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FYI #3:
Mish and Mash make is easier to handle a lot of desc texts... DrR
Mish and Mash 1.0.0 ------------------- 2002 Ralph & Rodger Sutherland. All rights reserved.
These two tools are used to extract and import Nova mission desc to and from a TEXT based relatively free-style data suitable for editing in Text editors such as BBEdit or even Word. The free-form format which allows for unfiltered string data (cf ConText/ResStore) across multiple lines, lets you perform spelling and grammar checking much more easily than in the more rigid ConText/ResStore format.
Mish also attempts to follow mission story lines in a fairly simple way (ie it can be easily fooled) that helps you to extract the missions in a sensible order, other than the resource id order.
The format is simple enough (see the example below) that you could write mission descs from scratch in a text editor and compile them straight in with Mash.
At the moment Mish can only use misn resources to find descs, although you can specify a range of misns or all of them. Mash doesn't really care about misns and just generally compile desc resources. Mish will eventually also be able to just extract descs generally.
Requirements: ------------- Mish and Mash require a PPC mac, running OS8.1 or newer.
Mish and Mash also work natively (carbon) in OSX, and memory issues are not a problem there. They do not require carbon in OS8/9, but run as PPC CFM native apps there.
MishMash Desc Format --------------------
Each desc is bracketed by
tabs (char 09) separate 1st seven fields
'* Begin desc', 'resID', 'File', 'Description:' and '* End desc' markers will be required;
'Type', 'Name', 'Graphic', 'Movie', and 'Flags' are optional and replaced with defaults if not specified.
Text following '* Begin desc' or '* End desc' on the same line is ignored, forming a comment.
Double quotes are required for Name string, File string and Movie string.
Description text between the Description: line and the * End desc line is free form, anything except char 0x00 !
Example:
This is an ignored line. the following desc uses all the fields...
"It would mean a great deal to all of us if you could bring us news about its final fate,"
With that he turns around and walks away leaving you wondering at the odd encounter.
This is a comment line where you could make notes. The following has some optional fields missing:
Useage:
Mish:
You can sort the descs that are found on:
Sorting on AvailBits involves sorting numerically on the first mission bit found in the string, then on the string itself if the bits are equal and then on resID if everything else is equal. Sorting on just the AvailBits string didn't work very well because of the non-numerical sort on bits without leading zeros. The combined numerical/string sort works quite well for the bX & !bY, then bY & !bZ etc type story lines, and leaves all the anonymous zero bit string missions in resID order. Having more complex AvailBits strings sorted numerically by the first bit number is not a bad compromise, and I bow to Matt's superior programming direction if he wants to try a more sophisticated method of extracting storylines from general AvailBits Boolean strings.
Mish does duplicate descs if they are referred to from multiple misns, but Mash will cope and write the duplicates back over each other as they are processed.
Mash: has no options, it just processes any TEXT file and recreates any descs it finds.
Memory Issues -------------
I have found that 8MB is more than sufficient for Mish and Mash in operating on Nova. You are of course free to increase/decrease this if needed.
Disclaimer ----------
Use at your own risk, preferably on copies of your data files until you understand how these tools work. These tools are free and are offered 'as is', while we like getting email feedback, and bug reports, we may not always be able to provide technical support. This software is not associated with Ambrosia Software Inc, and Ambrosia is not able to provide technical support for it.
------------------ (url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com/~family/sgg.html") w00tWare (/url) : NovaTools are coming.