Before you actually begin

You must be pretty eager to learn how to do plugs or make one rightaway, but there are several things you need to get started. The following list is mandatory, you can’t really do anything without these:

  1. A registered version of Escape Velocity: Nova. The unregistered version won’t let you play with plugs or modified data files, including yours. So if you haven’t already done so, go register the game at Ambrosia’s online store, it’s worth it.
  2. A plug editor. There’s no way you’re going to learn just by reading this, you have to experiment and poke around in the data files with one. For the Mac, there are ResEdit (direct download link), almost always used with NovaTools. Although this is widely used, it is only usable in the Classic Mac OS mode (Mac OS 9.2 and earlier) while running in Mac OS X. In particular, Intel Macs cannot run this mode at all. If you require or would prefer a Mac OS X native solution, there is Mission Computer. It works well, but does not contain complete graphical editors for every resource. For what has been completed, its features are vastly superior to NovaTools, so it is good to have a copy around. For the PC, the only one so far is EVNEW, which is both free and open source. Because of that, any PC Developer could make additions to the EVNEW engine.
  3. A copy of the Nova Bible, which is normally included with your distribution of Nova. This is deep stuff, but is an essential technical reference, and we’ll show you how to read it later on in this guide.

Also, it is advised (but by no mean essential) to know how to obtain plug-ins made by others. While easy to do on a Mac, the procedure is a bit more complex on a PC, so try to make sure you master it so you can take a look at plugins already made, a good tutorial for that can be found here. Also, feel free to check out the EV Developer’s Corner, they’re a friendly group of people who are always willing to lend a helping hand.

Once you’ve ensured that you have all of the required tools mentioned above, you are ready to go on to the next step: