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There seems to be some interest in EVN editors and whats happening. Here is an outline of what I have done and am planning, and a little bit about why....
Since Matt has never developed an editor for EV (to my knowledge anyway) it is up to 3rd party developers to step in and fill the gap. Matt did however provide the famous Bible which is what attracted me to the game in the first place! However 3rd parties can never really know how EV works at the detailed level that Matt does, so this makes it difficult from the beginning to provide a totally integrated editor for the EV games.
That said, there are several programmer/players who have developed and are continuing to develop tools to make editing EV easier.
After attempting a ship editor 'ShipWrite', and a mission editor 'Mission Control' the Nova team asked if I would like to have access to the Alpha version of Nova to help me develop editors for EVN more quickly. Naturally I jumped at the opportunity!
I have had to absorb a lot since December! (most of which I can't tell you!) But early on it became clear that I could help speed up the development of Nova by providing small tools quickly. I have made a number of EVN resource validators and checking tools, and these have proved fairly effective. In addition the editing of basic EVN resources is slow with ResEdit TMPLs, not just because of hex flags, but also with all the 'rules' that need to be applied to the format of the entries.
Soooo, I saw that while I might take some months to develop ShipWrite II, MCII, WeaponSmith II as Carbonized/Appearance applications, there was a need for a good interim solution that might even be of lasting value. ResEdit plugins.
ResEdit was designed to be modifiable from the beginning, but the tools to do so have not been generally available for some time. I have dug up some old compilers and linkers and can now build a nearly complete set of EVN resource editors for ResEdit as plugins. So instead of trying to make EVNEdit - a new ResEdit for EVN, we are making ResEdit into a proper EVN tool in the other direction.
As you can see from the older EVEdit, editing a complex set of interlinked Resources without screwing up is tricky! ResEdit was written by good programmers and they solved most of the resource management problems and so on. So I can lever off that and add just code to handle our new resources. This makes a much more stable, bug free general EVN Editor. Best of all it is available to the nova team almost immediately - where as new application level editors are some way off as yet and would require far more debugging before they could be safely used.
Now it is true that ResEdit won't run native under OSX, it will run under the Classic Shell though. But frankly I don't care! I'm not planning to run OSX on my personal mac for quite some time to come. With ResEdit and my plugins, anyone with a color screen and system 7 or newer can work on or just browse through EVN resources, that gives a much greater access to a wider audience. I'm even still going to make non-carbon PPC versions of my application level editors so you can use them under systems back to 7.5 as well.
Best of all the ResEdit plugins will be free! And if Apple isn't handling ResEdit anymore I'll just include a copy with the plugins.
Don't forget, the ResEdit plugins are one quick solution, more sophisticated editors are also on the way, they will just take longer,thats all.
Cheers Ralph
------------------ (url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")R & R Software(/url) "EVN? What's that?"
Well, let me be the first to say that I appreciate your keeping us updated on what you are doing.
I, as I'm sure everyone else, appreciates your wonderful efforts on providing us with tools making it a lot easier to develop plugs. I'm sure every future plug maker will be thanking God for what you produce
Once again thanks. Be sure to keep us updated if anything changes.
CS
Yes, definately... Damn, I really think it's awsome you're doing this, and putting so much effort into it. Thanks for doing this! It will make all of our lives so much easier! (As CS already said.. I'm running out of things to say... hehe) BB
------------------ Arrrrrrr, matey!!!!