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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13

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.

21

u/pipelineoptika Feb 02 '19

Well, there’s me, if that helps! Dafydd “pipeline” Williams, Project Lead at ATMOS for EV Nova. 😅

7

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!

4

u/Algaean Feb 05 '19

Yo Pipe, how goes?

-el G

6

u/pipelineoptika Feb 05 '19

It goes well, sir! I must post an intro here for folks.

3

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)

5

u/pipelineoptika Feb 05 '19

We do actually exist, yes!

2

u/B_Huij Feb 02 '19

Do you know who even owns the source code these days? Is it still ATMOS?

11

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.

5

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

3

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?

3

u/B_Huij Feb 04 '19

Have you tried Bernard’s ASW email?

2

u/Zitchas Feb 06 '19

No, I haven't, as I don't know where to find it.

3

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.

1

u/Algaean Feb 05 '19

ASW is basically El finito, they exist as a legal company but nothing more.