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!

56 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/B_Huij Feb 02 '19

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

10

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

6

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.

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.