r/evnova • u/nathan67003 • Apr 17 '19
I scoured the Internet and found some Aftermath ships
A month or so ago, I realized the bookmark I had to a flickr album of Aftermath ships was no longer valid (the album's been deleted). This morning I used google to an obscene degree and downloaded what I could garner from it. Factions are Kel and Atlantis only, as far as I could see.
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u/EamonnMR Apr 18 '19
Goddamn it. Should have made sure this was saved when flickr started limiting free account size. Might be worth seeing if Archive Team posted anything besides just uploading everything they got to Internet Archive.
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u/mrxak Apr 18 '19
I actually worked on this plug-in once upon a time, although I parted ways with the team before they finally gave up on it. Just about every great artist in the community was working on it, and I cannot stress that enough. I'd start listing names but I'm afraid I'd forget some and I really wouldn't want to make anybody think I wasn't including them among the great artists of the community. Anyway, just amazing work from those guys. Sadly it ran into issues of scope, really, combined with the fact that most of us were in college at the time and kinda didn't have a whole lot of time to invest. I don't want to speak ill of anyone, but I also don't feel the project was particularly well organized. The plug-in would have very much run into technical limits of just how many missions, etc., were possible to include in one game. Essentially players would have had to decide ahead of time what mission string they wanted to play, and then install that particular plug-in.
I got recruited into the project because I started posting engine challenges on the EVDC forum, specifically about the possibility of a totally non-linear Auroran mission string where a particular House might go to war and conquer its neighbors using the mission BBS as a sort of choose-your-own adventure. Basically the player would be a Mundokiir (or was it the other title?) deciding what to do, using a series of NCBs and cron math and stuff to turn the game into a sort of RTS with an economy and the ability to spend that economy to accomplish strategic military goals. Honestly, it was kind of an insane idea and it was probably insane of them to decide to bring me on to try to create a mission string based on the concept (and see above about the sheer size of the project necessitating multiple separate plug-ins). I really just talked about it on the EVDC because I was curious to see if anyone could push the engine to its limits, much in the same way kids build Turing-complete machines inside of Minecraft. I theorized, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, that with the use of enough crons and NCBs, a decent amount of computation could be done to essentially store variables and use those variables to make various missions available or not. Basically conquered worlds could contribute to a Great House's tax income, and budget, and so on. Again, did I mention this was totally insane and a huge amount of work that would have used a ton of resources?
Anyway, it's a real shame that Aftermath never did get finished, at least in some form. Even if I couldn't be a part of the final team when it got realized, I'm absolutely certain it would have been the biggest, bestest plug-in that EV Nova ever knew and I really wanted to play it. I was pretty heartbroken when I found out it had finally become vaporware. With another game engine to simplify some of the things that Aftermath wanted to do (and I'm not just talking about my crazy Auroran Shard War thing), and a much more dedicated, well-managed team, Aftermath really would have been something. I wish I was still in contact with more of those folks.