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@guy, on Apr 18 2007, 05:56 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
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
Maybe I remembered wrong, I always thought the escort carriers were tagged. Oh well.
I found one garbage character in the last Astrodyne mission 235, in desc 5107, also found 3 in 5106. It's character 127, or 7F in hex. What I'd do is dump all the descriptions to a text file, use a hex editor to search for this value, and then delete them from the descriptions.
Also misn 226, distribute biological weapons is only available from the bar on landfall in the Centauri system. But there is no bar there. I don't ever receiving this mission before either, so it may be a bug with 1.0.5. I think the easiest solution is to add a bar to landfall, especially since this is supposed to be a reoccuring mission similar to the distribute weapons from clotho prime.
I also abused the fact that some missions use ships that when you kill them they don't affect your standing in nearby systems. The last Rebel pursuit mission has 6 capital ships chasing you, destroyers and cruisers. So disabling all the cruisers gives you quite a much higher chance of getting lucky and capturing a cruiser sooner since they're all in one place. So now I have 4 kestrel and 2 rebel cruiser escorts for my kestrel.
Cham
Wouldnยt a QuickTime text movie be a simpler and more compatible way to do the introduction text than Flash? Or have you tried that?
Chamrin said:
Maybe I remembered wrong, I always thought the escort carriers were tagged
Thatยs my memory too.
@zacha-pedro, on Apr 19 2007, 07:59 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
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.
Indeed, that equation is shown in the bible and is correct for EVO but in EV there's a twist. I think it's a bug, it doesn't make much sense for it to be that way but it is and so the values in the port are set accordingly and I'm standing by them
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.
Oh good, I'd rather not have to do things like adding half armor regen.
- 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)
Well I spent quite some time investigating this but no luck. I tried two font repair programs but neither found anything wrong with the font. What I did manage to do is get a better .ttf version of the font for windows (I noticed the current one looks crap - very difficult to read) however it's now called "Sillycon Plain" which means you may want to remove the previous font.
- 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)
Yeah, I know it's pretty jerky. I think I used Times New Roman - I don't know what the exact font is but if it's not the same it's at least a very close match.
- 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.
Hm, it appears you're right. In EVO it's desc 1900 but that doesn't exist in EV.
- 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.
Weapon damages are correct :D. That'll be the same problem as with the lightning I'm afraid.
@chamrin, on Apr 19 2007, 09:51 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
I just checked and no it doesn't appear in-game in the original. Do you think I should add it anyway?
That's precisely what I planned to do :). Just needed to know what the character is first though - I had to do the same thing with EVO.
Mm, that sounds familiar - I think I noticed that once before. Adding an entire bar is quite a change though. What other facilities does Landfall have? In Nova I could make it available from anywhere.
@david-arthur, on Apr 19 2007, 10:06 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Wouldnยt a QuickTime text movie be a simpler and more compatible way to do the introduction text than Flash? Or have you tried that? Thatยs my memory too.
Maybe if you know how to do it. Just pasting text into a QT movie doesn't make it scroll. And it probably wouldn't be possible to have a sound loop so the file would end up a lot bigger in order to have sound for the entire duration.
Okay, new version up now guys :). See first post for more info.
@guy, on Apr 18 2007, 06:55 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
request a new flag for Nova 1.0.11, regen armor first, then shields. Until then, half armor regen.
Making it available from anywhere wouldn't make much sense. It's the third mission in a series (and is reoccuring). If you don't want to add a bar, have the second mission end somewhere else with a bar, preferable next to sol, and have the third mission start there. Though the existance of the third mission would imply that there was supposed to be a bar on Landfall anyway. So adding it would just be fixing a bug there.
I'd suggest adding a link to it in your post (I know it's in your sig, but that's annoying). Also updating the version number, dont' keep it at 1.0.0 beta, call it 1.0.0b2 or soemthing. This is good source material management.
In order to recreate the effect of the scrolling text (in particular the fade-in and -out) in an actual QuickTime movie, that would necessitate actually rasterising and make for a quite big movie file. On the other hand, this Flash movie is quite lightweight. Right now there is no compatibility problem with Flash (there used to, they wouldn't run under Rosetta emulated apps before some update), and I don't think it's a problem to use it as there is a shipping Ambrosia games that relies on Flash too. EDIT: oops, I take that back. I seem to remember that in the original EV, the text faded in and out differently: each line went from black to white and back as a whole (without a difference between the bottom and top of the letters), while here there is simply a black overlay at the bottom and top that gets progressively opaque, making the white text fade in and out of behind these. At first I didn't check closely enough and thought that this Flash movie worked like (what I remember of) the original, but this reproduction is actually close enough and should in fact be possible to do in an actual lightweight QuickTime movie, which would indeed be better, though doing so will probably require professional QT tools (QT pro may or may not be up to the task, no idea since I don't have it).
Hmm adding a bar is quite a change (if only because it would require adding a description), better move the mission to another plant with a bar (and make the previous mission go to that planet), let us favor the smallest change.
By the way, if I understand well, plugs converted to the EV3 engine with SpacePort assume your ports (as they are converted with SpacePort too) as their environment, right? (if only because big ships will be given a proper explosion value that isn't in the PortAuthority ports)
This post has been edited by Zacha Pedro : 19 April 2007 - 06:27 AM
@chamrin, on Apr 19 2007, 03:38 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
I'll wait for some more comments on this before doing anything.
Making it available from anywhere wouldn't make much sense. It's the third mission in a series (and is reoccuring).
Sorry, didn't make that very clear. By anywhere, I meant any one place anywhere on the planet. Like the shipyard or something.
If you don't want to add a bar, have the second mission end somewhere else with a bar, preferable next to sol, and have the third mission start there.
Mm, that sounds better. Unless there's some reason why it specifically went to Landfall.
Done and done (I was just lazy)
@zacha-pedro, on Apr 19 2007, 08:16 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
EDIT: oops, I take that back. I seem to remember that in the original EV, the text faded in and out differently: each line went from black to white and back as a whole (without a difference between the bottom and top of the letters), while here there is simply a black overlay at the bottom and top that gets progressively opaque, making the white text fade in and out of behind these. At first I didn't check closely enough and thought that this Flash movie worked like (what I remember of) the original, but this reproduction is actually close enough and should in fact be possible to do in an actual lightweight QuickTime movie, which would indeed be better, though doing so will probably require professional QT tools (QT pro may or may not be up to the task, no idea since I don't have it).
Yup, the transparent overlay was far easier than trying to work out how to recreate it exactly, if it's even possible in Flash, but it's certainly close enough. As for QT, I wouldn't even know where to find such QT tools let alone know how to use them.
Yeah, if there was a bar desc in the data files then I would certainly just add the bar but there isn't.
Yes, the explosion is hardly important but there are more critical differences such as govt classes starting at zero rather than one.
Very impressive! It's been 5 years or so since I've seen the original and I skipped EVO altogether -- I can't remember the difference between this and the original.
Now I've never played the "official" port, so I can't be sure, but I've noticed a couple things peculiar with this version:
Sometimes commodities are listed as "Lower" but the price coincides with "high." I think this happened on Sirgil.
I bought a couple neutron blasters for my argosy and they don't appear to work. My argosy shall prevail regardless.
Like you said, the font position is slightly off. However, it still looks quite good
.. that's it.
Really this is incredible. My iMac has long died, so I figured I'd never see my beloved EV again. On Windows even. Good work and thanks.
P.S. The file on your website has no indication of being updated from 1.0.0 -- do I have the correct one?
@guy, on Apr 19 2007, 04:12 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Landfall is an industrial world, and Landfall is to earth as Clotho Prime is to Palshife. But if it can't be there, then I'd suggest moving it to Eridani. It has a bar, and is adjacent to Sol. Barnard is too isolated, and Tau Ceti is ruled out as that's where the second mission starts.
Also moving missions to the shipyard is probably a no no. No other missions are offered from there in EV, and you shouldn't change it so one is offered from there.
The filename should include the version number.
I went and looked for one too just to see if it was there. It would certainly have put the matter to rest.
@spencer, on Apr 20 2007, 01:10 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
I noticed the comodities pricing oddities there too, I just forgot to mention it. It gets listed as lower, but sells for 440.
The neutron blaster is a secondary weapon. It works fine. (though I edited it to make it a primary for me).
Another thing I noticed, that was bugging me, is the kestrel parts mission. It's one of the hardest missions to get in the game. It's only available if you find a derelict freighter that very rarely appears in confed systems. Then you have to board it, however the mission is only offered if your record in the system is negative. But given the mission text, it suggest you abort it to make the confeds like you more. So if you like the confeds and want an increased record, you should still be able to get this mission. So I'm suggesting changing available record from -1 to 0.
The actual kestrel you can buy after completing the mission isn't all that great, less shields and weapons space. But traditionally I modify this ship to make it more appealing to me, and since the ship doesn't show up as a non player controlled ship anywhere in the game, doesn't change anything.
@chamrin, on Apr 20 2007, 06:09 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Indeed it is, a simple mistake. :rolleyes:
440, that's right. I haven't seen it again yet.
@spencer, on Apr 20 2007, 08:10 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Okay, what's happening with the commodities is two conflicting 'disasters' are happening at the same time - one lowers the price and one raises the price and it gets confused. There's nothing I can do to prevent that I'm afraid. The font is only off on windows - us mac users are sitting pretty
Thanks :). Any opinion on the armor regen?
Mm, I meant to add b2 to the read me but forgot. On a mac you can easily see the version info for the files but on windows you'd only be able to tell by checking the modification date. Anyway, your comment about the font indicates that you do indeed have the correct version.
@chamrin, on Apr 20 2007, 10:09 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Okay, that sounds good
Hm, that's not the way I read the text - it's only suggesting that because it knows you have a bad record. Either way, I'm unwilling to change something that isn't clearly a bug.
Btw, for anyone who's interested, Nova will report an 'unusually small price delta' if the price delta is less than half the base price. Also, 'Low' is 80% base price and 'High' is 125% base price.
This post has been edited by Guy : 20 April 2007 - 08:19 PM
@guy, on Apr 20 2007, 04:53 PM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
One other note on that subject. The kestrel in EVN has armor regen.
I'm inclined to agree with the lack of armor regen. You can't win on every little detail. And besides, I think how you have it now makes more sense than the original.
I found an interesting issue -- probably unrelated to your scenario, but interesting nonetheless.
Here was the situation: My high armor ship was disabled, so I requested assistance from a passerby. Just as he arrived, I was hit by several missiles and "destroyed." Shortly afterwards I got the "repairs complete message" and armor jumped up past disabled level. At this time, the ship was exploding and I could move around. The game returned to the titlescreen, but there wass no typical "Pilot has been killed." message, instead I clicked "Enter Ship" and was presented the location at which I had been destroyed, but no ship. The message "your ship has been destroyed" appeared and the game handled it correctly this time.
Since the save file was still ok, there is not real concern.
Ha ha, that's hilarious :laugh:. Can't say that's something I've ever seen before. Though a similar funny thing that did happen to me once: I got disabled but then the attacker got disabled just as he was drifting on top of me to board me. So we're both sitting there disabled and it's a race to see which captain is the first to press the 'B' key. Not surprisingly, the AI turned out to be rather slow at this and I boarded his ship. Unfortunately my attempt to capture was unsuccessful so after I finished plundering I had to carry on sitting there and wait for a friendly ship to jump in and help me out.
Okay, I've played tested this some more (rebought a Courier, made the Turin V terraforming missions, explored most of the galaxy ), and I have these comments: - the forklift oรผtf has TechLevel 32767. Not that we're supposed to get it, but, heh, might as well fix this (it causes issues with the Nova engine, right?) - Wow. Apparently Sirgil III can get "a manufacturing surplus" which decreases Industrial goods price except Sirgil III doesn't have any commodity exchange (it's supposed to happen in Sirgil Starport). Yet another quirk of the original scenario Oh, and Sirgil III can get "Increased demand" too For the record, another famous such quirk is the fact you can search very long for the place wood can be bought for cheap to sell for a good price in Tabletop as it's (logically) in Endor that wood is cheap, but there is no commodity exchange to buy it to begin with. - Hmm any chance you could put the armor bar in a different color? Even though you cannot reproduce the original behavior (which was a pattern) and it is not necessary to even have a different color since the shield bar and armor bar are now separate, I think it would be a nice addition if only because these three identically colored bars are a bit boring.
Also, I spent a few hours reading documentation about TrueType fonts, and the name table, and used it to analyse the supposedly faulty Sillycon (which, by the way, is identical to the version found in the EVC app resource fork), and I found two minor issues (in the Unicode version of the copright string, the copyright char is in fact a Bengali char, yep these Unicode strings were already there back then in 1996, I'd blame a faulty implementation of Unicode in Fontographer of the time which slipped because no one used these Unicode strings at the time, but nowadays OSX does ; and there is an extra space at the end of the copyright string for both versions), and a major one: there is more than one entry for the PostScript name of the font (3 in total), and two of them are in Unicode, when Apple's docs for TrueType say to have only one PostScript name, ever, and only in ASCII. However, when I fixed, first the major issue, then all issues, the font still wouldn't validate, I realised then that all tables are checksummed, so I corrected the checksum in the header (not correcting the global font checksum, which supposedly if there is an error with it, it won't manifest itself by failing to validate the name table), but the font still wouldn't validate. Failing to find anything else that could be wrong with the name table, I gave up.
I'm going to take this opportunity to make sure you're all aware of Basilisk II, which allows for a 100% authentic EV/EVO experience. The guide is tailored to Windows, but should also work with the OSX version of Basilisk.
You've done excellent work Guy, but with so many engine changes I'm afraid you're doing a labor of Sisyphus.
@zacha-pedro, on Apr 28 2007, 05:55 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
- the forklift oรผtf has TechLevel 32767. Not that we're supposed to get it, but, heh, might as well fix this (it causes issues with the Nova engine, right?)
Eh? I did fix that. My data is showing a tech level of 32766.
- Wow. Apparently Sirgil III can get "a manufacturing surplus" which decreases Industrial goods price except Sirgil III doesn't have any commodity exchange (it's supposed to happen in Sirgil Starport). Yet another quirk of the original scenario Oh, and Sirgil III can get "Increased demand" too
Yeah, all of 3 of Sirgil Starport's oopses also exist for Sirgil III :rolleyes:
For the record, another famous such quirk is the fact you can search very long for the place wood can be bought for cheap to sell for a good price in Tabletop as it's (logically) in Endor that wood is cheap, but there is no commodity exchange to buy it to begin with.
Hm, is that something I should add?
- Hmm any chance you could put the armor bar in a different color? Even though you cannot reproduce the original behavior (which was a pattern) and it is not necessary to even have a different color since the shield bar and armor bar are now separate, I think it would be a nice addition if only because these three identically colored bars are a bit boring.
Hm, like the darker green from the original armour ppat?
Fonts and printers are the two worst computer-related inventions ever.
@lizard, on Apr 28 2007, 07:28 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Yeah, I haven't tried Basilisk on a PPC mac but it certainly didn't run EV/O nicely on my Intel. I also tried under Parallels which was a lot better but seemed to run really fast, despite putting the speed slider to 50%. Not a 100% authentic EV/O experience. And to be honest, this wasn't a huge amount of work and does give a Pretty Goodย EV experience. Most of the required changes I already determined when I did the EVO port and so SpacePort now does all that for me. Only a few things I have on my list which SpacePort doesn't do but most of those are easy ConText/ResStore jobs.
About BasiliskII: it can be a solution, but remember it requires to have (and somehow be allowed to use) a 68k Mac ROM. Which practically means you need to own a 68k Mac (and extract the ROM from it and of course not use the 68k Mac anymore since you have transferred its eternal soul to your recent Mac).
@guy, on Apr 28 2007, 02:06 AM, said in EV Classic and EV Override for Nova released!:
Oops, my bad. A mixup between the original's "EV Data" file and yours.
Quote
Nah.
Yes, or a green between the two. Your call.
Well if Font Book's validator would please tell me what is exactly wrong with the name table, then I could surely fix it.
Fixed an error: a misc string read 'maneuvering energy'. Investigated possible bug from original data but found it's okay: 'Gun Running' says cargo should be dropped off at ReturnStel but there is no ReturnStel, only TravelStel. Apparently this is uncompletable in the original EV but Nova seems a bit smarter.
Yeah, I think that darker green would look good.
I hate fonts. I hate TrueType. I hate Apple. I hate Microsoft. I hate Font Book. I hate Apple Type Services. I hate Sillycon. I hate PostScript. I hate Adobe. I hate the Apple Font Tools. I hate this whole friggin mess.
With this liminary note (that may give you a hint of which mood I am right now) over, I can announce that I finally hacked the Sillycon font so that it would be validated by FontBook. When looking a bit on the web for a similar issue, I realised Apple had a set of tools that could be used to manipulate fonts and in particular TrueType fonts. I downloaded them and used the font validation tool to know what was actually wrong with the original font, and with my hacked version. Predictably, it found that the original font had too many PostScript names, and that two of them were not in ASCII. As for the hacked version, ftxvalidator complained that there was a gap between the name entries and the strings in the name table: indeed, in order to "remove" the two offending PostScript names, I had just moved the relevant entries at the end of the entries list and decreased the number of entries by 2, in order for them to be ignored while not having to recompute ten power a gazillion hojillion frooglepoopillion offsets. Apparently, the validator command-line tool doesn't like that unused space (but then, why the heck have an offset the to beginning of the strings part in the format? It's not as if that unused space was causing any harm.); it's something I suspected, by fixing the first problem the way I did it generated another for it, but without knowing what was actually the precise problem I wasn't willing to try another way to fix the problem. Okay. So I used the included ftxdumperfuser to dump the name table, make the required fixes, and "fuse" it back in the font. Problem is, the resulting font when double-clicked does not seem to be recognised by Font Book anymore: the app opens, but instead of getting a window with a preview of the font and the option to install it, I get the main Font Book window. Lovely. I invoked Console to see what's wrong, and there was "2007-04-29 22:57:43.940 Font Book(2098) ATSFontActivateFromFileSpecification failed -7000"; I cannot really reproduce the process that causes the font to go bad like that, sometimes fusing makes no problem, but sometimes it results in a font that has this problem, and once the font goes bad like that it systematically fails to load by Font Book and there does not seem to be any coming back to non-busted for the poor font, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what is wrong with the busted font for it not to be loaded by Font Book like that. Oh well, this means ftxdumperfuser is useless, let's go back to direct hacking using ftxvalidator to know what is exactly wrong. I come up with a way to keep the number of name entries (so that I don't have to recompute a umber of offsets) by modifying the faulty PostScript name entries to make them pretend they are entries for completely another kind of name altogether (as opposed to being another PostScript name entry), one which is actually not used. Once done, ftxvalidator finds no more error. But guess what, Font Book still won't validate the font. So I asked ftxvalidator for more complete coverage of the font for possible warnings, and I get a few of them, and I try to shut up these warnings too since I think that might be what Font Book is complaining about, when I see something interesting in the Console (since it was still open): Apr 29 21:09:21 MacBook-Pedro
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Support/FontValidator: "/Applications/EV Nova 1.0.10/EV Classic for Nova 1.0.0b2/Extras/sillycon.ttf" contains invalid PostScript name.
(yes, I'm working on sillycon.ttf, more practical since I can use HexEdit and it's the same TrueType data as the sfnt resource of the suit). So apparently for ATS there was still a problem with the PostScript name, one ftxvalidator did not care about! So much for the usefulness of ftxvalidator, too (in fact, perhaps that unused space problem wasn't a problem at all for ATS, the other way round). So I checked the PostScript name closer, and compared it with other PostScript names of known fonts and I realised the PS names of all other fonts don't have any space! It's probably not allowed. However, there is no indication in Hell of spaces not being allowed in the PS name in the TrueType specification (which even tells to use only chars from 0x20 to 0x7E, and 0x20 is space). So I removed the space from the PS name, recomputed the checksums and finalised the ttf, and this time it's validated. Gah. After that, I only need to copy the contents of the ttf file to the sfnt resource of the suit, and Sillycon.suit is validated too.
Way too many electrons had to suffer for very little purpose, suffering which could have been avoided if that darn system would have been better thought up, in order to finally bring you this file. Please think of the electrons.
Sillycon_Plain.suit.zip (8.99K) Number of downloads: 3
PS: Guy, you might wish to automatically disable only encoding Nรถvรค-creator files when Plugin Archiver is only asked for one file to archive