EVC for EVO

why no one has thought of this before

I decided to tinker around by making EVC playable on Override's engine. Now I am well aware that years ago, there has been a ported version of EVC to Override, but I checked in the addons that they are all in the form of plug-ins. What I have done recently was to turn them into data files. That's right, I made because it would be very convinient and it makes sense too (though I don't know why it was never done years ago shrug).

Various adjustments had to be made but I'm almost done, problem is though, there's this one bug I can't figure out, maybe you guys can help me. Here's the problem, despite having to make sure that all the cannon weapons such as the laser, neutron, and the protons match up accordingly to the graphic set, sprites and all, they won't even fire, even though the sound works. I had them work initially, but now they won't anymore, and I don't know why it is.

Make sure the masks are 1-bit.

Okay, I'll have to check that, even though I think the fact that both those games have the same 256 color limitation. But I also noticed that when the ships fire those invisible protons or lasers, they don't do any damage either.

Just curious -- did you account for the difference in the weapon damage formulas?

An interesting thing about the two engines is that only EVO follows the Bible exactly; in EV, you divide by 2 instead of 4.

I actually did a port of EVGE over to EVO a while back that included this adjustment; I could actually release that as a beta, come to think of it. I had planned to add some missions at Stoffe's request, but never got around to it. All I did was add smoke trails and some new graphics he made...

Well, currently I was planning to do some tweak adjustments, but some of the resources like the ships had to be configured to jump at different speed, you know to take advantage of the features EVC didn't have, or having to replace "0" with "-1" in all 116 mission refusal desc field texts. My concern right now is that weapons won't fire at all when it comes to protons and lasers, the other weapons fire okay for the most part.

If you managed to screw up their bitmasks somehow, they'd make the sound effect but would have zero area and thus wouldn't be able to collide with anything. That might also cause them to not display; I don't know how that part of the engine works though.

Edit: if the sprites use the bitmask to do transparency effects in addition to doing collision detection, then yes, having an invalid bitmask would cause the shots to both not deal damage and to not display. Check your bitmasks.

This post has been edited by Derakon : 10 March 2006 - 03:38 PM

that's very strange, and yet in a plug-in format, it seems to work fine. I wonder of the spin resource has anything to do with the problems. right now I'm using a plugin format along with data files in conjunction. In the plug-in, I'm testing out one resource at a time.

The same data works in a plug but not in the data files? That would indicate that some other data file is overriding it.

Or by a plugin.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 10 March 2006 - 04:38 PM

Back in the day, I did a complete remake of the ship graphics to get rid of the hideous top-down look, and during the process porting EVC to EVO. Not exactly state of the art, but what do you expect from something this old.

Currently I can't seem to find out what's causing it to mess up the weapon settings and stuff. Pfft, I see why they call it "Override". Maybe the EV: Override app itself is causing the trouble, who know.

Sorry, I guess my question was a little off-topic. However, I suppose what I can tell you is that my port was essentially just a plug-in. I don't really see why you have to go about replacing data files when a plug-in 1) works and 2) is easier to install. Of course, you would have to make sure you included blank resources for anything that Override has more of than EVC.

Sorry I can't be of much help, but it just sounds like a bizarre problem.

Well, the idea of making data files is so that the only thing that could be put in the plug-ins folders are plug-ins that were ported to Override, like Mugabi and Destiny, Cygnus Alliance, etc.

Clueless, on Mar 11 2006, 09:04 AM, said:

Back in the day, I did a complete remake of the ship graphics to get rid of the hideous top-down look, and during the process porting EVC to EVO. Not exactly state of the art, but what do you expect from something this old.
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Aha, so you did the sprites that can be found in EV Better Graphics? I think I prefer these old versions though. Some of the new ones look dark and fuzzy and don't seem to fit very well in only 8-bit.

This post has been edited by Guy : 11 March 2006 - 10:32 PM

Coraxus, on Mar 11 2006, 07:19 PM, said:

Well, the idea of making data files is so that the only thing that could be put in the plug-ins folders are plug-ins that were ported to Override, like Mugabi and Destiny, Cygnus Alliance, etc.
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As long as the plug-in files come alphabetically after the base EVC plug-in(s) though, the behavior would still be correct (this is why the EVGE plug-in file is called ZExpander Second Update).

I suppose there are tradeoffs either way, but I'd go with what works.

(Edit) (left out a word) (/Edit)

This post has been edited by Firebird : 12 March 2006 - 10:55 PM

Guy said:

Aha, so you did the sprites that can be found inEV Better Graphics? I think I prefer these old versions though. Some of the new ones look dark and fuzzy and don't seem to fit very well in only 8-bit.

Heh. Interesting to see where your work ends up, I had no idea. <_<

Why are you doing this? This isn't a case of "it's easier to develop an EVO TC than an EVN one", there's already a port for Nova with brand new graphics. What's the point?