Endless Sky: Open-Source Escape Velocity Successor

Endless Sky: Open-Source Escape Velocity Successor(endless-sky.github.io)

94 points by paultyng 10 years ago | 21 comments

flashman 10 years ago |

I have played several hours of this game, and I don't know whether it's just that I'm older now, but the gameplay only kept me interested for about five hours. (As a child I played all the Escape Velocity games for months on end.)

Everything dies far too fast for combat to have any strategic element. And (in the build I last played, anyway) trade prices are static, so you just need to find that one good trade route and run it until you're insanely wealthy.

But I am excited to see how it develops further. The potential for the main game is big enough, let alone mods and total conversions.

resist_futility 10 years ago | |

Had the same issues. Once you have enough ships you end up being able to buy another one each round trip of trading. There is no reason to even have weapons since the ships jump to the next system so fast. Even then if all the pirate ships decide to target your ship you can die extremely fast with the best shields available. So I end up removing all the weapons from the new ship and just adding more cargo space. Then reloading when I am basically instant killed.

FlailFast 10 years ago |

Anyone else remember using ResEdit on original Escape Velocity plugins? Probably my first introduction to hexadecimal as a kid, heh. Loved the game (and meta game of discovering how to tweak things myself) and excited to try this out.

JeremyHerrman 10 years ago | |

Yes! Using ResEdit to upgrade my ship and change game dialog was my intro to hex & tweaking programs. It was thrilling to find snippets of storylines I hadn't played yet and adding weapons like the forklift that I had never seen during real gameplay.

oceanofsolaris 10 years ago | |

Speaking of ResEdit, does the resource fork still exist in modern MacOS incarnations?

I still remember that I used to rip the graphics of Escape Velocity (Nova) by simply copying them out of the resource fork of some file (was it the executable itself?).

I also remember that my teenage self had a hard time writing a utility that copied files over a network, since I had trouble serializing the resource fork (or coming up with the idea of serialization).

Hemospectrum 10 years ago | | |

Last time I checked, the filesystem (HFS+) still supported resource forks, but in OS X they're neither necessary nor sufficient for their intended purpose. In classic Mac OS this was the only way to bundle parts of an application together and present them to the user as a single file. In OS X, that's done with plain old directories.

TeMPOraL 10 years ago | |

Discovered EV only recently, but the modding tools reminded me of my experiences with StarCraft back in the old days - also my first serious introduction to a lot of stuff, including string tables, "virtual file systems" and hex-editing properties.

statico 10 years ago | |

If you want more flashbacks, I made an album of some recent attempts at classic Mac development: http://imgur.com/a/scNE2

Included are screenshots of ResEdit, Resourcerer, CodeWarrior, and more.

FlailFast 10 years ago | | |

Oh man, love it! Thanks for sharing...that Copeland theme though. :)

Zarkonnen 10 years ago | |

Yep! That's pretty much how I got my start in programming. :)

0x07c0 10 years ago | |

Used it the remove the shareware block (Capitan something )..

jordanlev 10 years ago | | |

Hector! (named after the office parrot of Ambrosia Software).

mitchtbaum 10 years ago |

This reminds me of [Silent Death Online](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BvgxDCbZxE). I went looking for it again about a year and a half ago, and I ended up looking into how it might get recreated, with a modern free software twist. Perhaps, something like: [ShootR]( https://github.com/ntaylormullen/shootr), [purescript-asteroids](https://github.com/waterson/purescript-asteroids), and [multiplayer pacman](https://github.com/hdgarrood/multipac/).

basseq 10 years ago |

Nova was spectacular. I played through every storyline, hacked with ResEdit, and generally had a blast. Years later, I'd still start a new game and build up my favorite ship (a speed-focused Pirate Starbridge armed to the teeth with fusion pulse cannons).

I wonder if the real successor to EV is EVE.

bespoke_engnr 10 years ago |

This sounds really exciting; I'll definitely try it. I loved (and bought) EV: Nova, and have been pining for something similar (an open-world, multiple-storyline, space opera/trading/2D-adventure game).

I tried playing X2 and X3 for a while, and they gave me some of that open-world space trading experience I was looking for, but I never got into them as intensely as I did with Nova. Maybe they were a bit too serious?

Anyway, thanks!

TeMPOraL 10 years ago |

There's also Naev; seems to be in active development given that I keep getting e-mails from their Github repo pretty much daily (I subscribed some time ago hoping to contribute, but then got sucked into less useful stuff like $dayjobs).

http://blog.naev.org/about/

zyxley 10 years ago |

Another (free, but not open source) game like this that's been under very slow development for a long time is Transcendence:

http://transcendence.kronosaur.com/index.hexm

ComodoHacker 10 years ago |

Yet another similar game I can recommend is Stasrsector[0]. It's still in alpha, but is playable, enjoyable and moddable.

[0]. http://fractalsoftworks.com/

Aeolun 10 years ago | |

I can very much recommend this. Keep starting it up every few months and having days of fun with it again. Combat is really polished! Actually, the entire game is.

rythmshifter 10 years ago |

this is so awesome.

Loved the EV series and recently bought Nova again just for nostalgia sake. wish I had known about this project first! Quite happy with it.

rajacombinator 10 years ago |

EV, one of my favorite games of all time! Will try to check this out if I ever get time. :)