The Docks - new ship editing tool by Kane O'Donnell

Ok, so I go and do my regular duties of checking and then releasing plugs to the ev/evo addon's page, and I come across A new editing tool. How cool is that? From some guy I don't know yet. Anyway, hopefully we'll get his attention here, and can give him suggestions and he'll hopefully give us updates quickly :). I just emailed him to pay attention to this topic, so hopefully he'll look.

A few things I noticed, the application tended to give me an error message and then quit on itself a few times. But it does have a clean interface -cept one overlapping keyboard shortcut for opening cmd-o, you can tab to each field, etc...

The seperate windows for ids of weapons/outfits are nice, except make them go away when you switch applications :), these allow you to choose weapons/outfits that aren't in your plug.

I had problems with the sprite loading, as soon as I hit ok, even without loading a pict, it gave me the error message and the program quit.

One last thing. Make Sure you use copies of plugs, I noticed when I hit new ship, it ended up overwriting ships I had in there. And it autosaves errors and completed ships.

Post your comments and such here. The file is located in (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evo/addons.html")http://www.ambrosias...evo/addons.html(/url)

One other thing, its another Aussi, nice trend we have here. 😉

Chamrin

(This message has been edited by Chamrin (edited 12-31-2000).)

Hey mate...

We Aussies are a smart lot.

And we like it when people spell it Aussi e.

Thanks.

------------------
Majordomo
Captain of the Guard

Yep this is the author - there were a few errors in that Beta release but hey I've only been working on it for 5 days so we'll see how it turns out in the long run! Those list things were a bit fatal, although I thought I had got rid of all the auto-Quit errors, if someone will tell me exactly where they occur i'll get rid of them. I will also get rid of that overlapping Command key. Next release today sometime! Cheers!

Right...the errors that were noted above have been fixed, and I made the Weap/Outf lists simple floaters instead of global floaters, so they'll hide when you switch apps. The "new ship" button no longer overwrites your existing ships, either. And the graphics problem was a zero-divides error, must cause a nasty response on some machines and not others - on mine it just accepts a sprite size of 2147 million...oh well that's fixed now. The double up on the command key is fixed as well. Check out the latest release - The Docks 1.0.1b, hit me with the errors! Hopefully there won't be any and you can start suggesting additions/changes etc. Cheers!

------------------

Released

Suggestions: while being able to tab between fields, tabbing between them jumps pretty random, first the first field then down to the bottom, basically make it orderly, and what the user would expect. For sprites, have it warn the user if the sprite doesn't fit EVO's strict guidelines, it needs to be 6x6 for ships and weapon sprites, and the x length needs to be multiples of 8 for each sprite.

Chamrin

(This message has been edited by Chamrin (edited 01-01-2001).)

hey shado,
what development environment have you written this in?

Tycho

------------------
Where the Hell's my roof?

Yes the tab order is totally wacko, I know. I'll fix that up ASAP. The weird thing about being in Australia is that I have to wait 12 hours after I post something to get the US response, and by the time that happens i've realised there's a problem!!! The tab order is not a difficult fix anyway.
WRT the sprites, I will stick in a warning, that's not really a problem. Does anyone think a manual override (pardon the pun 😉 ) of the X/Y size would be useful? I notice that if you set the grid so that it doesn't fit properly, EVO scales the ship in the game accordingly.

Ok, version 1.0.2 Beta will be released ASAP. Oh by the way, I wrote this in REALBasic but the hardest work was done in ResEdit figuring out how the hell I was going to import the Ship resource!!! Cheers!

------------------

Version 1.0.2b has been uploaded and released... 1.0.3b will be released very soon, the latest version will have a "Govt ID list" menu item, since you need to know the Inherent Govt ID.

Any other suggestions?

You know sebek and I are making a network EV type game in RealBasic and we could always use more programmers. Check out the "EVA:Helian Wars Progress Log" post on the board for more info.

And I agree that those yanks take too long to reply to our messages.

Tycho

------------------
Where the Hell's my roof?

Well I'd love to help (especially to get my hands on the EV/O lib!!!) but I don't think I have the time, I only have a weeks holiday left and then my poor soul is going to Wagga for two weeks and then back to year 12!

But, if you ever have a problem you just can't solve, chuck it my way and i'll see what I can do. Always glad to help!

Cheers!

------------------

You do realise that you can down the lib from sebek?
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/sebek/")http://homepage.mac.com/sebek/(/url)

I thought you would have already looked at it. Oh well, no time like the future.

I heard it's cold in wagga, but we'll never call wagga wagga wagga.

Tycho

------------------
Where the Hell's my roof?

Damn, I went to all the trouble of creating a ship importer!! Oh well maybe I should make a full blown EVO editor now...

------------------

sounds good. give sebek or I a buzz if you need some help.ome source for a spritesurface if you want to put in a test drive bit.

Tycho

------------------
Where the Hell's my roof?

Ok people, do you think a weapons/outfits/govts editor in the same style as The Docks would be useful for anyone?

------------------

Yes! We need all the toold we can get!

------------------
Is the answer to this question 'no'?

Check out the topic "New EVO Total editor" for info on the EVO UniEditor, a total EVO universe editing tool.

------------------

First off, thanks a lot for creating this editor. This is as simple as Forge and Anvil for Marathon. I probably won't ever learn ResEdit, so thanks again. BTW, I have version 1.0.3.

I've been having some problems though (some more important than others). I'll describe the circumstances first. So far, I've been editing only Kris Hauser's SW2 plug for EVO. All I've played with are specs (turn rate, cargo, shields, mass, Y-offset, etc.). I have left the graphics section alone entirely.

OK, here we go - some problems that have been stabbing me:

Sometimes some ship graphics seem to randomly get messed up. These ships have the silhouette of the original ship but look like iridescent static. This problem applies only to the in-game ship animation - the comm pics, shipyard pics, and everything else looks fine. So far, the only victims have been the Star Destroyer and the Landing shuttle. This seems random, because I edited the entire ship archive the exact same way a number of times before I could create a version of the plug where all graphics were fine.

When I open up the Sample plug that comes with EVO, there are no ships to edit! Is there something obvious that I'm missing? I'd like to edit the ships from the standard EVO universe, but I can't get the plug to show me them.

Sometimes the Docks will die on me. I'll click "OK" to make changes to a ship, and the cursor will turn into the clock and do nothing. I then force-quit. I think this happens when dealing with figures that may be over the limit. I was dealing with the figures for the Super Star Destroyer at the time (a damn big ship). I just leave it alone now.

Whenever I open up the stock version of the SW2 1.0 plug, all the names of the ships (shipyard names, comm link names and target names) have been deleted. I type the names back in, but the comm link names are messed up. The comm name will have what I typed in, but that name will be followed by a messy combination of other names - ex: the name: Nebulon B the name as it appears in the game: Nebulon Bintercepirier. This applies only to the SW2 1.0 plug. The Extra Ships plug that goes with it has all the ship names intact and working. The only way I found to remedy this was to delete all the comm and target names.

I'll probably send in the shareware fee even if these problems remain, but I'd be very grateful for any help you could give. Thanks again.

------------------
The ones we love and the life we grow from

Quote

Originally posted by Miyun:
**> When I open up the Sample plug that comes with EVO, there are no ships to edit! Is there something obvious that I'm missing? I'd like to edit the ships from the standard EVO universe, but I can't get the plug to show me them.
**

I can help you with this one The sample plug-in contains no data, only the ResEdit templates that the developers of EVO made. To edit the ships, I believe you need to make a file in ResEdit with only the shďps, dëscs, spďns, and pďcts. Maybe shado can make that file and bundle it with his editor? 🙂

------------------
Visit my EVO web site at (url="http://"http://www.evoverride.com")http://www.evoverride.com(/url)!
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less."–Humpty Dumpty, Through the Looking-Glass , Lewis Carroll

Oh, I see. Thanks.

------------------
The ones we love and the life we grow from

I'd appreciate some help. My problem is as follows:

I want to fiddle around w/ the clipper in the EV Classic Ships 1.0 plug-in.

So, i open up The Docks and open a copy of the plug.

I open up the clipper and make a few changes, then close the clipper file (by pressing OK, not cancel).

If i open the clipper up again, the changes are still there. However, if i close the plug-in (either through the close button or the close command in the file menu), my changes are erased and the ship goes back to default. If i quit the docks w/o closing the file, the changes are still erased.

Any info on how to keep the changes saved would be greatly appreciated!

------------------