The Official Escape Velocity Wishlist

Here is a list of ideas gleaned from the EV-Delta and WWW Message board as well as some of my own. Ambrosias official stance is that there will not be any major upgrades to EV in the future, just bug fix. I have not spoken to Matt, but I am under the I impression that he has no intentions of adding any major upgrades to EV in the near future either. Here's hoping against hope.

• A Windows 95 version of EV. Though the plugin architecture will take a miracle in programming skills to pull of under the Windows OS, I still think it would be worth Matt's time in doing it.
• Transporters - allowing you to board a ship from a certain range (in pixels) after the shields are down.
• Planet Landing - this would be the coolest. Being able to land and explore a planet, collecting minerals, flora and fauna as will as encountering sentient natives and selling them on the open market. This would allow players to purchase mining devices which could be left on a world for to gather minerals. Just think Starflight, and to a lesser extent, Elite.
• Set mission bits on a mission accept not just mission failure or success.
• Allow player to fly a specific ship for a specific mission.
• Sell escorts or be forced to maintain them.
• Bigger escort number
• Buy drink, and link missions/info to drink
• An outfit that adds Marines to increase the chance of boarding.
• Player being disabled and boarded (then ransomed/sold off, or just plain killed) by pirates instead of just blowing up.
• Increase the number of ships "on screen".

The United Colours of EV-Traveller

I have tried to use colour coding to allow easy identification of vessels in Fire, Fusion and Steel. The simple colour chart to the left can be used as a guide to vessel allegiance in the game. Double colour band indicates that both colours will appear in that Governments vessel design.

 

 

 

Why did you do it?

I wanted to.

 

The Rebel EV-Delta Mailing List

Welcome to the Rebellion.
Once upon a time Ambrosia had a mailing list for EV plugin developers. They then canned the list without so much as an announcement or warning. After some pestering and investigation, a long time list contributor (not me) squeezed the reason out of them. They thought that there was to much arguing and spaming. People had been complaining to them to do something about it, so they did - they killed the list.

Anyone on the new Ev-Delta list will tell you I never liked Ambrosia, not one bit. For an "international" company they had an extremely belligerent attitude towards there customers. So, I decided to do something about it and started the Rebel EV-delta list on April 28 1997. Its still early days yet but it seems to be going well.

To subscribe or unsubscribe from the list send a message to ev-delta-request@electric-rain.net.au with no subject and the message subscribe ev-delta or unsubscribe ev-delta.

As of the 12th of September this list became defunct because I changed servers.   Two new lists were created from the ashs, one for EV the other for EV2.

 

Design

I have tried to be consistent with the design style of each power. For instance, the Imperials have a tendency to build triangle shaped vessels, while Confederation vessels have a more wet navy look, like the space ships from "Star Blazers" cartoon series. Another, simpler and more obvious design consistency includes the colour coding of vessels. I tried to do it to all vessels, but, as you will notice, not all ships are colour coded. The reason for this is mostly aesthetic - I just could not get the Imperial Starburt or Confederation Standard on that darn ship.

A simple breakdown of each race's design style;
Terran Confederation: Battleship
First Imprium: Wedge/Triangle
Vegan: Bulbous, reflective and smooth design
Droyne: Flattened sphere look, think Millinium Falcon from Star Wars
Newt: Older 60's looking space moon module look
Collectors: Inspired by the old 50/60's "saucer" style vessels
Aslan: Sleek, agile looking design, with a brown fur like motif
Zhodani: Star Trek Federation look
KKree: Star Trek "old" Romulan style
Hiver: Original design from EV itself, very volcanic/organic look
Ancient vessel/derelict: Organic look, much like the Vorlorn's from Babylon5

Also, you will notice not all ships are 3d objects. Since I am much better at traditional two-dimensional drawing, some of the more complex vessels I just did by hand to get this darn thing finished. Hopefully in a future addition I will make these into 3d objects as well.

One last point, the vessel's displayed here are not all of my own creation. Those that are not animated are originally from the the game, and I have either left them completely alone or only slightly modified them at all.

Gimme! Gimme!

If your part of the EV-Delta list you would know my plugin has had a little setback. For those who don't know what I am talking about, heroes the short of it;

I don't have a Mac, all the graphics and some of the coding for the plugin was done on my PC at home using Executor2. ResEdit is *very* unstable under this emulator, most of the ResEdit coding was done on a Macintosh at work. Well, one day I had walked in to work on my plugin and the Macintosh was gone, and so was my plugin. The Macintosh had been moved to another office.

The latest version of the plugin (the Beta version) is still on that Macintosh somewhere. I am doing my best to get it back, but things don't look good. The version available here is the 1-month old backup I had at home (the alpha version). So until I get another Macintosh or get that old Macintosh back, this is all that's available at the moment, the alpha version.

Fire, Fusion and Steel (alpha version), is 2.2M .sit file. You may have trouble extracting it, because the file !types are probably all screwed. To remedy this run it through a tiny program called "File Tweaker".

Known Problems with the alpha
Those point marked with an * have been rectified in the now lost Beta version.

Planet names are not consistent.*
Not all Planetside pictures have been deployed.
Not all Station pictures have been deployed.
Planets have the wrong or no description.
Not all the bars have the right description.
Not all the ships have the right description.*
Not all systems have dudes (empty worlds).*
Some ships still have to be fixed up.*
Many planet tech levels are wrong.
No new missions added (I think).*
Old missions haven't been updated yet to fit into this universe.*
Some Governments are wrong.*
Some pictures still need further tweaking.
I have melded another plugin (the Rocks plugin as well as some Elite! plugin pictures) with mine. I meant to remove these plugins before release, but without a Macintosh, I couldn't do it.

 

This site is a tribute to 'Traveller'. All trademarks and copyrights acknowledged.
'Traveller - Adventures in the Far Future' is available from Imperium Games.