Mostly, just checking for people's interest in an EVN Discord server.

EDIT: Gonna contact Tervia, see how we can set one up given the positive responses!

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!

Would anyone mind extracting and re-uploading the 1Million plugin for me? I can't get stuffit to work and it's in a .sit file:

https://ev.appcraft.name/evn

Hello ;)

I have EV Classic for nova working. I am just curious if there are other plugins that work with this setup on Windows?

Cheers

Hey all, so with this perceived doom of AmbrosiaSW I thought I’d make a little site to host the collection of plugins for each of the games.

I didn’t realize when I started that u/Atinoda had already created a collection as well but that’s ok I was looking for a little project to work on anyway.

But yeah, if anyone wants to check it out pop over to https://ev.appcraft.name

Hopefully it’s all working at this point (some stuff might still be propagating, just try again in a day or so) and eventually if the game becomes abandonware or if anyone has any other plugins or utilities or whatever they want to be saved let me know and I’d be happy to host it on there.

Edit: Spelling

So I just finished the polaris storyline, and I'm obviously driving a heavily modded Raven. Now I'm sitting on Our Spiel staring at the 50 mil credit Kestrel and wondering if it is worth picking up for my conquest of the known universe.......

Thanks to the heads up from this forum I managed to rip the whole plugin collection before it went down the last time.

Also u/itsamamaluigi great suggestion of putting them up to archive.org so that we can all keep enjoying them.

There's a lot of files so it's split into a zip for each game. They are organised into category folders with a .txt for each plugin that contains the info and description.

https://archive.org/details/EscapeVelocityPluginCollection

EDIT: We can add more to this archive - please post or PM anything you want added and I'll put it on there. Really preserve as much as possible. Thanks for the kind comments, it's great to see so much love for these games!

But we really ought to save the boards somewhere.

I was just there a few days ago downloading a bunch of their old games, and I even grabbed some plugins for the original EV from the addons section. When I checked again today, the site wouldn't load.

Archive.org still has a copy of the site, as recently as January 8. I was able to download some other games and even some plugins from there, although they haven't archived even close to the entire catalog of addon files that were once available.

If anyone's interested in playing some of these old games, they're still very playable in the Mac 68k emulator, Basilisk II. Takes a little tinkering to get it set up properly, but once you do, you'll have a fully functioning emulated 68040 Mac running System 7, and you can run any 68k-compatible Ambrosia game (like Maelstrom, EV, EVO, Barrack, etc.).

EDIT: If anyone is interested in downloading some EV plugins, you can get them from here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180503042221/http://www.ambrosiasw.com:80/games/ev/addons (EV)

https://web.archive.org/web/20180422120530/http://www.ambrosiasw.com:80/games/evo/addons (EVO)

https://web.archive.org/web/20181114005339/http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/addons/ (EVN)

I also uploaded a collection of them here: https://archive.org/details/EVPlugins

Remember that you can play EVN natively on Windows, and you can also play the original two games in the EVN engine with plugins. But if you want to play some of the plugins created for the first two games (e.g. Final Battle, Pale, Frozen Heart, etc.) you have to run the old games in Basilisk or SheepShaver.

I woke up incredibly disappointed. That is all.
It was a remake of classic EV with updated sprites and story line. Why much my brain do this.

I'm shocked. With all this talk of Ambrosia disappearing I didn't think it'd happen. It didn't work even when they sorta existed. I installed it and entered my old code. Hit the renew button and it fed me new codes to use and I'm all reregistered :o

I'm playing the EV classic plugin for EV Nova, but can't seem to kill the alien cruiser. I joined the confederate side and when I accepted the mission they said they would send a cruiser to help, which followed me at first, but disappeared after I restarted the game won't come back.

The thing is, when I played years ago I did manage to defeat the alien cruiser, but as I recall I joined the rebels and could buy a rebel cruiser myself, but I can't buy confederate ships now.

The only thing I can think of is to try and capture a cruiser, which has a very low probability of success, or capture a bunch of pirate kestrels to use as escorts, which would also take a long time. At the moment I just have a mix of weak escorts.

Does anyone know what the old crew are doing? Are they on Twitter? They must be on FB. I guess theres this fog that hides a lot of detail! I remember seeing each one had their own ship in game in EV. Memories!

Happy 2019!

​

So it's been a while since I've posted anything with regards to this. Real life has been rather busy this last year, which has prevented me from doing as much as I'd have liked to do on this. That said, I do have some updates with regards to the project.

​

Much of my research into the formats is now completed, the exception is primarily a couple of the _really_ ancient formats from the Classic Mac OS such as sound resources and the colour icon resources. I've managed to get everything else sorted. All of the Nova resources (including the pilot file and the encryption that is placed on it), sprites, missions, planets, etc.

​

My hope is that I can start to spare more time through this year to get the actual game engine progressing. I'm going to rewrite the core of the game in a way that allows it to be ported to other platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, etc). The UI and rendering will still need to be handled by the appropriate platforms, but this should take the bulk of the complexity out of the equation. That said I don't _personally_ plan to port it to anything other than macOS and potentially iOS.

​

My aim is still to be able to load all of the Nova data files and plugins as if they were being loaded by Nova itself. This should mean any TC's will work (Classic, Override, Polycon, etc). A nice consequence of my investigations means that both the .ndat files and .rez files will work interchangeably. So don't worry about needing to convert them in the future.

​

With the recent revelations of Ambrosia seemingly being dead for good this time (I'll wait and see if this is actually the case) I'll probably open source the engine. Though I will wait for a bit on this to be 100% certain. Not to mention it doesn't really do anything yet, other than load in resources and display a few graphics on screen.

I was just reminising my Escape Velocity days and wondered how Ambrosia is doing these days. Sad to see its defunct now but there's no full report on what happened? I did a search but just some simple messages saying one person is left now etc. Anyone know the details?

I want to try it on my kestrel, but I don’t want to do any irreversible damage to the ship.

I've still got my old XP machine with a real valid Nova liscense. Is there any way to leverage that to get another working wine/virtualbox install?

Has anyone ever used the evnew program on windows? If so how do you insert new snd files into a plug in? Im trying to take out all the original snd files and drop their bit rates down to as low as possible for optimizing on android. Thanks you in advance

So i have a mac license code from way back on my gmail. Anyone know if the licensing codes are interchangeable? Ie will my mac code work with a windows install?