5 ms·

Just reading the discription of this game and it reminds me of Escape Velocity Nova[1]. I spent a long time playing this game in high school. It felt so epic in

Just reading the discription of this game and it reminds me of Escape Velocity Nova[1]. I spent a long time playing this game in high school. It felt so epic in its scope at the time. I have no idea how popular it was. Did anyone else play this? [1] https://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ https://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/

freeqaz 9y ago
Dude... I played every story line and eventually wrote some mods. This game is likely the reason I'm a dev today! Definitely check out Endless Sky for a modern engine! https://endless-sky.github.io https://endless-sky.github.io
- montecarl 9y ago
  What! There is a modern engine!? This is news to me. I think I know what I am doing this weekend. P.S. Stuff like this is why I really enjoy HN. I feel like it is full of people who have had similar life experiences as mine. Almost none of my current friends are real computer nerds, which I don't mind at all, but it is nice to have a community of like minded people.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Ambrosia's Escape Velocity (pre-Nova, pre-Override), coupled with Bungie's then Mac-only Pathways into Darkness & Marathon, fell into the category of "games I could play in the school's Mac-only computer lab." Pathways into Darkness is particularly cool. From memory, it actually used the filesystem as an inventory manager.
- kosinus 9y ago
  Oooh, I didn't know about this. There's also Naev: http://blog.naev.org/ http://blog.naev.org/
- flashman 9y ago
  Currently trying to capture robot-controlled ships to replace my human-crewed ships, to bring down my expenditure on crew salaries. If I might digress for a minute, Endless Sky inherits Escape Velocity's very 20th-century American approach to economics and labour. The primary money-making activities are commodities arbitrage and freelance gigs (cargo and passenger transport). Crews are paid a fixed rate and can be sent to their deaths in a boarding party without mutinous consequences. There is no concept of anyone's welfare besides the player-captain. Where's the fully automated luxury gay space communism? It suffers from a slight lack of imagination.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    I've toyed with a sci-fi novel, and while "worldbuilding" what quickly becomes clear if you're going to do "space opera" type environments that are even somewhat realistic is that you have relatively few sets of choices that drastically constrain your setting. You're right there's a lack of imagination there, but it's also limited by the setting. E.g. you have to choose FTL or no-FTL. If you choose no-FTL you're basically limited to a single solar system at most, so whether or not you believe FTL may become possible, for a space sim it's pretty much a requirement. You need to rule out the singularity or people opting to "upload" to a computer in any significant proportion of the population. You also have to decide if you believe scarcity will still exist. If you decide we'll all automate everything, then the only route to scarcity is that someone is hoarding everything or is running out of raw materials. That's a potentially interesting setting, but has significant impacts on space sim type trade: Nobody would be hauling [insert whatever] manufactured goods from Earth to Mars if it can be manufactured by robots right there. Refined materials, maybe, or people. Mining asteroids, certainly. But not shipping foods of all things, for example. But such a setting would also need e.g. significant costs of raw materials and difficulty obtaining tech to automate manufacturing, or the chokehold would slip fairly quickly. If you rule out automation you've made a choice that's decidedly anti-tech: it presupposes technological stagnation at some point, or that it is slow enough that scarcity is still there at whatever point in time you've chosen, in which case you accordingly need to reflect that in an environment that does not have all kinds of super-fancy technology. Most space sims end up in that last category: Automation, if it exists, is limited and doesn't affect manufacture and trade enough to be worth mentioning to the point where there are still arbitrage opportunities for small ships; FTL exists, but most other tech seems to have largely stagnated. Part of the problem, I think, is that these choices makes it easiest to create a frontier feel, and space sims tends to very much be westerns in space (incidentally, "space opera" is derived from "horse opera": a term for a very cliched western). Exceptions mostly come when you add story elements that let you add e.g. large capital ships and the like and armed forces, such as games like Terminus, that lets you join military units or be a rebel etc. Thinking outside that box and still have a compelling story is difficult, because it means overcoming a lot of barriers. E.g. let's say you drop FTL. Now we're stuck, unless you find some way of setting your game in the kind of accelerated timeframe that it would take for non-FTL travel to be viable, but hen you also need a setting where that "works" which would be decidedly non-human. Let's say you admit to people "uploading". Now you need a compelling reason why people stay human, or you'll have a Clifford D. Simak "City" situation on your hands (a bunch of dogs tell each other stories about humans, who have long since left Earth behind, not to "upload", but the effect being the same). No scarcity? Now you need another mechanism than basic commodities trade. But the "trade plus occasional piracy" model is very simple. Thinking up variations that doesn't immediately seem flawed and idiotic that solves the above issues is a lot harder. Don't blame these games for it; blame sci-fi authors who also have not explored this very well, with a few exceptions. E.g. Iain M. Banks is one of the few authors of what you describe with the "fully automated luxury gay space communism" meme. I'd love to see someone adapt ideas from that into a game. But it also presents a lot of difficulties because his solution to make it interesting is alternatively go up in scale (e.g. the Idiran war, described with destruction of entire habitats housing billions) and down in scale, focusing on specific conflicts involving specific people that might suit e.g. a more complex graphical adventure type game, but that'd be hard to adapt to a space sim. Notably his books have a lot more scenes of people conspiring or doing stuff on the surface than they have of people flying space ships. Because why would you fly a space ship when you can hitch a ride on a Mind controlled ship the size of a city in according comfort? There are reasons, but again they require a lot more thinking and making that work in an open world game as opposed to a story led one would probably be tricky. One interesting other approach is Frederik Pohl's Gateway. It's set on an alien space station far from earth in a future where humanity does not have FTL, but this alien race that mysteriously left thousands of years ago did have FTL. The lack of FTL + Gateway's distance means there's a lot of scarcity on Gateway irrespective of conditions on Earth. At the same time, Gateway is the literal gateway to a massive number of alien locations via FTL ships that humans haven't figured out to control other than to start them, wait for them to reach their destination, and trigger a return trip. Which means it's basically prospecting where the lucky ones bring back untold fortunes in alien artifacts. Creative thinking on introducing constraints the way Gateway did is, I think, something that has great potential for more interesting variety in space sims (since I mentioned Banks above, two of his other novels demonstrates this: In "the Algebraist" the setting is a solar system that has been cut off from its surroundings from a century after their local jump gate was destroyed; they're waiting for a replacement sent from the nearest system at sublight speeds - the tech is implied to use entanglement, so they can't just build a new local gate; in "Against a Dark Background" the system is isolated far away from any nearby galaxies, basically crushing any fantasy of interstellar travel)
- danaris 9y ago
  I tried out Endless Sky a while back, but was frustrated by the seeming uselessness of most of the engine upgrades—most ships seem to be designed specifically for the engine they've got, and any upgrade that's worth bothering with won't actually fit in it. This seemed to be the case with a bunch of the potential upgrade types, as I recall... I'll probably still pick it up and play it again in a while, 'cause I loved EV, but it is frustrating when trying to incrementally work your way up from your starting ship to something with real oomph.
namdnay 9y ago
Elite (on the school BBC Micros, we'd start the cassette load before going to lunch and play 30mn before afternoon classes), Frontier, EV (I was lucky enough to have a friend whose dad had Macs), EV Nova (ported to windows)... There's a long line of these awesome games. I tried Endless-Skies, not bad but maybe a bit too sandboxy for me, if that makes sense? I thought Nova hit the right balance (except for the alien faction being completely overpowered, both for cargo and combat)
- baldfat 9y ago
  I played Elite for months as a kid. I also had that horrible COPY RIGHT DEVICE!!!! It was a prism that you had to hold over the manual page and read the decoded code. I ended up writing the decoded request and I shared it with my local Computer and well that document ended up "Getting around." I think I saw it on every BBS within 24 hours and I think it made it over the globe within a week. I am sorry to the creators of Elite but that was the worst Copyright Device known to mankind!https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/thumb/a/aa/Lenslok.jpg/400px-Lenslok.jpg https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/thumb/a/aa/Lenslok.jpg/400px... I came down with pneumonia and it lasted for MONTHS. I actually ended up just going to 80 days of school, but I really got good at the game till I would get ambushed by pirates while warping and had zero fuel :( It was Rougelike before Rouge.
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    I actually think that's a pretty clever device. People will figure out a way to pirate -- if it hadn't been you, it would be someone else -- but it's a memorable little trick and fun, unlike some DRM.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      Till the device is lost or in the case for me breaks. Back in the day they would as for the 6th word on page 34. So people copied manuals.
mratzloff 9y ago
Thanks for the pointer. Star Control II is one of my favorite games ever; how have I not heard of this game?
zardo 9y ago
I got Escape Velocity on a shareware disk, played until Capt Hector convinced me to convince my Mom to buy a license. (During the trial, a Capt Hector would occasionally ask you to buy a license, when the trial is over Hector goes hostile)

freeqaz 9y ago

Dude... I played every story line and eventually wrote some mods. This game is likely the reason I'm a dev today! Definitely check out Endless Sky for a modern engine! https://endless-sky.github.io https://endless-sky.github.io

montecarl 9y ago
What! There is a modern engine!? This is news to me. I think I know what I am doing this weekend. P.S. Stuff like this is why I really enjoy HN. I feel like it is full of people who have had similar life experiences as mine. Almost none of my current friends are real computer nerds, which I don't mind at all, but it is nice to have a community of like minded people.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Ambrosia's Escape Velocity (pre-Nova, pre-Override), coupled with Bungie's then Mac-only Pathways into Darkness & Marathon, fell into the category of "games I could play in the school's Mac-only computer lab." Pathways into Darkness is particularly cool. From memory, it actually used the filesystem as an inventory manager.
kosinus 9y ago
Oooh, I didn't know about this. There's also Naev: http://blog.naev.org/ http://blog.naev.org/
flashman 9y ago
Currently trying to capture robot-controlled ships to replace my human-crewed ships, to bring down my expenditure on crew salaries. If I might digress for a minute, Endless Sky inherits Escape Velocity's very 20th-century American approach to economics and labour. The primary money-making activities are commodities arbitrage and freelance gigs (cargo and passenger transport). Crews are paid a fixed rate and can be sent to their deaths in a boarding party without mutinous consequences. There is no concept of anyone's welfare besides the player-captain. Where's the fully automated luxury gay space communism? It suffers from a slight lack of imagination.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I've toyed with a sci-fi novel, and while "worldbuilding" what quickly becomes clear if you're going to do "space opera" type environments that are even somewhat realistic is that you have relatively few sets of choices that drastically constrain your setting. You're right there's a lack of imagination there, but it's also limited by the setting. E.g. you have to choose FTL or no-FTL. If you choose no-FTL you're basically limited to a single solar system at most, so whether or not you believe FTL may become possible, for a space sim it's pretty much a requirement. You need to rule out the singularity or people opting to "upload" to a computer in any significant proportion of the population. You also have to decide if you believe scarcity will still exist. If you decide we'll all automate everything, then the only route to scarcity is that someone is hoarding everything or is running out of raw materials. That's a potentially interesting setting, but has significant impacts on space sim type trade: Nobody would be hauling [insert whatever] manufactured goods from Earth to Mars if it can be manufactured by robots right there. Refined materials, maybe, or people. Mining asteroids, certainly. But not shipping foods of all things, for example. But such a setting would also need e.g. significant costs of raw materials and difficulty obtaining tech to automate manufacturing, or the chokehold would slip fairly quickly. If you rule out automation you've made a choice that's decidedly anti-tech: it presupposes technological stagnation at some point, or that it is slow enough that scarcity is still there at whatever point in time you've chosen, in which case you accordingly need to reflect that in an environment that does not have all kinds of super-fancy technology. Most space sims end up in that last category: Automation, if it exists, is limited and doesn't affect manufacture and trade enough to be worth mentioning to the point where there are still arbitrage opportunities for small ships; FTL exists, but most other tech seems to have largely stagnated. Part of the problem, I think, is that these choices makes it easiest to create a frontier feel, and space sims tends to very much be westerns in space (incidentally, "space opera" is derived from "horse opera": a term for a very cliched western). Exceptions mostly come when you add story elements that let you add e.g. large capital ships and the like and armed forces, such as games like Terminus, that lets you join military units or be a rebel etc. Thinking outside that box and still have a compelling story is difficult, because it means overcoming a lot of barriers. E.g. let's say you drop FTL. Now we're stuck, unless you find some way of setting your game in the kind of accelerated timeframe that it would take for non-FTL travel to be viable, but hen you also need a setting where that "works" which would be decidedly non-human. Let's say you admit to people "uploading". Now you need a compelling reason why people stay human, or you'll have a Clifford D. Simak "City" situation on your hands (a bunch of dogs tell each other stories about humans, who have long since left Earth behind, not to "upload", but the effect being the same). No scarcity? Now you need another mechanism than basic commodities trade. But the "trade plus occasional piracy" model is very simple. Thinking up variations that doesn't immediately seem flawed and idiotic that solves the above issues is a lot harder. Don't blame these games for it; blame sci-fi authors who also have not explored this very well, with a few exceptions. E.g. Iain M. Banks is one of the few authors of what you describe with the "fully automated luxury gay space communism" meme. I'd love to see someone adapt ideas from that into a game. But it also presents a lot of difficulties because his solution to make it interesting is alternatively go up in scale (e.g. the Idiran war, described with destruction of entire habitats housing billions) and down in scale, focusing on specific conflicts involving specific people that might suit e.g. a more complex graphical adventure type game, but that'd be hard to adapt to a space sim. Notably his books have a lot more scenes of people conspiring or doing stuff on the surface than they have of people flying space ships. Because why would you fly a space ship when you can hitch a ride on a Mind controlled ship the size of a city in according comfort? There are reasons, but again they require a lot more thinking and making that work in an open world game as opposed to a story led one would probably be tricky. One interesting other approach is Frederik Pohl's Gateway. It's set on an alien space station far from earth in a future where humanity does not have FTL, but this alien race that mysteriously left thousands of years ago did have FTL. The lack of FTL + Gateway's distance means there's a lot of scarcity on Gateway irrespective of conditions on Earth. At the same time, Gateway is the literal gateway to a massive number of alien locations via FTL ships that humans haven't figured out to control other than to start them, wait for them to reach their destination, and trigger a return trip. Which means it's basically prospecting where the lucky ones bring back untold fortunes in alien artifacts. Creative thinking on introducing constraints the way Gateway did is, I think, something that has great potential for more interesting variety in space sims (since I mentioned Banks above, two of his other novels demonstrates this: In "the Algebraist" the setting is a solar system that has been cut off from its surroundings from a century after their local jump gate was destroyed; they're waiting for a replacement sent from the nearest system at sublight speeds - the tech is implied to use entanglement, so they can't just build a new local gate; in "Against a Dark Background" the system is isolated far away from any nearby galaxies, basically crushing any fantasy of interstellar travel)
danaris 9y ago
I tried out Endless Sky a while back, but was frustrated by the seeming uselessness of most of the engine upgrades—most ships seem to be designed specifically for the engine they've got, and any upgrade that's worth bothering with won't actually fit in it. This seemed to be the case with a bunch of the potential upgrade types, as I recall... I'll probably still pick it up and play it again in a while, 'cause I loved EV, but it is frustrating when trying to incrementally work your way up from your starting ship to something with real oomph.

namdnay 9y ago

Elite (on the school BBC Micros, we'd start the cassette load before going to lunch and play 30mn before afternoon classes), Frontier, EV (I was lucky enough to have a friend whose dad had Macs), EV Nova (ported to windows)... There's a long line of these awesome games. I tried Endless-Skies, not bad but maybe a bit too sandboxy for me, if that makes sense? I thought Nova hit the right balance (except for the alien faction being completely overpowered, both for cargo and combat)

baldfat 9y ago
I played Elite for months as a kid. I also had that horrible COPY RIGHT DEVICE!!!! It was a prism that you had to hold over the manual page and read the decoded code. I ended up writing the decoded request and I shared it with my local Computer and well that document ended up "Getting around." I think I saw it on every BBS within 24 hours and I think it made it over the globe within a week. I am sorry to the creators of Elite but that was the worst Copyright Device known to mankind!https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/thumb/a/aa/Lenslok.jpg/400px-Lenslok.jpg https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/thumb/a/aa/Lenslok.jpg/400px... I came down with pneumonia and it lasted for MONTHS. I actually ended up just going to 80 days of school, but I really got good at the game till I would get ambushed by pirates while warping and had zero fuel :( It was Rougelike before Rouge.
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  I actually think that's a pretty clever device. People will figure out a way to pirate -- if it hadn't been you, it would be someone else -- but it's a memorable little trick and fun, unlike some DRM.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Till the device is lost or in the case for me breaks. Back in the day they would as for the 6th word on page 34. So people copied manuals.

mratzloff 9y ago

Thanks for the pointer. Star Control II is one of my favorite games ever; how have I not heard of this game?

zardo 9y ago

I got Escape Velocity on a shareware disk, played until Capt Hector convinced me to convince my Mom to buy a license. (During the trial, a Capt Hector would occasionally ask you to buy a license, when the trial is over Hector goes hostile)