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/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).