Hullo all,

I'm terribly sorry for posting this here, but I wanted to clear up a few points about Nova that Badanov raised on his website. I've already mailed this to him, but I wanted to make this public.

Quote

Mailed by me to Badanov
**Hi,

I'm Dafydd Williams. I headed up the project development team for Escape Velocity Nova at ATMOS Software. We created the scenario, and suggested/requested all new features for the engine, which our good friend Matt Burch implemented with us.

We come from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. We are all white. We all have friends of every racial type imaginable, and I personally find your statements on your website to be highly offensive.

Many of our characters are described as having caucasoid features. Many are described as having no identifiable racial characteristics at all. For example, the Auroran peoples are almost uniformly negroid or mongoloid... or somewhere between. They're my personal favorite race. The Polaris are somewhat asian in their makeup, as well. The Vell-os are at least half subcontinental Indian.

The characters we describe are based on our own experiences as people. In Australia, and particularly in my home city of Hobart, racism is basically unknown. There's no point to it, so why bother?

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My next point; Andrew Welch didn't make Nova, we did. Matt Burch coded the engine, and ATMOS created the rest.

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Nova was created entirely on Macintosh. The engine was written on Macintosh. All our custom development tools were written on Macintosh.

Contraband ported Nova to PC, and, no, there are no plans for any official plug editors. We have neither the time, money, skill with PCs nor inclination to do so.

Yours,

Dafydd "pipeline" Williams @ ATMOS Software Productions Pty Ltd**

Thanks for your time, all.

Dave @ ATMOS

Thanks for the letter Dafydd, I've just posted you an e-mail. Again, I meant no offense, I was just offering what I think is constructive critism. My apologies. I would like to include your letter in the "Counter-Rants" section of my webpage-- I think it's that important. And I'll remove the jabs at New Zealand, etc. That was low.

As an Alabamian who grew up in Montgomery and Birmingham in the 60's I supposed I'm more used to frank racial discussion. And I have a dark sense of humor regarding race. Forgive me.

Let me say for the record that I love EVN, the awesome job done by you and your team, and it's vision of the future. Though it is true, as you say in your letter, that "The characters we describe are based on our own experiences as people," it is also true that in a global market perhaps it would perhaps pay to consult others with different experiences, lest we unintentionally make someone feel excluded, especially in the RPG-genre.

~Badanov

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"Moose and squirrel must die!" B. Badanov

With regards to all that, I say "fair enough". Thanks for sorting that out.

Dave @ ATMOS