I was just passing through this forum, when I was suddenly struck with a memory from years ago. The hours spent playing on EV, not wasted, but invested... into a great game. And it made me feel like posting here.

I wanted to make a thread along the lines of, ''best plug-in: which was your favourite?''. But as the winner will invarioubly be Pale or GS, I thought I might ask a different question.

What is your most wanted plug?

That is, what story/secenario/mission string would you most want to play on EV that was never made? Or that was in development, and never got finished?

My one would be OctoberFost's idea. It started well but was never finished. The basic idea was to reconstruct the original alien war, before the rebels were even around. It would have been great fun to make and play, but unfortunately was never finished.

Any others?

Gav

For the longest time I wanted a decent star wars plug, I even did quite a bit of work on one that never was released of course.

Cham

Yes, a good Star Wars plug would be fun. And expanding on the alien war would be fresh because it's not been done.

The Empire series has always been a favorite of mine. Each game had new/hidden systems, new governments, new weapons, new ships, and I thought it was fun to fly around and discover. And the story lines where always well done.

I'm not at home so I don't have access to any of my old notes for quick reference, but Pale is also up there.

One of the aspects I really like of the plug I'm playing now, Clavius and Beyond, is the the Gladiator Battle, found in the mission computer in the Arena system. Where you can battle massive ships and fleets for massive credits. It's easier than trading and much, much quicker than looting, and even helps prepare the player for future battles against specific ships in the actual mission string.

Me? I always wanted a Galactic Scourge II, but the author abandoned the attempt due to real life issues, difficulties adapting to the Nova engine, and general lack of enthusiasm.

F-25 (EVO) just popped into my head. I really enjoyed the Find The Elders string, where you had to decipher different clues to figure out where the 12 elders where located. It was a refreshing change of pace than the usual Disable and Board, or Destroy the <X> Fleet.

Well... I always wanted to see New Republic released. Production, unfortunately, stalled years ago. I get the occasional E-Mail from Kevin trying to prod me into working more on it but I'm too swamped with work to get much done. Not entirely sure but I'm willing to bet he's still got some desire to see it finished. Thanks need to be extended to forge and Joe Burnette for their efforts. Hopefully, someday, someone will play it and all that work can be appreciated.

edit(1): http://ucplugs.evula.net/ev.html
A pretty good indication of how far along it really was... So sad.

Also, I lost touch with the community for a while. Did the EV Expansion Set ever see the light of day? I seem to remember the author having a personal tragedy at one point and not much after that. Another one I was looking forward to.

Edit(2): EVES never did see the light of day. It's extensive collection of beautiful sprites did, however. The author, by the way, was Matthew Dailey.

Oh let's see... what else... Anybody remember Skyhawk? Final Battle 2? Err... I mean Xenocide? Errr, scratch that. He was trying to write his own game engine for it? Another failed Development Team I had the pleasure to be a part of. Suffered from far too overly-ambitious leadership.

My own plug-in never saw the light of day... It got lost in a storm of mission bit editing that first got frustrating, then boring, and finally completely impossible to stomach. So I gave up. Got some pretty ships in it and that's about it.

So that's 4, of which 3 I worked on. I seem to be the only common element of these failed projects... Hmmm. Maybe I'm just cursed.

-AJ

This post has been edited by AJ : 14 February 2008 - 02:59 PM

@pistgavin, on Feb 3 2008, 09:26 PM, said in Most wanted?:

My one would be OctoberFost's idea. It started well but was never finished. The basic idea was to reconstruct the original alien war, before the rebels were even around. It would have been great fun to make and play, but unfortunately was never finished.

This is, of course, one of the standard plug-in ideas; practically everyone who ever developed plug-ins for the original Escape Velocity tried at one point to create either this or the Vorinth -style return of the aliens. I don’t know of any Great War plug-ins that actually made it to release, though — finding an interesting plot that fits the backstory is harder than it sounds.

Woah, nice to see you AJ. I think I'd be just as eager to see all that work on NR go somewhere, but it's always that darned real life that gets in the way. I don't know if I have any EV-related expertise left, but maybe if you guys do revive the project I could hop back on to help in some way.

I definitely remember Skyhawk of Final Battle fame, and the ill-fated Xenocide 2 or Epsilon project. That was after similar failed projects like Nova (Adam Sommerfield and Stoffe) and VOID (I think by Jay.. something). I think just by watching all those attempts at a loosely-EV-inspired multiplayer game taught me a lot about how development projects work and how important the human element is in all that.

I guess none of my projects ever really got off the drawing board (except for one of those add-one-system-and-a-mission-string plug-ins), and time will tell whether I get anything done in the future.

Anyway I wonder if EVula's willing to resurrect his directory (well, maybe it's still functional) for us all to keep in touch... I guess there are probably networks on some of the social networking sites (on Facebook for example) that serve a similar purpose, but there's always something special about the oldschool Web 1.0 way of doing things...

@callide, on Feb 13 2008, 03:03 AM, said in Most wanted?:

F-25 (EVO) just popped into my head. I really enjoyed the Find The Elders string, where you had to decipher different clues to figure out where the 12 elders where located. It was a refreshing change of pace than the usual Disable and Board, or Destroy the <X> Fleet.

**It's nice to hear a few people appreciated what I was trying to do there.. Exploration was always meant to be at the heart of the plug, and that was the best way I could think of to test people on how well they'd explored the nooks and crannies of the galaxy..

_bomb

**

My favorite part of playing any plugin is flying around, discovering what lies beyond. F25 was a lot of fun to explore, especially waaaaay up north. ^_^

Ooh. F-25. If I ever pick up EVO again, that'll definitely be the plug-in I, well, plug in. My apologies if I couldn't put in the time to beta test it as well as I could.

It's definitely one of the most immersive plug-ins I've played though, far surpassing a lot of other games, even, that I've played. Nothing quite like the Great Expanse and the great beyond -- it really did feel like stepping into another universe, in a way.

@firebird, on Feb 15 2008, 08:17 PM, said in Most wanted?:

Woah, nice to see you AJ. I think I'd be just as eager to see all that work on NR go somewhere, but it's always that darned real life that gets in the way. I don't know if I have any EV-related expertise left, but maybe if you guys do revive the project I could hop back on to help in some way.

That reminds me, I forgot to credit you and so many others that helped out. I've still got the most recent version laying around but it'll be some time before I'm ready to take it on again.

@firebird, on Feb 15 2008, 08:17 PM, said in Most wanted?:

I definitely remember Skyhawk of Final Battle fame, and the ill-fated Xenocide 2 or Epsilon project. That was after similar failed projects like Nova (Adam Sommerfield and Stoffe) and VOID (I think by Jay.. something). I think just by watching all those attempts at a loosely-EV-inspired multiplayer game taught me a lot about how development projects work and how important the human element is in all that.

I guess none of my projects ever really got off the drawing board (except for one of those add-one-system-and-a-mission-string plug-ins), and time will tell whether I get anything done in the future.

Well... one did eventually become something almost of note. I've been a student at the Digipen Institute of Technology (www.digipen.edu) for the past several years and last year, as one of our yearly projects, I grouped up with a team of 4 other guys and made a starship arena combat game called "Firestorm," inspired a bit by Escape Velocity (maybe more than a bit. You be the judge). Anyways, it never quite made it to gold before we ran out of time. It was enough to pass the class but not quite enough for the multi player to function well or for the single player to function at all really. All it was good for was setting up custom matches with an unpolished interface. Anyways, if anybody is interested, it can be downloaded from the Digipen student gallery here: http://www.digipen.e..._2006#Firestorm

Bear in mind that it's a student project with a limited time line. Fun to work on, not to play.

Some essentials for Firestorm:

~1.3 MB Download
OS: Windows 2000 or later (Sorry mac peeps! Next year's game will be cross platform!)

edit:
Wow. Ugg. Just went back and played it for the first time in 8 months.... Not so hot. Anyways, alot of debug and development keys are still in it. F2 changes the camera. There are zoom controls as well. Forgot how to orbit with it. F8 is a debug statistics display. There was some stuff on the numeric keypad. It really was junk...

@firebird, on Feb 15 2008, 08:17 PM, said in Most wanted?:

Anyway I wonder if EVula's willing to resurrect his directory (well, maybe it's still functional) for us all to keep in touch... I guess there are probably networks on some of the social networking sites (on Facebook for example) that serve a similar purpose, but there's always something special about the oldschool Web 1.0 way of doing things...

That egocentric megalomaniac is still alive?

-AJ

This post has been edited by AJ : 25 February 2008 - 03:13 AM

While this wouldn't necessarily be a Most Wanted, I thought the "hidden" landing ports in that one system in Frozen Heart was a rather clever idea.

@callide, on Feb 19 2008, 08:41 PM, said in Most wanted?:

My favorite part of playing any plugin is flying around, discovering what lies beyond. F25 was a lot of fun to explore, especially waaaaay up north. ^_^

**Oh yes. I always meant to expand more of the story about the whole section up there but data restraints really limited what I could do. That and the ships. The second version (2.0) is a vastly superior to the first, at least.

_bomb

**

@firebird, on Feb 22 2008, 12:39 AM, said in Most wanted?:

Ooh. F-25. If I ever pick up EVO again, that'll definitely be the plug-in I, well, plug in. My apologies if I couldn't put in the time to beta test it as well as I could.

It's definitely one of the most immersive plug-ins I've played though, far surpassing a lot of other games, even, that I've played. Nothing quite like the Great Expanse and the great beyond -- it really did feel like stepping into another universe, in a way.

**Were you a beta tester on the original? That version suffered mightily from poor beta tests, so I wouldn't feel bad if I were you.:) (and poor lead developing, too)

The problem was, everyone wanted to play it before everyone else, but no one wanted to test the thing.

The second version, conducted with a small, dedicated group of individuals actually produced a superior, cleaner (but imperfect) product.

_bomb

**

Something else to add to the list:

Uninhabited systems that contain surprises. Frozen Heart had gas clouds, space mines and asteroids that were kind of fun to run into.

@bomb, on Mar 8 2008, 05:22 PM, said in Most wanted?:

(b)Oh yes. I always meant to expand more of the story about the whole section up there but data restraints really limited what I could do. That and the ships. The second version (2.0) is a vastly superior to the first, at least.

_bomb

Oh well, it's still fun to play.

It would be cool to see a star fox Storyline. (actually captian Zaphod Beblebrox & I are working on one) __ ****:D

...At the same time as the Food Stuff plug-in I haven't started yet.

@eagle44, on Mar 22 2008, 10:35 PM, said in Most wanted?:

It would be cool to see a star fox Storyline. (actually captian Zaphod Beblebrox & I are working on one) __ ****:D

Yeah... doesn't really help Gav, now does it? Let us know WHEN it's finished and we'd be glad to try it out.

@captain-zaphod-beeblebrox, on Mar 22 2008, 10:46 PM, said in Most wanted?:

...At the same time as the Food Stuff plug-in I haven't started yet.

Mebbe because I'm feeling pissy, or mebbe not. Either way you are beginning to annoy me.