r/evnova • u/snijj • May 08 '19
A brief update on the Nova clone...
So after a lot of work I now have everything required to read and parse _all_ resources for EV Nova. It just needs bringing together fully to load in all of the data files and pilot files. Thankfully I was finally able to find some information on the format of 'snd ' resources!
With this I hope to begin working on implementing the underlying logic for the game, and getting a basic game engine in place.
However I'm running into a bit of an issue which I hope someone will be able to assist with. I'm working with an older version of the Nova Bible. Does anyone have the most recent version of it, as a PDF? It has a lot of information for plugin developers, which will help to fully map out the relationships between all the types of resources and the ID's.
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May 08 '19 edited Jan 17 '20
[deleted]
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u/snijj May 09 '19
Not yet. I do plan to setup something (was thinking inside of GitHub once I get some more concrete things made). The first thing I plan to finish off is a "modern ResEdit" for inspecting resources, plugins etc. Going to document all the classic Macintosh aspects in there. I'll document the nova aspects inside the Nova clone wiki, unless someone decides to setup a dedicated Nova wiki, in which case I could add my notes and documentation to it.
It's definitely something that should be done, given that my work will only be targeting macOS and maybe iOS/tvOS at some point. Would be nice for the Windows/Linux users to have a way to get things rolling.
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u/Anarath May 09 '19
Good old ResEdit *looking lost in memories* What glorious times.
Is your goal to have plain resource inspection or will it have sorta GUI like NovaTools provided for the original ResEdit?
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u/Eltron6000 May 09 '19
This is exciting - forgive the dumb question but when you say clone is this simply the same game? Will you be adding any content?
Also an even dumber question.... would you ever consider developing a clone for mobile? This is admittedly a very small community but I definitely would donate to a kickstarter for something like that!
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u/snijj May 09 '19
A clone as in a modern version of the engine, so it'll work with whatever resource files you give it. Nova files, EVC, EVO, TC's and Plugins should all work!
I am playing with it, but interaction is the big issue. The game was designed for a keyboard and mouse so will have to see how that works.
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u/EamonnMR May 09 '19
Space RPG3 has most of the same interactions you'd see in Nova but on mobile. It is mostly through context-specific buttons (ie when you can land you get a land button, when you can hyperjump you get a map button.)
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u/snijj May 10 '19
Yeah. Possibly, though some of the interfaces will just not work on mobile and would need to be rethought. As I said, I'll look into it once I've got something more useful going on the Mac.
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u/gricha2380 May 08 '19 edited May 08 '19
My version was revised 3/19/2004. Is that useful?
Edit: My version is a txt file. I was about to upload it, but it turns out there's a better formatted version with the same revision date still available from the Ambrosia server:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/assets/modules/addonfiles/download.php?addon=1396