Does anyone still play EV?

Well, after a really, really long hiatus, I found I could still log back onto my account. So, as a first thread, I was going to post and ask if anyone here still plays EV? I know when I left, this forum didn't have much going on and it looks like it really isn't alive much anymore. I haven't played EV in a while, but I am feeling a bit nostalgic and might dl it on my desktop to play a bit.

Does fire burn?

Does the sun rise in the East and set in the West on the planet Earth?

Do EVC's ship graphics have only 36 frames each?

Is the sky blue?

Are we all being smart a..........

Yes, we are still playing a game series known as Escape Velocity.

I came back last month to an almost dead board and stirred up some sleeping people it seems when I broke out questions about plugins and such. It was good to see old TC's still chugging along. So excited for the prospect of those getting nearer to completion.

Not the game series mind you. Just the original EV. I love the whole series, don't get me wrong, but EV in particular is the first one I played. Such a great game.

still...
...still.

I am trying to find original EV plugins (TCs or big game expansions) that were converted for use with Nova. I have found Clavius....but the file seems corrupt!

I played Escape Velocty comparatively recently. I don't have time for games just now, but when I have a spare moment over the annual Nazareth-to-Bethelehem donkey trek anniversary festival I intend to make a start on Escape Velocity Override.

The entire B&B is playing EV.

@mrxak, on 17 February 2014 - 11:53 AM, said in Does anyone still play EV?:

The entire B&B is playing EV.

Wow that is some commitment!

I haven't played in ages but mean to do so soon, at least Override, which was always my favourite, but perhaps I should start with Classic :).

I've been involved in detailed level-by-level write-ups of playing through the Marathon Trilogy recently, and it would be cool if there could be an active discussion like that going on for EV, but it doesn't quite lend itself to the same, at least not without taking an RP role.

Right, yep, I need to play. EV, then EVO, then Frozen Heart. In the next few months.

what's EV?

It's an initialism.

Guess what I did this evening, yesterday and some other random days from last week?

Nova.

Time to do what I spent such ridiculous amounts of time doing when I was younger... fiddling around with resources and trying to mash every plug in existence into one, even though it isn't possible!

Okay remind me: what do I need to do to get past endless "Distribute Rebel Munitions" from Clotho Prime?

I'm guessing it involves getting to Deadly, but it is as I recall, that EV is annoyingly strict on requirements, and it takes a long time to up the combat rating for the fact that the big ships are actually crazy hard to take down, rather than just time consuming as in Override where you can fall back on the Monty Python more easily :).

I managed to complete T.A.G. - You're It in my Corvette, but only thanks to my cloaking device, and getting most of the Kestrels to leave the system over and over again. Packs of Lightnings are so much scarier than even packs of Crescent Fighters - Phase weapons have a lot to answer for!

Now having just got the Astrodyne Outpost starter, I find myself forgetting if there is more of a story still hiding - one didn't have to do much to get the cloaking device, and since then there have only been broken story fragments; is it really a case of sit back and wait for the alien missions? I always did prefer Override for all its stories. But as I said, I'm playing through from the start, so just in case.... Cheers :).

Okay so the next rebel thing was just the alien string ... man the stories in EV were tiny.

Taking the alien cruiser was so much harder than back in the day. Somehow the game doesn't quite translate to the high speeds and fast computation of now. Back then on an LC III that mission was about half an hour of just following the cruiser from one end of the system to the other, lasering and javelining it. I was barely even aware of the rebel ships being there to help, and the alien cruiser seemed happy to just keep running away and leave me at its back and out of harm's way.

Now we have a real situation, where the aliens are much more active and downright deadly, and the only hope for taking out the cruiser is the mantas from the mission help, and even then it took several attempts ... and then failed to give me credit for completing the mission ><, but felt fit to steal the hired help so I'm on my own if I care to try again. Which I don't. And I can't abort the mission. Ahh nuts. So near and yet so far. How easy is it to edit a pilot file and set a mission to completed?

Editing the pilot itself? Impossible as far as I know. You could make another mission that aborts Destroy Alien Cruiser and grants the same rewards all upon acceptance of the mission. However, EV isn't known for missions bugging like that. I'm willing to bet you left the system before the cruiser finished exploding. This causes the 'destroy' objective to not be satisfied.

Indeed I have noticed that with my next effort, an Override playthrough, where Voinian ships can take a bit longer to blow up. In the alien case though, it blew up all right, and then I went back to Guiron and landed. Then it was back again on entering Gamera. Lame. Well, I was about done anyway, and happy to call that revisiting run :). Override is nicer with the extra plugs as well, the Nova-like spaceport GUI and the awesome graphics overhaul options. Text is still awfully small on a 1080p screen ... might have to pull out the tangerine iBook I acquired a few years back, and try to find an OS 9 install for a totally authentic experience :D. Cheers.