Warning | Scenarios and plug-ins for the Escape Velocity series are stored in the old Macintosh resource fork format. While it was highly capable and forward-looking when it was designed in the 1980s, it has both a 16 MB upper limit and limitations on the number of resources, which can interfere with modern development. This applies to any editor, not just to MissionComputer. To avoid the risk of file corruption or loss of data, it is best to divide your plug-ins into multiple files, as Ambrosia have done with the games' scenarios; try not to exceed a few megabytes in each file, and err on the side of more files rather than fewer. Corruption caused by neglecting this precaution has afflicted the development many major plug-ins, as well as EV Override and EV Nova themselves, and can easily affect your own work if you are incautious.

## Introducing MissionComputer

MissionComputer is a scenario editor for Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity series of shareware space adventure games, including Escape Velocity (1996), EV Override (1998), and EV Nova (2002). It began as an editor for missions and has grown to cover many other aspects of the game. No one tool can ever perform all of the diverse functions that are required to build a plug-in — Photoshop and a 3D modeller are both useful to create graphics, and traditional tools such as ResEdit and NovaTools are still of value — but MissionComputer provides an efficient, modern interface for editing most of the data types the game engine accepts.
MissionComputer also offers the following additional tools:

- an integrated Resource Copier utility for copying large numbers of resources between two files
- a convertor for the plug-in format used by the Windows version of EV Nova
- an integrated Target Generator utility, which makes it easy to transform ordinary colour graphics, such as the 'shipyard' 3/4 images for a ship type, and adapt them into the scan-line form used for EV Nova's target graphics (with various options to customise the procedure)

## The Escape Velocity Community Online

If you experience problems using MissionComputer, please post them on the official EV Developer's Corner forum, where they will be seen by me and other members of the development community; I can't fix a bug if I am never told about it!
When it comes time to release your plug-in, the best place to upload it is Ambrosia Software's official add-ons directory, the Internet's premier repository of files related to EV Nova. You may also want to announce it to the public on Ambrosia's official forums.
All upgrades to MissionComputer are announced on the official Escape Velocity web forums, and are available from my web site at davidarthur.evula.net.
MissionComputer is copyright © 2001-2010 by David Arthur and is
protected by the copyright laws of Canada and by international treaties around
the world. The Escape Velocity games and the Resource Bible excerpts are copyright
© 1995-2008 by Ambrosia Software, Inc. et al. All other copyrights, trademarks, and
registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
MissionComputer may not be distributed for profit in any form without the
prior written consent of its author. Non-profit distribution is acceptable
as long as the entire package is distributed without modification. All use
of MissionComputer is at your own risk; please keep backups of your data!