A Ship Plug-in for the game "Escape Velocity"

by Eduard Schwan & Bryon Schwan

version 1.0, March 22, 1997

What is it?

This is a freeware plug-in for the Mac OS shareware game Escape Velocity, by Ambrosia Software. It was designed to run with EV version 1.05, but should run with newer versions of 1.x as well (but not EV Override, v2). This plug-in adds a new giant ship to the EV shipyard, whose specs are based loosely on the "Vorlon Planet-Killer" ship shown in the Babylon-5 TV series. Since our family was hooked on this intriguing science-fiction TV show, and our son is hooked on Escape Velocity, it seemed appropriate to create this ship as our first EV plug-in.

The ship is a very large, very well-shielded, very slow ship, with an extremely powerful beam-cutting weapon.

Where is it?

You can download this 190K archive from here.

How do I use it?

Just drop the "Vorlon Planet-Killer" plug-in file into the "EV Plug-Ins" folder in your Escape Velocity game folder. Now when you start Escape Velocity, you should have this ship available for purchase in any shipyard.

How did you make it?

Bryon watched the video tape of a recent B-5 episode and sketched out the ship on paper, and described what kind of sound he wanted for the beam weapon. Eduard converted the sketch into a 3-D POV-Ray ray tracing renderer scene description file, then used POV-Ray 3.01 to render the 36 frames of images and masks into PICT files. They were then pasted into long PICT-strips & stuck into a new resource file with ResEdit. The sound was created with Macromedia's SoundEdit 16/Pro software. The other EV resources needed were created by hand with ResEdit & the EV-supplied TMPL resources, with a lot of help from the "EV-Bible" document. Also, Joel Watson spent a lot of time beta testing it to insure it worked properly and played well with others.

Who are you anyway?

Bryon is your standard 9 year-old computer-game-playing wunderkind, with stars in his eyes and dreams of becoming a spaceship pilot. Eduard is your standard proud dad, writing Mac OS software for a living. When he's not at work, he is writing Mac OS software in his spare time, or helping Bryon with homework. This is a product of Eduard's home-based company, esp Software.

Legalsleaze

This plug-in may be freely distributed electronically or in Mac OS shareware bundles without need to ask permission from its authors (Eduard & Bryon Schwan). The package must remain intact and unaltered; the original read-me document and the plug-in must be kept together. It may not be sold commercially by itself or as part of a larger collection without prior permission by its authors.

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy our work!

Eduard & Bryon -- esp Software & BESTech