Escape Velocity Nova is an impressive and very successful shareware game which has been around for some time on the Mac. PC gamers will now have the chance of sampling EVN in order to understand what it is about the Escape Velocity series that has captivated Mac users.The recntly ported game was brought to our attention (thanks Hojew) and you can find a link to the PC demo by following the download tab above.Nova is the third game in the Escape Velocity series, and is by far the most ambitious installment to date.
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With a completely redesigned gaming engine, EV Nova thrusts you into a sprawling universe dominated by a myriad of warring factions, each sharing a common bond, but so philosophically different as to make conflict inevitable.The remnants of the Colonial Council's utopian vision of a united galaxy are littered about like so many discarded dreams. The eccentric genius in Omata Kane, whose Hypergate system brought distant stars within reach, has all but been forgotten. Like a wave in the darkness of space, colonization flowed outwards from Earth, until discord and dissent against a growingly corrupt central government caused it to come crashing down.Open rebellion caused the destruction of critical parts of the Hypergate system, severing entire systems from the umbilical cord of civilization.
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Apr 10, 2019 βThe Nova Pro Smart Alarm System is a DIY, easy-to-use security system with no monthly fees and contracts required. It could connect to the Internet by LAN or WiFi, and use cellular SMS as backup communication. The Nova Pro app allows you to.
They were left adrift in the lonely void of space, forced to fend for themselves, truly strangers in strange lands. The collapse of a central government caused civilization to slide helplessly into a dark age of isolation.
The few pockets of humanity that did survive developed in near solitude, clinging perilously to life like a tree desperately trying to gain root on a rocky cliff.Time marched on in its relentless journey toward the future, and each of these civilizations slowly reconstructed their humanity. But in their isolation, a strange thing happened. They each followed markedly different paths in their evolution. As rediscovered technology finally allowed contact between these far-flung children of the Colonial Council to tentatively resume, they found that they had little in common. Indeed, rather than reunited brothers, they were strangers. Or worse, adversaries.It is into this maelstrom of territorial contention that you are thrust, like a pebble tumbling aimlessly between the tectonic fault lines that uncomfortably separate these divisions of humanity.
Welcome to EV Nova. Will the pebble become an avalanche?
The game does not seem to want to work out of the box, but it can still be done.
MacOS Mojave: The patch doesn't work unless you patch it under High Sierra first β see below.
Download EV Nova
Ambrosia SW's servers are still online, version 1.1.1 is the latest for Mac. Install it in
/Applications .
DO NOT run it yet.
The Registration Dance
Ambrosia SW uses expiring license keys for some reason, and I was unable to get new keys in Nov 2018.
So I disconnected from the Internet by disabling Ethernet/WiFi in System Preferences, and set the system date back to the day I received my license key in May 2005. Then I launched EV Nova, and went through registration. It accepted my key no problem β if you have issues, maybe try a different year (sorry I can't be more specific).
EV Nova will appear to start, go to a black screen, freeze, and quit after 10β15 seconds.
Go ahead and reset your system time and re-connect to the internet. The game won't ask you to re-register unless you switch Macs.
Fixing EV Nova
Daniel Loffgren has found a solution to the black screen issue: novafix. If you are familiar with building software from source, go ahead and follow the instructions for cloning the repo and compiling.
If you do not have XCode installed or don't know much about Terminal.app, then use the 'super-automatic installer' linked in the README.
Either way, it will apply a code patch to the EV Nova application that fixes the black screen issue. You should now be able to run it. If there is some problem with the patch, you can delete EV Nova and re-copy the application from the installer disk image and try patching it again.
Mojave
As noted in the novafix issue tracker, the fix doesn't compile on MacOS 10.14 (Mojave). I tried building on my laptop running Mojave and can confirm the same error report.
If you edit the Makefile and change
i386 to x86_64 then the patch will compile, but then applying it to EV Nova will make EV Nova not run.
However, if you compile and patch EV Nova on a High Sierra system, then copy the EV Nova application to a Mojave system, then it will run fine.
The Keyboard Does Not Work
Run this in Terminal.app:
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And re-launch EV Nova. Opening the preferences dialog seems to break it and require this command to fix.
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