As blackhole briefly explained:
"Final Battle: Xenocide" became "Xenocide" when a moment's thought was given to the fact that the plots had nothing to do with eachother. This was back in the old days, before EVO, when there were fairly harsh maximum limits in EV's engine (128 maximum ship types, I believe). The scenario called for enough stuff that it exceeded the limits, often vastly, in a number of places.
To overcome this, Xenocide was originally going to be implemented in four "chapters" (the actual term used was something else, but I do not recall what), each chapter an independent plugin file. A single pilot file would persist through the four chapters, but the data would change, removing the outdated stuff and replacing it with the ships/systems/outfits required for the next part of the plot. The player's ship would also change: all the ships accessible to the player would have four evolutions of sorts, gradually upgrading as the plot (and time) progressed.
Laer joined the project at some point, I was learning to program, and there were enough things that we wanted to do but couldn't within EV's engine that we set out to write our own. The engine was called "Epsilon", and it was to run the Xenocide scenario.
At its peak of feature-completeness, Epsilon had a ship which you could fly around in, AI ships with a very basic task-based AI (I believe they could be tasked to "follow you" or "hold position"), a largely functional map (you would hyperspace between individual stellar objects; clicking a system on the map overview would display a zoomed in view of all the stellars in the system, from which you could select a hyperspace target), a customizable HUD, and, best of all, no resource limits. The entire engine was built more or less from scratch.
Alas, it was not to be. Several hardware failures (my computer, his computer, my computer completely dying) set us back, and eventually Laer moved on to a university where he had no access to a Mac and fairly little free time. While I had a solid enough grasp on C/C++ to make progress with his assistance, he was far more experienced than I, and I had no practical capacity to continue the project once he could no longer work on it.
Around this time, a lot of issues started cropping up in my personal life as well (my parents getting divorced, among other things). This pretty much sunk any chance Epsilon or Xenocide had of seeing the light of day, although I continued developing my programming skills.
While things in my personal life have evened out a good deal and I've become a reasonably skilled programmer, I've moved on from Epsilon/Xenocide. EV:O and EV:N largely fill the gaps that Epsilon tried to, anyway, and implement a reasonable portion of the new features we were putting into Epsilon (banking ship sprites, for instance). Instead, I have a new project (though I fear my vision has scaled exponentially as my ability has scaled linearly), but I won't trouble you with the specifics.
Several people on this board know how to contact me if anyone needs to get in touch with me for any reason.