Ralph and Rodger's EVO software.

EVO Ship Editor: ShipWrite

What is it?

Shipwrite is a tool for viewing, editing and creating ships for plugins to use in the great game Escape Velocity Override™ (EVO for short) by Matt Burch and the people at Ambrosia Software Inc. This is not official software and we are not associated with Ambrosia in anyway except as satisfied customers.

What does it do?

Creating a complete ship for EVO requires up to 14 separate resources to be created, all with specific numbering conventions. Shipwrite makes it easy, all you have to know is a single ship ID number and ShipWrite takes care of the rest. It provides a complete editor for ships, including:

• An animated spïn (sprite) resource editor and preview, which shows a spinning ship sprite so it is easy to get it going.
• Views of all the ship graphics and the ability to load them from PICT file, PICT resources and even PICT resources in other files (as well as the clipboard as usual). All associated strings and text can be edited in the same window.
• Prompting popup menus for all the ship fields where it will help to have an idea of what are sensible numbers to use. For example the turn rate field has a pop up menu to suggest a range of turn rates. The weapon fields have a pop up menus with a list of all the standard EVO weapon ID numbers. The Government field has a menu for the standard groups etc. The user can quickly make a working ship and then modify any fields manually as they please.
• Only the ship ID needs to be specified, all other resource Ids are allocated automatically.
• A quick visual check is available to see whether the ship resources are complete, or if any are missing.
• Graphics can be saved out of a plugin into PICT files and PICT resources.

ShipWrite can open existing plugins, create new ones from scratch and it is also a safe ship viewer. ShipWrite can open a plugin file in read only mode so no accidental changes can be made.

What does it NOT do?

ShipWrite is designed to open, create and view single file EVO plugins. It will not open multiple file plugins or edit the multiple EVO data files. This is partly a safety design, and a decision that greatly enhances reliability and simplifies the technical issues for the editor. If you want to view the ships in say the multi-file B5 plugin, then you should merge the plugin files into a single file (make a copy!), copying at least the 'shïp', 'spïn', 'dësc' and 'STR ' resources to a new file and opening that with ShipWrite.

Who did it!

Ralph and Rodger Sutherland! We are having great fun playing with EVO, and we found the existing editors a bit hard to use. So... we made our own. We are working on EVN stuff in the meantime.

Rodger is 12 and a keen 3D graphic artist and a budding ship designer. He did all the graphics for the editor (The Sprite background, the splash screen and the G-Fighter example). Ralph is older (!) and he did the program design and programming. Email us at DrRalph@mac.com or rodger_sutherland@mac.com if you have any constructive comments, bug reports or generally good ideas. We are asking a shareware fee to go some way towards the effort put into the program (Rodger wants to buy more games!) but we will talk to anyone even if they are not registered. The beta versions are free to sensible bug reporters!

Credits 'n Stuff

Escape Velocity Override is ©1996-1999 Ambrosia Software Inc. We used bits of the icl8 for EVO to make the icons for ShipWrite. We used RayDream Studio 4 (RayDream Inc.) for the graphics and ResEdit 2.1.3 ( by Apple Computer Inc.) and Metrowerks CodeWarrior (Metrowerks Inc.).

---

Back to EVO Software