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Endless Sky: an open source space trading and combat game
- rdtwo 5y agoI love this game I played it a bunch a couple years ago. Gameplay is great and story is excellent. Would have paid at least 20$ for it. It’s like 2d space sim. If you have ever played escape velocity on the Mac it’s the same formula.
- eightysixfour 5y agoI've always wondered why no one has taken this formula and developed an MMO.
- reidjs 5y agoEve Online is the MMO/spiritual successor to Escape Velocity in my mind
- rdtwo 5y agoIn some ways yes but eve slows everything down to a tedium this game is fun because progress is fast and meaningful
- eightysixfour 5y agoYes, I think this is the hard (maybe impossible) balance for an MMO like this. Eve Online is so slow, while EV was extremely fast paced. You'd have to find something in the middle to really make it work.
- rdtwo 5y agoFreelancer was so close… that’s the closest anyone had come by they made it clunky due to no native joystick implementation
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brnt 5y agoFreelancer... if there ever was a game I want more of.
- hashkb 5y agoMOBA-paced would be so fun. Or, a few servers to choose with different pacing.
- rdtwo 5y agoIt’s been tried and it really works better as a 2d story game. Earth above and beyond and jump gate were the attempts
- jimbob45 5y agoEarth and Beyond was really incredible and was the first to implement trading as a profession (e.g. buy tons of an item in one place, sell it at another for profit and xp). EVE took things to a wholly new level with trading though.
- dleslie 5y agoForget MMO; I'd be happy to play a game of Endless Sky with a friend in the same way we play a game of Civ. It seems well-suited to it.
- notjustanymike 5y agoElite Dangerous is multiplayer, bit more of a space sim. X4 is single player and definitely focuses on the empire building. A long time ago there was the Jumpgate MMO, probably the closest to what you want.
- ttymck 5y agoStarport: Galactic Empires[0] is an MMO in which I spent many hours in the early 2010s. If I remember correctly, it exhibits many of the mechanics of EVE, and appears to be very similar to Endless Sky. [0] https://www.starportgame.com/ https://www.starportgame.com/
- behringer 5y agoI played so many hours of this. Thanks for reminding me about it!
- imtringued 5y agoThere are lots of MMOs like that and they are all niche and not very successful.
- b0afc375b5 5y agoI love space genre games (Spore, Starsector, FTL) and I remember getting addicted to Endless Sky. It's difficult to get started but once you do it's pretty fun.
- rdtwo 5y agoI played all those any others you recommend?
- Rebelgecko 5y agoMaybe it's just nostalgia, but I think Escape Velocity: Nova still holds up today. I'm also looking forward to Cosmic Frontier, which is a remake/remaster/new engine for Escape Velocity: Override (which I didn't enjoy as much as EV:N)
- cryptoquick 5y agoCan confirm, played an old Windows copy a year or so ago, it still holds up. Endless Sky doesn't quite have the same magic for me.
- rdtwo 5y agoThe story telling in nova was so fantastic. Endless sky writing is good but nova writing was fantastic
- rdtwo 5y agoDid you figure out how to reinstall it? I think the license server is long gone and it requires an unobtainable version of QuickTime to run
- Rebelgecko 5y agoIf you still have your original license key email, registration works fine if you roll back your computer's clock to the day after you bought your license. Windows: I've never tried the Windows version so I can't vouch for this fix, but if you trust random DLLs from the internet, supposedly placing these files in the Nova folder will let you run it without a full Quicktime installation: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KhvxgI4dEi1CBV8SbLeFQkaaZTpBM_65 https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KhvxgI4dEi1CBV8SbLeFQkaaZT... Newer macOS versions: You'll probably need this patch to make the binary actually work: https://github.com/RyuKojiro/novafix https://github.com/RyuKojiro/novafix From here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Escape_Velocity/comments/9atyzj/ev_nova_download_links_and_more/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Escape_Velocity/comments/9atyzj/ev_...
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoHuh, seems (superficially) somewhat similar to the recently released HighFleet.
- Jarwain 5y agoI love endless sky, so I guess I've gotta check out highfleet next
- thrtythreeforty 5y agoI wasted a significant amount of time playing a similar concept game called Space Trader on PalmOS (and it seems someone has reimplemented it for Android!). This game is much expanded but Space Trader was very, very reminiscent of Drug Wars.
- WaxProlix 5y agoOh my god I had forgotten about that entirely. I had it on a Handspring Visor that I used as an organizer in high school. I must have looked like such a dork, but what a nostalgic vibe. Thanks for the reminder, and I'll definitely check out the parent game with this endorsement :)
- alexjplant 5y agoI bought a Handspring Visor Deluxe when I was 10-11 (when they first came out) and loved it. My favorite game was by far Space Trader. I remember waiting patiently for the vaporware sequel Picoverse but I stopped checking Peter Spronck's site long ago after it seemed basically abandoned. Somebody also re-implemented it in .NET if I recall correctly. I'd love to build a TUI re-implementation but there's other stuff on my plate at the moment that precludes me from doing so. EDIT: From his site, "I I have been working on a sequel to the game, named "Picoverse", since 2003. I still haven't given up on that one, though it probably will not be for the Palm computer, as this brand is rather dead at the moment." There is hope yet!
- themodelplumber 5y agoSpace Trader on FDroid is fun to play, and it seems pretty similar to the PalmOS version. The downside is that there isn't a ton of help for new players, so you do have to do some guesswork, but it's not too bad.
- hakuseki 5y agoI really like the world-building that went into this game but I wish it were more challenging. I think the absence of escape pods is rather telling: they are an unneeded feature, since save-scumming is the default.
- rdtwo 5y agoWorld building is something I’d always wished for in that game
- imtringued 5y agoIn Skyrim the most powerful ability is to go back in time before you died...
- JeremyHerrman 5y agoBack in the 90s I played countless hours of the Escape Velocity series. I still drop into a Mac OS 9 emulator every now and then to get a healthy dose of nostalgia. I'm happy the EV torch is still going in the 2020s with Endless Sky!
- mrzimmerman 5y agoSame. I fire up Endless Sky whenever I need to scratch my Firefly itch for a bit.
- LivelyTortoise 5y agoOh man, your comment is the reason I clicked on this link. EV was amazing. Looking forward to reliving some of it!
- DavidSJ 5y agoIn that case, I’ll shamelessly plug 14 year old me’s Escape Velocity web site, which I still think is pretty good: https://web.archive.org/web/20050924134158/http://davidsj.com/ev/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050924134158/http://davidsj.co...
- JeremyHerrman 5y agoNice - great advice in there. Aside from capturing disabled ships I didn't really use escorts to trade cargo, but your freighter strategy can really rack up the credits!
- virtue3 5y agoaw shit EV is what got me into coding. I loved making stupid mods for it so much.
- btown 5y agoFun fact: For Mac OS systems, Escape Velocity's entire mod and game data system was based on HFS Resource Forks. To mod the game, you'd create massive resource forks with ResEdit and other specialized editors, placing ship graphics in resources named to avoid collisions like shŠn and d‘sc. Such a unique and absurd system. http://escape-velocity.games/docs http://escape-velocity.games/docs
- s09dfhks 5y agoi recall playing some portable space shooter game on the library computers after school with my classmates (this would have been around 2002?). Can anyone think of what it was called? All I remember is it was top down and everyone had their own ship
- koverda 5y agoSubspace?
- ericbarrett 5y agoIt’s still around! https://subspace-continuum.com/ https://subspace-continuum.com/
- throw0101a 5y agoIs this anything like the BBS game TradeWars 2002? * https://if50.substack.com/p/1991-trade-wars-2002 https://if50.substack.com/p/1991-trade-wars-2002 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27301478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27301478
- cyanydeez 5y agoyes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CapriciousCptl 5y agoSweet! An MMORPG element would be the bees knees here. Years ago there was a similar (though-MMORPG) game called Diaspora from a small studio[1]. I still remember waking up at all hours of the night to play inconspicuously (without tying up the phone line). It was freeware and featured in PC Gamer. Eventually cheaters/bots overtook the game, literally DDOSing the thing as each "node" could only support maybe 50 ships because of how they were displayed in game (~5x10 grid or so). Ultimately, the studio didn't have a solid monetization strategy and the project disappeared off the face of the earth when its users spiked. They would have made a killing with micro-transactions, but online payments weren't ubiquitous then. Instead these poor devs spent all this time/money developing the game, maintaining the servers and fighting cheaters for free before the whole thing crumbled under its own weight. It lived on in clones (Rillaspora, Xiaspora and The Reunion) but they all died within a year or two. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(video_game)
- imtringued 5y ago>An MMORPG element would be the bees knees here. The game you are looking for is called Star Sonata 2.
- PikachuEXE 5y agoAnyone know/remember Skyrates? http://skyrates.net http://skyrates.net (Ya no HTTPS :S
- Waterluvian 5y agoI’ve tried many times to play games that replicate Escape Velocity, but have never come close to reliving the feeling of being 10 and playing that game to death on my Macintosh.
- rdtwo 5y agoIf you haven’t played ev nova it was peak magic for that franchise. It perfected the whole experience.
- foerbert 5y agoYep. I had that exact feeling with Endless Sky myself some time ago. I couldn't quite pin down what the problem was. There were obviously various things that could be improved, but none that I could really say for sure would help get the feeling right. Maybe it's time I check it out again and see if it's gotten closer.
- ethbr0 5y agoI suspect part of it was being stuck in the school computer lab, without a portable supercomputer in your pocket, and with little web to speak of (and less connectivity to what there was). A moment that will never exist again.
- Waterluvian 5y agoFunny enough, It was 1996 or 1997 that I played the game and we had cable at home as well as two computers side by side. But the same problem kind of existed: there really wasn't some quick access reference to the game, so we didn't think to just look stuff up. And I think that was a lot of the magic. I still remember a moment where we hit the wrong key at a specific time and we got a warning BEEP and the text, "You are moving too fast to board this ship." "YOU CAN BOARD SHIPS?!"
- rdtwo 5y agoTrue mine just barely ran on a Mac lc3 with ram doubler installed. Somehow it tricked the computer into thinking it had 8 megs vs 4 and that that the game run. Though quite slowly as it couldn’t handle all the assets
- beckingz 5y agoA game you will easily lose 30 hours to without noticing.
- breadzeppelin__ 5y agoI'm getting some star control vibes off this at first glance, definitely going to check it out
- rdtwo 5y agoI wish there was a community somewhere of space gamers that like ev style games. I don’t follow gaming much anymore but I’d love to know when similar games come out
- thomasballinger 5y agoA nice surprise to see this here! I did a web port of this game with Emscripten which much help from janisozaur: https://play-endless-web.com https://play-endless-web.com There's an outdated post about what was hard about the port at http://ballingt.com/porting-endless-sky/ http://ballingt.com/porting-endless-sky/ – with Emscripten as good as it is, it really wasn't bad!
- valyagolev 5y agoStar Traders: Frontiers is a good take on the genre. quite addictive! and exists for computers, ios, and android
- lucas_codes 5y agoI've been playing this recently, it's fantastic. And the developers, the Trese (?) Brothers, have been releasing content updates for it for years, with mod support coming soon - even while working on their upcoming cyberpunk-themed game.
- napsterbr 5y agoI love the trip down memory lane in this thread. The game that I immediately remembered when seeing this was Gazillionaire Deluxe [0]. I still have a Win95 emulator somewhere just so I can play it every now and then :) [0] - https://gamefabrique.com/games/gazillionaire-deluxe/ https://gamefabrique.com/games/gazillionaire-deluxe/
- martinmakesgame 5y agoEndless Sky is truly excellent. I've been playing it for the last couple of months. It's even possible to explore the whole galaxy playing pacifist and never firing a shot. It's wonderful to be able to play a game in a completely peaceful way.