Plug-In Design:How do I make an addition to a ship?

Ingredients:

- familiarity with the shďp and wëap resources
- name and text description
- set of values and aspects (see EV Bible, oütf resource)
- if item is a weapon or ammunition, ID of wëap resource
- a set of images for the item
- 45 degree view, 100 x 100 pixels or 200 x 200 for Nova
- the above scaled to 32 x 32 pixels (not required for Nova)

Uses:

Here you can create item that can be purchased by the player for his ship. Up to 128 different kinds of items can be defined. If the item is ammunition for a weapon, then you will need a corresponding wëap resource. Familiarity with the shďp resource is also helpful. See the EV Bible, oütf resource for a list of everything you can do.

Construction:

Some tips on building oütfs:

- Mission Bit: The oütf will only be offered if a certain mission bit is set or clear. If you have a mission where you want to allow the purchasing of a specific oütf only after it's been completed, you'd put that mission's CompBitSet number in the Mission Bit field. If you want that oütf to be available until a certain mission has been completed, you'd add 1000 to that mission's CompBitSet number and put it in the Mission Bit field. See "How do I make a mission?" for more information.

- Tech Level: This tells EV where (on what stations/planets) this outfit can be purchased. If this number is lower than or equal to the Tech Level of a stellar object, it will be available in the Outfit Ship dialog. If you want to make it so an oütf is never able to be purchased (but obtained through other means such as a mission), you'd set this to some arbitrarily high value (like 9999). See spöb resource for more information

- Flags: Make sure these correctly describe your outfit and are calculated properly (see "How do I yse HEX plags?" for more information).

1. Create a new oütf resource and enter the appropriate information into the fields. If this oütf is ammunition for a weapon, you will need a corresponding wëap resource. See wëap resource and the questions "How do I make a weapon?"for more information.

2. Create a model of your oütf in your 3-D program. The details of this are too numerous to go into here. Some experimentation may be necessary.

3. Create a 100 x 100 pixel image for the Outfit dialog box. It is placed in the PICT resource as ID 6000 + (oütfID - 128). See note below. OR for Nova, create a 200 x 200 image. Nova does not require the small outfit picts.

Note: The above mentioned images are stored using PICT resource IDs 6000 and up. Unfortunately, the master outfit menu PICT is stored at ID 6100, so these large images that would normally be 6100 and above are offset forwards by one. The large outfit PICTs are stored from PICT IDs 6000-6099 and 6101-6128.

4. Shrink the image created in step 3 to 32 x 32 pixels. This image should be added to the PICT resource ID 6100. This is an 8 x 8 array of all of the oütfs in the game, and are in the same order as the oütf resource groups. Make sure it is properly positioned in this image. Not required for Nova.

(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 11-03-2003).)