Endless Sky: GPL Licensed Escape Velocity Successor | Hacker News Reader

Endless Sky: GPL Licensed Escape Velocity Successor

endless-sky.github.io

191 pointsCDSlice44 comments

I have a really fond memory of Escape Velocity. My brother and I played it all summer one year. We daisy chained two apple keyboards so that he could fly and I could control escorts.

Then something incredible happened. I must have pressed a wrong key because we got a beep and a note, "you are too far away to board this ship." We looked at each other like we just discovered the map to the holy Grail. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN BOARD? YOU CAN BOARD SHIPS?"

Then later came discovering ResEdit (and creating my patented "Javelin Spray")

I still remember so much about that game. Like capturing Lightnings and selling them for a profit. Or how it takes exactly one torpedo to kill a Defender. Or how a bumper crop lowered the price of food on Levo. The forbidden planets were so mysterious. The Lethe/Cydonia war. The Mass Driver. Modifying an Argosy into a terrifying gunboat of proton turrets. Captain Hector. Aliens. Feuding couriers that eventually start killing each other. Having 6 Rebel Destroyers as escorts, the F key turning into "press for missile rain."

That game opened us up to a whole universe of what video games could be. We were maybe 8 and 10 years old.

Were you ever able to take over planets

Oh yeah! The game ended for us once when we managed to capture almost every planet you could. So much cash!

I _love_ Escape Velocity Nova. I used to play it for maybe 2-4 weeks once per year but then my license key expired and their renewal system went down because the company died.

I've wanted a successor of some kind for so long but nothing quite hits the mark. Maybe this will come close.

Can u recommend other multi user space/trader games ?

I dont even mind browser games, since mechanics>graphics for me.

Wish I could, but like I said in my first post I just haven't been able to find any similar space/trader games on the same level as EVN. Maybe someone else will be able to chime in.

But my guess is just that it's not really a popular enough genre, which is why there's such a dearth in games of similar style and quality.

I've started work on one, but I don't have the trading part implemented yet.

https://www.emergencevector.com

The battles in space sims are not fun. It is the trading and exploring . Just like all the fun with Hacker News are with the comments.

I've devised a way to have a procedurally generated tech tree. Actually, it's an inexhaustably large number of tech trees in a huge Directed Acyclic Graph. The particular resources will be partially location dependent, which will motivate the exploration and trading. That's the plan, anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w

I always like the optimization of weapon systems, sensors, etc. In customizing your ship.

Please try our game, Star Sonata. https://www.starsonata.com/

It's in the same genre as EV, Star Control II, etc. It has been out for over a decade now and still under active development with a stable player base. The economic side is generally more about making bases and colonies and setting up automated trade routes than hauling stuff around manually, though. In general, people set up their economy while going off to do missions and explore in parallel.

For me at least, this didn't quite hit the mark. The world just didn't feel like it had the same richness.

The good news about EV:N is that IIRC you can just disconnect your computer from the internet and roll back the clock to the day after your license was issued. Then it will work without complaining about expiration.

Yeah, that's the trouble I've had looking for similar games.. I'm really hoping another shop will be able to build a game like this again someday with the same level of richness. But it feels like an older, less popular style of game that just doesn't really have a market these days.

Thanks for the tip! I might need to just see if I can spin up a VM and do that. Would rather not need to do it with my regular computer OS.

You won't be able to play through the full storyline though.

I was able to. Once you reset your clock and use your license key, you can get past Cpt. Hector

Captain Hector isn't the issue. You never got the 4th wall break?

The crack is on the Reddit thread here https://www.reddit.com/r/Escape_Velocity/comments/9atyzj/ev_...

You'll also find a minimalist QuickTime no-installer

I was obsessed with EV growing up, and then found EV:Nova during college. Such awesome games! And the mods.. oh god, the mods rocked! Full Star Wars clone... it was crazy awesome.

I'll never forget that red alien blob craft (IIRC, it was in the original EV), it slow slow to turn but very powerful, allowing configurations with ridiculous amounts of weapons.

And then the stunningly gorgeous Kestrel (http://blog.eamonnmr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/kestrel_...), damn, this game is one of my all time favorites! Definitely one of the first things which put me on track to fall in love with All Things Space :)

I've always wished for some sort of EV with LAN or Internet play, to make it less lonely. If there were mechanics to make it really work smoothly and still be fun, that'd be dreamy.

I've enjoyed Elite:Dangerous [0], but it's very different gameplay in comparison. E:D is similar in some regards, like ship upgrades, missions, and trading economy but _much more time intensive_ and first-person POV drive, whereas EV was always 3rd person.

I also preferred the ability in EV to to hire subservient autonomous agents who could then be mass-controlled with hotkeys. This really helped scale up combat to take on entire fleets. Then you've got E:D, where it's like "click, click, click, steeeerrrr" to aim and fire every shot.

To sum it up:

EV - Super fun to play, fast gameplay, excellent storylines, easy to start / save / stop / resume, okay-ish economy, fun easter eggs, but lonely.

E:D - Fun, relaxing (or boring, because of all the time to accelerate / decelerate / travel), huge expansive universe (simply massive!), good network play, weak story line, different fighting style, quite excellent trading economy, but high time commitment and overall complexity.

[0] https://www.elitedangerous.com/

Registration is busted. You can get a copy at http://escape-velocity.games

Having played this game, is everything an update should be except the art it's super generic. After a while I just can't really get into the ships because they lack that used and abused Star wars feeling that ev Nova ships had.

I've played all three of the Escape Velocities distributed by Ambrosia Software. They're among my favorite games of all time. I first played Endless Sky on steam a few years ago. Its gameplay is very close to Escape Velocity. Its plot isn't bad either.

I’ve been playing Endless Sky for a few years now. It’s not quite as polished in UI and ship balance as EV but it’s really good and quite close. And yeah, the plot is fun. I would love a multiplayer version.

Should I just make one? My game server is tailor made for top-down asteroids style mechanics. When I last benchmarked, it could handle 73 player melees, but it should be capable of something like twice that now.

https://www.emergencevector.com

Please do, I would enjoy the heck out of it.

It was because of Escape Velocity that I discovered web forums and IRC; it was because I wanted to make mods for EV that I learned to use POV-Ray and ResEdit; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that I eventually became a professional programmer because of EV's plugin system.

And I'd be right there with you. The plugin system allowed me to dream of making interactive the stories, ships and characters I was reading in 2001, Rama, and all the rest. And the reasonable technical knowledge required to interface with the plugins made getting there a fun, and attainable goal.

Rendezvous with rama is an amazing book.

The EV: Nova forums were the first online community I got into as a teenager. Good memories

Readers of this post may also enjoy Oolite, a GPL-licensed space exploration game heavily inspired by the original Elite. But this one is in 3D.

http://www.oolite.org/

Man, I've always dreamed of a spiritual successor of Elite fit for the 21st century, I can't believe my prayers have finally been answered! I can't wait to fly around in my Cobra III and blast some Thargorns!

If you really want a spiritual successor to Elite fit for the 21st century you should buy Elite: Dangerous, created by the original creator of Elite, David Braben. I don’t want to knock Oolite which is a great free software project.

But Elite: Dangerous is astoundingly good. You can, in theory, visit every star in our Milky Way galaxy (in addition to the old Elite star systems, tucked away in a corner). All in incredible 3D graphics, and even VR if you have a headset. Worth every penny.

(It’s got everything, too: the letterbox space station docking (except now you get to see the inside), Thargoids, refueling from stars, playing the Blue Danube waltz when you use the docking computer...)

Nice to see. EV plug-ins — and a plug-in editor — were my first attempt to make shareware. Totally failed to sell a single copy, but my plugin got onto MacFormat magazine that month.

I’m glad this game also has plug-ins and a map editor.

Plug-ins where a pretty great config format, in retrospect.

I absolutely cannot let https://transcendence.kronosaur.com/ go unmentioned in this thread.

Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/kronosaur/TranscendenceDev

Also, George Moromisato is an awesome person.

The problem I had with Endless Sky was that it didn't have the kind of stories that really drove Escape Velocity. EV (especially Nova) was fantastic, had multiple storylines, etc. The writing seemed genuinely good to me; Endless Sky was nowhere near as enthralling (and the technical glitches made me give up).

It's got "good bones" but lacks content; it really made me realize the value of writers and those who can hammer out storylines.

I remember getting Basilisk II working so I could play the original Escape Velocity without a Mac.

Later I remember playing EV:Nova and trying out a really excellent fan created scenario, but looking now I can't figure out which one it was.

Perhaps Polycon?

http://download.escape-velocity.games/EV%20Polycon%20%28stan...

I assume this just got posted because the latest MacOS update cut support for 32 bit apps and thus EV Nova. I would say: don't give up. Emulation is a viable option. It runs in WINE and there's always virtual box. EV is probably my favorite series and while I will play the heck out of any clones (including my own) the original games still have value.

Used to play the EV series an awful lot. Right now my jam is "StarSector" http://fractalsoftworks.com/ which is an amazing game and obvious labour of love by the dev who also keeps intresting blog posts going.

Timely, the first new beta in years just came out. There's a lot more content to go before it's a complete game, but there's lot of fun to be had. Contributions welcome!

I wonder what could be done in a game style with this, but with the graphics and solar system "engine" of Kerbal Space Program.

It would be a completely different game, something more like elite and other flight simulators in space.

Is there any hope of EV: Nova or EV classic being open sourced?

This reminds me of Space Rangers.

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