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Comment by TomAnthony | Hacker News Reader

Former Ambrosia employee checking in! TomWoozle was my handle back then.

I worked at the company from 2003-2005, having (like many here) grown up on their games and spent hours modding Escape Velocity.

I mainly worked on the website (I wrote a version of the online store ground up in PHP), but also ran testing for a while and worked managing the later Windows conversion of EV Nova.

It was an incredible place to work and I learnt so so much. Andrew was an amazing mentor and an extremely generous guy. My time there absolutely changed my life.

One thing that stands out, and it feels like something that won’t be regained from that era, is that everyone there was just having great great fun. I loved going to work. We were a business, but I never remember money being the deciding factor in any decision. It was all passion.

I miss those times!

If people are interested AMA (though late here so may be tomorrow when I answer).

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Thanks Tom. Always loved having you work there, definitely tried to work to live rather than live to work! /andrew

Omg you're on here too! Please Andrew let me take this moment to tell you that there is a huge market of people who will absolutely throw money at you if you make a new game. look at the success of the kickstarter for cosmic frontier and that's a relatively small endeavor. If you try to make something new people will freak out.

I know it's been a long time but I hope that spark is still there. I and many others grew up playing your games and we are hungry for more.

Indeed. Chiral refresh that works on Windows and/or Linux x86? Shut up and take my money! :)

Oh wow. I just wanted to say thanks to you and any other people here from Ambrosia, EV was easily the best game of my childhood. Saving up for a Kestrel took me... a lot of cargo runs. But I loved every minute.

It's telling that of all the objectively better, more expensive, more complex space games I've played since my middle school years... Escape Velocity still ranks #1 in terms of sheer joy.

It feels a lot like Populous: more fun than the sum of its parts, and only explicable as tapping some Miyamotoesque yearning in the zeitgeist.

Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of that for me was that the universe felt very alive - ships coming and going from planets, comms, recurring characters. I haven't found anything quite like it since, though Starsector comes close in some ways (and is extremely good in its own way, you should check it out if you haven't).

To this day Basilisk mac emulator is one of the first things I install on a new PC build just so I can play EV! 26 years or so and I still love that series Thanks so much!

I know these things can be legal quagmires, but it would be great if you and your former colleagues could release activated copies of your software, somewhere. I was able to track down Soundboard after a lot of digging, but EasyEnvelopes seems to have disappeared from the internet. It would be a shame if it was just lost to history.

Yes, I agree it would be a shame if these were lost. I do have some (unopened!) Ambrosia CDs with copies of the software.

The activation stuff is beyond what I can offer, but I do speak to Andrew sometimes and will raise it with him. :)

Please do if possible! It's slightly irritating needing to do the hacky workaround to get my expired license code to work when I want to re-play EV Nova and fart around as an OP Vellos or Polaris haha.

That's such a happy, beautiful story. EV and EV Nova are still some of my all time favorite games. I used to have to play it at a friends house because he had a Power Mac so when it came to Windows I was beyond excited.

Thanks for being part of all of that!

Yeah, EV is still top 3 for me!

As for the Windows release of Nova, I had the honour of packaging that up and releasing it. I still remember exactly where I was when I pressed the button!

People on IRC were going wild! I was so fortunate to be part of it.

What I wouldn't give for an updated version of Barrack that runs on modern machines. I've been tempted in the past to attempt a 1:1 clone of it, but I just don't have the time to get into gamedev.

Ah I remember TomWoozle as one of the super advanced ships in EV:N. I'm guessing a few staff members had them? They were always intimidating and very powerful, was a treat to see them as a kid.

Yes, I had a character in the game. I had an extremely over powered ship, and then if you managed to defeat me and board the ship you would find I only had a single credit.

I was a beta tester for EV Nova before I joined as a staff member. I got the character for winning a bet against Andrew Welch that I could hack the shareware mechanism of Snapz Pro (the screen capture tool). I did it by ignoring the shareware code itself, and instead patching the watermark code so the rectangle was 0x0. So you got nagged but the tool worked.

I spent hours as a kid trying to figure out the serial number scheme for Ambrosia games. (Sorry.) I had learned how to read PowerPC assembly but the Ambrosia registration application was obfuscated and had very long functions I couldn't follow, I suspect compiled from machine-generated C.

Andrew dropped an enigmatic hint once that it involved "polynomials" and when I eventually learned about these in school I spent a lot of time wondering how you could turn one into a serial number.

Maybe @khalwat can finally reveal the answer to a question I've had for at least 20 years?

I remember them changing the licensing system, it was shortly before I started at the company. Matt Slot, who was the lead coder alongside Andrew, wrote an article about it which I've managed to find archived [1].

The article doesn't shed a lot more light on it, but the rough understanding (between my understanding at the time and what I've lost to memory!) was that it was similar to public key cryptography, with a public key in the app that could be used to verify license codes signed with the private key.

[1] http://www.windowsusers.org/piracy.html

That's probably the exact article where I first heard about it using polynomials. Perhaps it uses something like Shamir's secret sharing.

I found a Reddit post that explains most of the algorithm, but not much to do with polynomials. https://www.reddit.com/r/evnova/comments/g3ie3x/ambrosia_and...

(P.S., I did pay my registration fee for Uplink. Thanks for porting it!)

Thanks for sharing, Tom. I grew up playing Ambrosia games. I spent countless hours on all the Escape Velocity games. Loved every minute!

it feels like something that won’t be regained from that era

How might you attribute these feelings? Is it the vastly increased competition in games and the race to the bottom in mobile app stores? Microtransactions and monetization strategies?

I still try to support a lot of my favourite indie developers. I buy Spiderweb software games because I played them so much as a kid. I think it’s awesome that Jeff can still keep doing what he loves.

I think it was a product of the era, because nowadays games are either big budget with huge teams, or they are indie games which will struggle to differentiate themselves from the crowd.

Back then, there weren't the tools available for most single devs to launch a full game (which is where Ambrosia came in with a suite of libraries, artists, and knowledge) as they can do nowadays. So there wasn't a huge mass of games, and also there was an overhead to releasing something- nowadays you can throw things up on the App Store and see if it sticks (not diminishing anything from the amazing people working on things nowadays). Ambrosia had a phone line you could phone for free at any time to get tech support!

So Ambrosia games were not big budget but they were created by people who loved what they were doing and who had the expertise to make games with great playability. Nowadays that is possible, but it strikes me as harder to differentiate yourself.

Once something is big budget and with a big team, I think the dynamics change a lot. On a small team every voice could be heard, everyone could have an impact on the direction of the game.

I was a huge Ambrosia fan back in the day, so thank you for stopping by!

One thing I don't understand is why Ambrosia never put their back catalogue on Steam. At least with EV Nova's Windows version, it seems to me that if you stripped out the licencing system and tossed it up on Steam, you could have had a nice income stream from there. I'd have bought it.

Most of the other games you might have been able to package into an emulator, like GOG games running in DOSbox.

But that's my outside perspective, so maybe there were bigger legal or technical hurdles?

I was also a fan before I was an employee. I know the love they inspired!

I had moved on from Ambrosia before Steam became a thing, but have also wondered the same. I did point this thread out to Andrew, and he has dropped in some replies, so maybe he can shed some light. I would guess it is a case of all the legal shenanigans needed to make it happen cleanly. Various people external to Ambrosia own various parts of the rights, so you would need to get a bunch of people on board and spend money on lawyers.

I also thought some games could be suited to something like the Nintendo Switch. However, that would obviously need a bunch of technical work to convert it (something I admit to having looked into late last year!).

I played hours and hours of Maelstrom back in the day. The game ran so smoothly. It just a beautiful, seamless play experience.

Any details on what the code was like for these games? I'd love a peek behind the curtain. At the time, it felt incredibly well-polished.

Funny you should ask, someone else linked the github repo of Maelstrom 3.0 SDL port! https://github.com/richardjs/maelstrom

So, I'm not sure how much of the code is near-original Macintosh version code, and how much was revised/replaced to support SDL. Probably lots of original stuff though, surely.

I also played many many hours of Maelstrom! That particular game is now open source [1].

On the whole, the main code of most games was not written by Ambrosia. There was a form on the website where you could submit a simple demo of a game idea you had. If Ambrosia thought it had potential then we would sign you up, to support the development, publishing and distribution.

Ambrosia had a series of libraries, which were a mixture of C and Assembler, for graphics and sound etc. We had an in house graphic artist. And, of course, the shareware licensing code and mechanism.

It was a great model. Coders with an idea could get support to take their game to the next level, and sell it etc. It all seems so easy now but the net was in its infancy then. We were mailing out CDs filled with the games.

I never got my hands dirty of the game code, but I know the libraries we had were well polished and optimised, and so were very valuable to coders (no stack overflow back then!).

[1] https://github.com/richardjs/Maelstrom

I played EV nova on a friends mac till I could get it years later on PC.

There are so many nova like games out there, but none have the depth of story line that Ambrosia crammed into their world.

I'm happy to have lost so much time in it.

Yeah, EV Nova was HUGE. The content was primarily the product of ATMOS studios in Australia. It started out as a plugin for EV Override, but Ambrosia bought the rights and helped turn it into the 3rd iteration of the game.

The original EV was great to explore in, but fairly linear (two main threads to the storyline, I believe), but Nova was massive with so many routes through, I doubt anyone ever saw it all!

That's great to hear. He's still generous and giving to developer communities in what he's doing now. Learned a ton from him and his tools make our work better.

I'm very curious about the development of WinNova and it's unique windows resource format, Rez. My understanding is that it went through two porting companies is that true? And any idea which one developed Rez? Was it a standard tool for porting mac games, or something that was developed just for Nova?

Hey!

My memory of this is imperfect and I joined as the project was already underway, but I believe there were two companies, yes.

The main POC at the second company that got the project completed was Rebecca Heineman [1] from Contraband Entertainment; my job was facilitating comms and help manage and organise the beta testing. I also built the installer.

I _believe_ that yes, Rez was created specifically for this. All EV modders know that the resource fork part of files was a critical part of how EV data files, and all mods, worked. There was a huge dependency there, and so I think the decision was made to create Rez to fill that gap. However, that is the extent of my knowledge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman

Thanks for the reply! Cool to know for sure that someone so illustrious worked on Nova!

Interested to hear what you are doing now and any journey's along the way.

Hey! That is kind of you to ask.

I joined Ambrosia in late 2002 as part of a 'sandwich degree' as we call it in the UK. I was doing a 4 year BSc in Computer Science, where the 3rd year was spent as a year in industry. For that I moved to upstate NY to work for Ambrosia. It was a dream for someone who had grown up modding EV (like so many here apparently!).

I returned to the UK and kept working for Ambrosia from the UK whilst finishing my studies and for a while after. Andrew offered me a role at Ambrosia and I _agonised_ about the decision as I loved the company but ultimately I was too afraid of moving to the US without an end date there. I often wonder if that was a mistake.

I then did freelance web dev for a couple of years, before going back to Uni to do a PhD in AI. I found out I was going to be a father, and freelance web dev wouldn't cut it any more so I joined an SEO consultancy (Distilled), having taught myself a lot of that building small company websites.

In February of this year, the SaaS project I led at Distilled spun out as its own company SearchPilot (https://www.searchpilot.com/). I know SEO doesn't have a great reputation on HN, but what I love about SearchPilot is it applies A/B testing to SEO to remove the mystery, hand waving, and everything else. My focus is on the product and the network infrastructure side of things, but we are a small team so I get to do all sorts.

I do miss both the fun of working on games, and being part of the joy people would experience (as this thread shows). I also miss the AI research, as it was an interesting set of intellectual challenges.

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