Stars-Nova

I have only looked at this briefly but it seems to me that a state file is
what the server/console generates containing information about the state of
play. It is like a .m file for stars, except there is only one of them per
game (which needs to be fixed for security puposes and I intend to do when
I convert it to xml). I think that the turn file is generated by the GUI
and contains the players commands for his race/fleets/planets etc, like a
.x file for stars.

Yes, I set up the associations for *.race and *.turn in the installer I
created last night; I noticed though that the programs seem to ignore
filenames passed in. (Windows filetype associations work by calling the
program with the argument of the filename, so fixing the command line
behavior is the same as fixing the Explorer behavior at this point.)

As for unique extensions for these files and for components.xml, how about
"default.novamod" for components.xml, "humanoid.novarace" for the race
files, and "abarefootjaywalk.novaturn" and "whatever.novastate" for the
turn and state files? (What's the difference between a turn and a state
file, anyway?)

Taking the race file as an argument to the race designer shouldn't be too
hard. The same applies to components.xml for the Component Editor and a
turn file for Nova GUI as well.

Having .state or .race files in Windows Explorer automatically open the
appropriate application is just about associating the correct application
with the extensions. That is maybe something the setup package could do
during installation, but it might not be as easy under Linux and Mac. We
might have to make the file extensions more unique if we wanted to do this.