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ButtonErrors

A screenshot showing the results of the Dithering Bug on Nova graphics used in a plug, with one button having the infamous red hue and the other missing its text altogether, both resulting from the same engine change.

The Dithering Bug also commonly called the Red PICT Bug, was an engine change to 1.09 in which the Macintosh version of Escape Velocity Nova no longer automatically dithered images via Quicktime. Under normal conditions, a player would not notice anything different from 1.08. However, when a plug-in was used, chances are the image would not be in a format Nova considered to be "correct" (16-bit or less, uncompressed) and, consequently, would have errors displaying the image. Most commonly, this resulted in various graphics being overlaid with a bright red hue, though visual oddities, such as lines, splotches of color, and other errors could result as well, even when using some graphics from Nova itself in a plug-in. The proper way to fix the images was to run them through a w00tWare utility known as BlitZen and tell the program to produce 16-bit, uncompressed images. While this worked for new plug-ins, there were still hundreds of plug-ins at least that now had broken graphics.

By popular demand, this "bug", as it was called by the members of the Nova community since the support of the affected image types was purely coincidental to begin with, was fixed in 1.10.

Nova ModdingMod Releases by year
Novaverse Mods PlugPackARPIA2 (2007) • Anathema (2007) • Brave New Void (2022)
Novaverse Total Conversion: White Dwarf (2023)
In Development You're Not Special, Haiku
Tools for Plugin Creation Mac: MissionComputerResEditNovaTools
Windows: EVNEWRezEditor
Bugs Patch NotesDithering BugExponential Beam Bug
Guides Nova BibleWindows Plugin Conversion TutorialNova Control BitsPilot File
Total Conversions Major Completed: Polycon EV (2002), Ashen Galaxy (2008), Colosseum (2008)
Official: Escape Velocity, Escape Velocity Override
Minor Completed: EVN Paintball, Miners, Teacup
Blank Slate: Absolute Minimum
Released Incomplete: Acheron, Starfleet Adventures
Vaporware: Delphi, Aftermath, APOPHIS, EVN: Eon, EV Noir, EVN: United Galactic Federation, EVN: Phoenix, EVN: Starcraft, Firefly, Frozen Heart 2, Genesis, KFL, Open Source TC, Retribution, Sephil Saga, Space Opera, Stargate Nova, STN: The Final Frontier, A-Ram-Kar, Star Wars Nova
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