the line will reappear starting from the system in question and continues going left on the same diagonal as it was when it was connecting to Sol, all the way left, up to infinity. It just keeps going. Overall, this isn't a huge problem, just a bit annoying. It's the other thing that's weird.
In the actual system, there are never any ships. However, the first time I jumped into the system, my computer froze. I rebooted. I jumped into the system again, nothing froze, but "tab" selected a ship with a random name (boxes, e's, numbers, randomly scrambled), so I autopiloted to follow this thing to wherever it was. Unfortunately, I reached the map's edge and never found it, however, I was able to continue jumping through the system just fine. I poked around to see if I could fix it. However, there appeared nothing wrong, so I simply saved my non-changes and loaded again. Now, there is no phantom random-name ship in the system, but there is still not anything else. However, if I look on the minimap, I can very noticeably see a little gray dot, sometimes several, zooming across the map until they disappear.
Very strange, and I don't know what to think of it. =/
The old game editors will never be forgotten as long as there exists rational people. Those people know that Nova is a horribly stupid game.
As long as you don't post that on the Nova board, you won't get chased with pitchforks and torches.
Check the thing out with ResEdit. That will give you a no-nonsense look at your system/links.