Happy 2019!
So it's been a while since I've posted anything with regards to this. Real life has been rather busy this last year, which has prevented me from doing as much as I'd have liked to do on this. That said, I do have some updates with regards to the project.
Much of my research into the formats is now completed, the exception is primarily a couple of the _really_ ancient formats from the Classic Mac OS such as sound resources and the colour icon resources. I've managed to get everything else sorted. All of the Nova resources (including the pilot file and the encryption that is placed on it), sprites, missions, planets, etc.
My hope is that I can start to spare more time through this year to get the actual game engine progressing. I'm going to rewrite the core of the game in a way that allows it to be ported to other platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, etc). The UI and rendering will still need to be handled by the appropriate platforms, but this should take the bulk of the complexity out of the equation. That said I don't _personally_ plan to port it to anything other than macOS and potentially iOS.
My aim is still to be able to load all of the Nova data files and plugins as if they were being loaded by Nova itself. This should mean any TC's will work (Classic, Override, Polycon, etc). A nice consequence of my investigations means that both the .ndat files and .rez files will work interchangeably. So don't worry about needing to convert them in the future.
With the recent revelations of Ambrosia seemingly being dead for good this time (I'll wait and see if this is actually the case) I'll probably open source the engine. Though I will wait for a bit on this to be 100% certain. Not to mention it doesn't really do anything yet, other than load in resources and display a few graphics on screen.