A short guide about

how to examine and edit the contents of EV's pilot file



 
 
At first, I have to admit that my research is not complete and maybe not always accurate. At least I found the locations of the most interesting entries (from my point of view, of course). If you have additional infos, corrections, questions,... just contact me (Marko Klockner).

Many thanks to seant, who published the raw material at Ambrosia's EV-boards in summer 2000. I got interested enough to wade through all these figures and added the offsets to this list.

If you are familiar with Hex-resources, just get the list and have fun. Otherwise you may want to read on, I'll try to write a short introduction how to use this information.
 
 
 

1) you will need:
 - (a copy of) an EV-pilot 
 - "EV Pilot De/Encryptor" available from the EV-addons-page or here
 - "ResEdit" or another tool to view/edit resource-forks
 - a soft- or hardware calculator (optional but recommended ;-))
 - for references: the "EV Data" file and/or the EVBible
 

2) using the De/Encryptor:
If you want to watch or edit your pilot file, you'll have to decode the file and in case you want to use it afterwards, don't forget to encode it again. Both is done in the same way, just open the application, select a pilot and hit "open". There will be no additional window or user interface, so don't be confused.

NOTE: At the first glace, you won't see a big difference after decoding the file. Below is a screenshot with both versions of the same pilot.
 

3) the hexadecimal-system:
Unfortunately there is no template for easy editing, so we'll have to deal with the Hex-numbers. As you might know, hexadecimal is based on "16" instead of "10" where A-F represent the the two-digit-numbers:
9(dec)=9(hex), 10(dec)=A(hex), 15(dec)=F(hex) and 16(dec)=10(hex)= 1*16^1 + 0*16^0 ...
I think it's useful to have a calculator ready to do the conversion for greater numbers.
 

4) getting the information (finally ;-)):
Ok, after opening the decoded resources in ResEdit, you should see something like the window at the right side of this picture:


 
Just forget the right column, the four columns in the centre store the data and the left one tells you the offset of the first data in each row.
Now, it's time for Ambrosia's list with it's annotations for each figure you'll see. Open this file with your favorite text-editor and look for something you want to know about your pilot (ship-type, outfits, weapons, cargo, escorts, missions, wich systems you visited and your status there,...).

This file looks like this:
00-01     short lastStellar; // last stellar object to be visited (0-1499)
          short shipClass; // player's ship class (0-63)
          short cargo[6]; // current quantity of each of the six types of basic cargo
          short unused; // unused
12-13     short fuel; // current fuel quantity, 100 units per jump
14-19     short month, day, year; // current date
001A-07EB   short exploration[1000]; // current state of each system's
       exploration: <= 0 means unexplored, 1 means player has visited, 
       2 means player has visited and landed within this system

"short" does mean that this info is stored in four hex-digits and the numbers, I added at the beginning of each line, is the starting offset. (In case you didn't know, you can search for a special offset in the "find" menu.)

An example: 
Let's compare this piece of text above with the picture. The first lines of resource 128 tell us the last visited stellar, the ships type and it's cargo and fuel. The second "short word" is the ships class (000F) and the 10th (offset 12-13(hex)) stores the amount of fuel (01F4). Now we have to convert this into the decimal system and get "15" for the ship and "500" fuel. After a look at the original EVData, we can see that this is a Kestrel (ID 128+15=143) ready for up to 5 hyperspace jumps.
 
 

Well, I think that should be enough for now. If I forgot something or this page needs an update: mail me.

Tschüß,
 - Marko

Okt 31th, 2000