Licensing and Technical Features
The first two Escape Velocity games are only available in their original forms for the Apple Macintosh and are Classic-only. EV Nova is a Carbon application and runs natively on both the original Mac OS and Mac OS X, and has been ported to Windows. Version 1.1.0 of EV Nova, released in December 2008, is a Universal Binary, and runs natively on Intel-based Macs. Adapted versions of the scenarios of the first two games that run natively in EV Nova are available for free.
This series follows the general licensing rule for Ambrosia Software. All three games are shareware. Ambrosia's shareware system allows most distribution of unregistered games. Copies of the first two Escape Velocity games will work without limitation for 30 days. Afterwards, the player is simply reminded at startup that they have not registered, and told how many times they have run the game, as well as for how many hours it has been run. There is also the character called 'Cap'n Hector' (named after Ambrosia's mascot and office parrot) who reminds the player to register. During the trial this is done by flying by the player's ship and sending a message. After the trial period has expired, the character starts attacking the player, but in EV Override, Cap'n Hector also steals the player's credits. Players can not damage Cap'n Hector directly, though in the original game it was possible for splash damage to disable or destroy her ship.
An unregistered copy of EV Nova is more limited. In addition to the attacks by Cap'n Hector, certain ships and technologies cannot be obtained after the thirty-day trial ends, and even before then, the game's story lines stop about two thirds of the way through, and plug-ins are not supported. Once the game has been registered, Cap'n Hector and all of the other restrictions disappear from the game.
The entire series features an open-ended plug-in architecture, allowing new scenarios to be written by users. This technology is based on the Macintosh resource fork format, making it possible to develop plug-ins without using any purpose-designed editors (though several editors exist and are popular since they make the task much easier). Since Windows does not support resource forks and it is therefore impossible to preserve them when transferring files to Windows-based computers, an alternate format and a conversion system were devised for the Windows version of the game.
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