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But Were Afraid to Ask For
Please add links to this list, and only links (note: short descriptions are encouraged). If it has to do with plug-in development, either as a tutorial, utility, information, exploitable engine oddities, or whatever, please post. And please remove your signature. There's a little check box to do this when you reply.
Quick Essentials
Mac plug-in editor (Mission Computer)
Windows plug-in editor (EVNEW)
Mac plug-in compression (Plug-in Archiver)
Mac plug-in extraction (The Unarchiver)
Windows plug-in extraction (Plug-in Extractor)
Free file hosting (Dropbox - Click here for a free 2GB account with 500MB bonus)
Software
- Development Tools
Mission Computer (OS X) - Nearly-complete EV/O/N editor.
Rezilla (OS X) - Basic resource fork editor. Note some templates may not work correctly on Intel.
ResEdit with NovaTools (Mac OS 9) - The basic and complete EVN editor. NovaTools is currently the only tool with a graphical shän editor.
BlitZen, ConText/ResStore, Duped, EnRLE/DeRLE, Mish/Mash, Mission BitMap, Sprites and Words (Mac OS 9/OS X PPC) - The NovaTools collection from w00tware, all the basics for your EVN plug.
EVNEW (Windows) - The one and only EV Nova Editor for Windows.
Plug-in Archiver (OS X) - Essential Mac tool to quickly archive plug-ins in the correct format for distribution on the addons pages.
SpacePort (OS X) - Program for porting EV and EVO plug-ins to the Nova engine.
- Other Software
The Unarchiver - OS X archive extraction program, featuring support for both .sit and .sitx as well as transparent extraction of .bin.zip.
MakeSnd (OS X) or SoundApp (OS 9) - Utilities for saving audio as 'snd ' resources.
Guides and FAQs
Member-Run FAQ
NCB Guide
EV Nova Resource ID Guide
Cool Nova Hacks
PC Plugin Conversion Tutorial
EVN Wiki - Feel free to add more content yourself
Graphics Tutorials
Details on Nova's ship sprite light setup - Straight from pipeline, so you too can create ships that fit in with Nova's
Walkthroughs for 3D space scenes and objects - Feel free to add your own methods to the thread
Extremely Basic Sprites Tutorial (Dr. Trowel)
Developer Discussions
mrxak's Dialogue on Developer Relations
mrxak's Dialogue on Developer Relations Part II
Martin Turner's Creativity Techniques Discussion
Science Fiction or Space Opera? Discussion
On Relative Sizes of Spacecraft
This post has been edited by Guy : 01 October 2018 - 06:31 PM
Okay, things are all nice and clean now for all of you. New links start here.
Due to the board change, ZP's guides in the "Bomb's Plug-in Guide" are gone…
… NOT!
Thank you Google cache:
dësc gövt shďp spöb s˙st
And, last but not least, Plug-in Distribution Guide!
Unfortunately, I couldn't find oütf, düde & wëap on Google, but I'm sure the versions on the EVDC are still up to date.
This post has been edited by Pace : 23 December 2006 - 12:31 PM
Better yet (what I could find on EVDC):
Plug-in Distribution Guide NovaTools and MissionComputer intro tutorial The shďp annotated template (guide to ships) Annotated template: wëap (weapon guide) gövt annotated template (governments guide) Plugin intro tutorial Annotated template: oütf (outfits guide) Guide to the desc resource s˙st annotated template (system making guide) The Nova bible explained
However, there is much missing. I've PMed Ben Adams about it, I hope he fixes it soon.
Weird... it says I've posted in this topic before now.
To LNSU's collection of ZP topics, I'll add these: düde and spöb Annotated Templates Contribute, Require, and ScanMask Guide Debugging Guide
And, because the currently-linked-to set of guides isn't quite current, Official Correction List.
Edwards
I have an archive of all of them, as they were on Bomb's Plug-in Guides, on my hard drive (that I archived at the time of troubles with the Voids). Allow me to think about how I'll repost them, if I ever do (the problem might end up being solved...).
All right folks, I took advantage of this to (re)learn HTML and CSS the right way, so I've rewritten them a bit (it was easy when starting from the HTML source of the topic), and posted the completed one in my webhosting at http://perso.orange....e/PluginGuides/. Right now there's only the pre-Intro, Tutorial for NT and the BEtD, other should (I say should ) follow soon, this is only a start. I'll post a more official announcement as soon as more is completed. You may say that this is a proof of concept too... and that perhaps I should think about delivering actual things instead of throwing PoCs around; the thing is I agree with you, but my time is a bit limited right now. By the way, this is quite basic HTML and CSS, though I've written them in such a ways that just modifying the CSS should do wonders.
Oh, and it's 2AM and I'm tired. ZZZZzzzz.
These guides are great, Zacha Pedro.
Just one point. Not sure if I should note this here or somewhere else, but I did spot one thing in your introduction to ResEdit/Nova Tools:
Quote
ResEdit (even with the help of NovaTools) cannot create a plug-in file.
I think it can actually. If you create a new file in ResEdit, and then Get Info for it, and change its creator to 'Növä' and its file type to 'Npďf' (for a plug-in; 'NDät' for a data file; etc) it should read as a plug-in file no problem. At least, this always used to work with older engines - I'll try and remember to test to see that it still does tomorrow …
Edit: Bah - testing before sleep! Just checked: this does work fine.
This post has been edited by pac : 13 January 2007 - 08:52 PM
I know it does work, I just meant that it's not as straightforwrd as with MC (perhaps I should rephrase this to be more accurate... hmm...). In fact, this very introduction tutorial used to have a section describing how to do just that, but it's probably too convoluted and error-prone for the beginner so I deprecated it and replaced it by my blank plug-in.
Heh, in fact I still have it as well as the screenshots:
View PostZacha Pedro, on May 11 2005, 06:24 PM, said:
These are the deprecated instructions for generating an empty plug-in by hand, kept for informational purposes only. Might be useful in cases the empty plug-in can't be included.
Indeed, your file is not a plug-in yet: if you check it in the Finder, it has the appearance of a ResEdit document (actually, it IS a ResEdit document), and Nova will not see it as a plug-in and won't load it. Therefore, you need to modify the file so that it's actualy a plug-in. To do this, you have to go back to your plug-in in ResEdit, and choose "File -> Get info for <plugname>". This will open this window:
GI_Type_Crea_.png
In this window, we're interested in two things: the Type and the Creator fields. These are two 4-char codes (usually hidden to the user). The Type field identifies the kind of file, and its format: a Quick Time movie, a raw text document, a JPEG picture, an aiff sound, an MP3 music file, etc..., all have an unique Type code. Here, rsrc tells it is a simple resource file. The Creator field identifies which application this file belongs to (mainly setting which application will open the file when the user double-clicks it, allowing documents of the same kind to be opened by default by the different applications that created them), usually the application that created it; here RSED identifies ResEdit indeed. Combined, they allow the Finder to know which icon to give to the document, for instance.
For your new file to be considered a Nova plug-in, you need to set the Type field to Npďf (capitalisation and inflexion DO matter), and the Creator field to Növä (capitalisation and inflexion DO matter):
GI2.png
Now close this window, and confirm the save. Now, if you refresh the icon of your plug-in in the Finder (selecting it, reopening the window, or waiting for a few seconds, usually works), it should now sport the apperance of a Nova plug-in (a black square with tools on it). If it doesn't, get info in ResEdit for your plug-in anew and double-check the two fields you modified.
In order not to have to do this again for each plug-in you'll do, copy your file which is now a real plug-in, strip the copy from its resource (i.e. open it with ResEdit, select the resource, hit delete, and save), and rename it "Blank Plug", you will only need to copy this to have a new virgin plug in the future.
@zacha-pedro, on Jan 14 2007, 12:52 PM, said in All the Important Links You'll Ever Need:
You're right, you probably don't want to include that explanation at that stage of the introduction. Should have known you hadn't really overlooked anything!
Update: the intro tutorial for Mission Computer is up, as well as the Plug-in Distribution Guide. The latter has been a bit long to do as I had to update a few things (Orca's Plug-in Archiver, the demise of AriosSW stuff); as if that wasn't enough, I realised at the end that the archive on my hard drive was a few revisions behind and I've had to reupdate using the page from Google's cache that Pace found (thanks). On top of that I've had to write correct HTML (the boards didn't even have correct HTML, admittedly I've done some weird stuff in my posts to trigger that), indeed everything aims to be valid transitional XHTML, using CSS whenever possible. Please tell me if you find somewhere that's not up to date, a broken link, anything really.
Have we given up on Bomb's board ever coming back? It's a real shame. I had great hope of what that board could become if ZP was given modship for it. A place where people could all add their own guides and help topics to create a centralised source of all info related to Nova development. Have you talked to Ben about it at all, Zacha?
Not really, I've let him handle the gazillions of other issues wih the update; also, while this post isn't definitive, one shouldn't get his hopes up too much. Lastly, I've not given up on it, but since it's been one month now I think people deserve to have access to these guides, so I'm doing this.
Everything is now up there, please update your bookmarks.
SpinApp - My main website with some useful resources for using SpinApp. Also contians the latest version.
This post has been edited by EVWeb : 30 March 2010 - 02:14 AM
That link to SoundApp doesn't seem to work anymore.
Fixed
Does anyone know a good link to a tutorial on how to make good ships in Wings 3D? I mean, I Can make ships, it's just that theirs room for improvement... yeah... :unsure: