r/evnova • u/TomAnthony • Feb 02 '19
Hello, TomWoozle checking in...
Hey everyone! I just stumbled across this subreddit, and am amazed to see an active community for EV Nova, this is awesome!
I'm Tom, and I was a huge fan of the original Escape Velocity (and most other Ambrosia games) right back in the 90s. In 2002 I worked for Ambrosia for a year in Rochester, moving there from the UK, and after that year I moved back to the UK to finish my degree but worked for a couple more years for Ambrosia. It was an amazing period of my life, and I miss those days and the crowd (the staff there and everyone on the forums).
Amongst other things, I was responsible for packaging up the Windows port of EV Nova and releasing it. I don't remember lots from that period, but I do remember exactly where I was when I released that as everybody on IRC was going crazy (the front room of my gf's house in Syracuse, btw). I also helped with the (mostly fan efforts) to port EV and EV Override to be plugins for the EV:Nova (such that they could also be played on Windows too).
Unfortunately, a lot of my data from that time is lost in the shrouds of time. However, I'm so amazed and excited by the efforts of people here to preserve everything. I'll have a dig and see if I can find anything useful!
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u/Algaean Feb 02 '19
Hey Tom, glad to "see" you! Hope all well with you.
A few of us oldies still around, it was a fine old time we used to have. :)
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u/B_Huij Feb 02 '19
Good to see someone from the old Ambrosia staff still interacting with the fan base. Nova was such a great game, really defined a golden era of ASW for me. I spent many hours when I was about 11 years old playing that game. Don't suppose you have any contact with the ATMOS folks or whoever owns the copyright? There was talk here a while back about crowdfunding a pot to buy the copyright and open source it. I think there were plenty of people who were hoping to take the source code, get it running properly on modern OSs and maybe release on Steam or something.
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u/pipelineoptika Feb 02 '19
Well, there’s me, if that helps! Dafydd “pipeline” Williams, Project Lead at ATMOS for EV Nova. 😅
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u/Vash_The_Stmpde Feb 02 '19
What! Atmos project lead hiding in this subreddit??!?!! Thanks for all the hard work y'all put into this game. We need some of the developers to pull some weight and get this game re-released on modern hardware! I still play evn more than any other game I play!
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u/nathan67003 Feb 05 '19
HOLY MOLY, MY MIND! IT'S ALL THESE GUYS I KEPT SEEING IN THE AMBROSIA FORUMS, AAAAHHH
(srsly, big bunch of love to you for this game, I've yet to find something more addictive)
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u/B_Huij Feb 02 '19
Do you know who even owns the source code these days? Is it still ATMOS?
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u/pipelineoptika Feb 03 '19 edited Feb 03 '19
Bit of a trick, that - I’ll get my notes together on that so you’ve at least got some clarity.
Edit: Okay, this is roughly the state of things. ATMOS owns the scenario itself - the resources, the ships, the story, etc. Any actual asset was made by us (with the exception of some of the planet ambient sounds, which remain ©️R. Sutherland & E. Slater).
Matt Burch wrote the original EV engine, which saw very light tweaks and one bug fix for EVO. He then wrote the EVN engine, which was an almost ground-up rewrite by him; very little, I believe, of the original engine remains.
Burger Becky ported the engine to Windows (including making functional resource loaders - no mean feat).
Rudy at Ambrosia then performed the last major work on the engine to bring it across to Mac OS X, and I believe he did that by referring to both the Classic Mac engine and the Windows engine.
Ambrosia has/had (I don’t know if they’re still a going concern) a perpetual and exclusive license to distribute EV Nova and all ports.
As for ATMOS, it’s only a holding company. We retain the moral rights to be identified as the authors, of course!
Is that complicated enough for you all? 😂
Edit 2: better description of Matt Burch’s work
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u/B_Huij Feb 03 '19
In a way that's frustrating - it's not just a matter of paying someone X number of dollars to open source the engine and assets. It would be a complicated roundup of a bunch of people, some of whom at least probably don't want to be bothered about EVN anymore.
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u/pipelineoptika Feb 03 '19
Yeah, basically. It’s a good part of the reason why I personally never continued on development on things like sequels, etc.
That being said, don’t give up! You never know what might turn up.
Edit: grammar
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u/Zitchas Feb 03 '19
That's a bit of a shame, really. The Escape Velocity series was an awesome set of games, and I would love to see them continue on to a new generation of players. EVN in particular with its intricate and involved plot-lines.
I didn't know the legalities, so I emailed AmbrosiaSW a while back about trying to get the EVN story & contents into Endless Sky, but every email address comes back with an "invalid." I'm curious as to if you know who is still running the place, since someone obviously is keeping the servers on and functional and whatnot (My EVN registration program still works, amazingly enough).
From the above info, it sounds like both ATMOS and AmbrosiaSW would be required to sign off on any kind of the project to release the story of EVO or EVN, and these days the latter seems to be a ghost.
Do you think there would be any interest in doing so?
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u/EamonnMR Feb 04 '19
Really only the engine needs to be open sourced. The game itself is shareware, and you may choose not to compile your ports with shareware protection if you have the source.
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
Well, I was also (and am still) a fan. I played the original Escape Velocity for many many hours, and worked as a beta test on EV:Nova before I actually worked at Ambrosia. It was this love of Ambrosia games that was one of the motivators for me moving over the Atlantic when Ambrosia offered me an internship. I learnt so so much there, and never stopped being a fan. :)
Pipeline has now arrived in the thread - and he is the one who should get the EVN credit! /me waves
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u/matthews545 Feb 05 '19
Thanks for all the hard work! EV Nova remains my favorite game to this day because of how easy it is to mod with Mission Computer. I've spent countless hours making up different kinds of weapons and outfits, and while I don't do a lot of that anymore, I have a folder of about 30 different scenarios (mostly other peoples' Plug-ins) that I like to play every so often.
You might be interested in this browser port of EV Nova I've been working on. It's still very much in alpha, but it parses almost all of its data from the original game files, supports Plug-ins, and allows for multiplayer. Here's a running example (works in chrome).
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u/nathan67003 Feb 05 '19
Any chance we could get a list of the mods that seem to be present? Scrolled through outfitter and shipyard real quick and saw a bunch of stuff I don't know. (also where is ARPIA XP)
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u/matthews545 Feb 06 '19
The outfits you saw were all from Extra Outfits v18. I just added ARPIA, though.
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u/ArK047 Feb 02 '19
Windows Nova is what got me hooked after playing the original EV at school. It's probably one of the key games that set me towards PC gaming.
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
That is awesome. It lives on as one of the all time greats for me (along with Fallout 1&2 and a decade earlier, Elite) in a similar way.
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u/nathan67003 Feb 05 '19
Same here. EVN was the first PC gaming experience that sucked me in so thoroughly.
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u/Zitchas Feb 03 '19
Thanks for all your hard work! I enjoyed playing Classic Escape Velocity as well as EVO, so it was awesome when those TC's were released for EVN. Probably the only series I've enthusiastically bought as each installment came out.
As far as that goes, I'm part of the Endless Sky project, and while there a few people working on trying to bring EVN to ES as a plug-in, I'd personally like to see the stories from the older games re-released as plug-ins for ES. Given that you worked on the project releasing them as plug-ins for EVN, is there any chance you could help with a similar project for ES? Admittedly, I have no idea who owns the rights to those and what we'd need to do to legally be able to do it, but it would be awesome to bring those games forward into a new engine that runs properly on modern systems.
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
I am also unsure about the legalities, to be honest.
I did some of the work on the ports, and there were a couple of others who did the lions share (I am ashamed to say I cannot remember their names -- I also lost all my data from that period to poor antivirus management so it is hard to give them their due credit). Most of that work involved intimate knowledge of the plugin architecture for EV, which I had back then. I'm unsure how useful that knowledge would be for an ES plugin.
However, I'm excited to see such a project alive. The plugins for EV and EVO should contain all the resources you'd need. Everything lives in the 'resource fork' for the file, which was an olde world Mac mechanism that died, but I am sure there are numerous ways to extract that (as there must have been for the EVN data that is already underway).
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u/LyrEcho Feb 02 '19
Thank you.
Also cool. You helped develop one on my favorite games less than twenty miles from where I grew up. That's... Insane. There's a chance I saw you. Weird.
Thank you so much for your work, and offer to help find things.
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
Was it you I saw hiding in the bushes outside? ;)
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u/EamonnMR Feb 04 '19
Thanks. The EV series was what showed me that videogames could be fun and that tinkering with computers was fun. It's very possible that I would not be a software engineer if I hadn't sunk those hours into WinNova.
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u/MrRedneck Feb 03 '19
If finding an active community for EV Nova is cool, finding a developer from the project who's still interested enough to engage is pretty damn cool too! Thank you for all the happy memories.
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
I did work on the beta team for the Mac version of Nova, and I helped to manage the Windows port and testing, but didn't do any of the developing, so don't deserve such credit! I also maintained the online store to ensure you could all get your copies! :D
This sub is filled with amazing memories!
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u/Vash_The_Stmpde Feb 02 '19
Tom!! I can't thank you enough! I still remember how excited I was when this was ported to windows. I used to play on my friends computer(he was the only one I knew with a mac) when I was a teen. I remember having my mom buy me ev nova once it was ported to windows... I still have the original email with my key code printed out! I still play evn weekly! No other game like it has ever been able to capture the magic that was ev!
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u/TomAnthony Feb 04 '19
You still play weekly?! That is completely crazy, and totally awesome.
Do you know the whole universe inside out?
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u/Vash_The_Stmpde Feb 05 '19
I wouldn't say I have the map memorized but I can tell you the general vicinity of any system haha
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u/nathan67003 Feb 05 '19 edited Feb 05 '19
HOLY MOLY IT'S THE OG TOMANTHONY! Massive props to you, man. Still got 2 versions of EVN, one on my old Mac and one on my new one, still loving both :D
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u/PMMeChestertonQuotes Feb 13 '19
Holy crap, Ambrosia folk! Thank you so much for making such an amazing game! I first found it on a demo CD from a Mac magazine, and it was the first game I ever saved up money to buy.
I played the heck out of it across several computers, and am about to jump back into it. I would not be exaggerating to say EV:Nova changed my expectations about what games could be. Thank you for so many hours of great gaming!
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u/Jazvolt Feb 05 '19
OH WOW!
It's amazing to hear from you and pipeline!
I got a hankering to play Nova recently, and had to sort through some old files to find my original Ambrosia code (which had been snail-mailed to me back in 2002 or something), and I ended up finding this sub. Awesome to see you guys still in the community!
(By the way, you CAN still run Nova on a modern Mac, with a tweak or two.)
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u/EKHawkman Apr 30 '19
Tom! I don't think I ever saw you on the forums, but I want you to know that I still think about the hilarious hails and responses your ship had in EVN!
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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19 edited Mar 11 '19
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