EV NOVA MAP SOFTWARE

Lastly, the ship needs a “ship” resource to provide ship stats, a “shan” resource to describe how the sprite sheets should be interpreted, and two “desc” resources for in-game text when you’re shopping for the ship or attempting to hire it as an escort.Īgain, these resources are best created by copying them from a similar existing ship and then updating their IDs to a number that EV Nova doesn’t use. To find these images, check the “ship” resource for an existing ship, which should include the IDs of the corresponding pict resources. These are also 24-bit bitmaps, and their sizes are best found by just exporting the resources from another ship and then editing in GIMP. Next, a number of “pict” resources are needed for the ship’s shipyard image, detail image, and targeting computer image. Once these rleD and rle8 resources are in, two additional sets will need to be made for the ship’s blinking lights and thrust.

This is called the “rle8.” The ship sprite’s rle8 is going to follow slightly different rules for whatever reason (maybe it’s used to display ionization?), so just be sure it matches with the rle8s of other ships.

Next, a grayscale bitmap and accompanying 2-bit mask are needed, which in most cases determine the rleD’s opacity per pixel (black opaque, white transparent). This is called the “rleD.” The mask can be loaded in as a 24-bit bitmap so export settings don’t need to be adjusted frequently, and EVNEW will flatten it out to the necessary 2-bit format. In addition to the initial 24-bit bitmap sprite sheet, a 2-bit black and white bitmap mask is necessary to determine which pixels of the sprite sheet are recognized. Graphic ResourcesĮV Nova uses a number of graphic resources to render a ship. With this in GIMP, I simply pasted each of the screenshots over the existing ship and then applied a number of filters and tweaked the brightness, contrast, and color levels until the art style matched up nicely. Next, I used EVNEW to open EV Nova’s data files and get an example sprite sheet out for a ship. With the texture mapped onto the ship, it was time to render the scene, position lights to match how a ship in EV Nova is normally lit, and then take 64 screenshots of the ship rotated by increments of 5.625 degrees. In hindsight, I should have probably imported the ship as multiple objects and then applied a texture to each. It’s a rather arduous process, but seemed to be the quickest way to get what I was after at the time. This process involves “unwrapping” a 3D object onto a 2D plane, filling that 2D plane with artwork, and then re-wrapping it around the object. Next, with the model completed, I brought it into Blender so that a texture could be UV mapped onto the CAD model. EV Nova uses 64-frame sprite sheets to display the ship on the screen, and I knew there was no hope of consistently drawing a ship at different angles that many times, so a model would be necessary for rendering. To create my franken-ship, the IDA Courier, I first started in FreeCAD to build a 3D model of what the ship would look like. EV Nova had quick ships and it had freighters, but it didn’t have a quick, small freighter, so I decided to design one by combining the original Courier with EV Nova’s iconic freighter, the IDA Frigate. One of my favorite ships was the Courier, a light freighter able to move quickly between star systems while carrying a reasonable amount of cargo.

EV NOVA MAP SOFTWARE

Years later in high school, Ambrosia Software released its second sequel, Escape Velocity: Nova, and my friends and I were hooked all over again.ĭue to a recent unexpected bit of downtime, I found myself playing EV Nova once again with my friend, and decided it was about time I expanded it a bit by filling a perceived gap from the first game. It was fascinating in its openness and the range of ways you could play it. I was maybe ten or eleven years old, and I’d just gotten a space exploration game called Escape Velocity. The first time I stayed awake until the sun came up was the night I got my color Macintosh IIsi.

Ev nova map