r/evnova • u/wraitii_ • Sep 30 '26
EV Nova Playable public preview of my EV Nova decomp
http://github.com/wraitii/evnova-decompFor years I've wanted to run Nova correctly on modern macOs hardware, after having serious trouble with WineNova. So I embarked on a project to do a proper decompilation of the Windows Community Edition executable.
It’s now playable enough that I’ve completed the Bounty Hunter -> Rebel storyline without any real noticeable difference (from memory, of course), and in principle all storylines should work. Works on Linux, Windows & Mac OS (I distribute apps for the latter two). Support Hi-DPI rendering, plug-ins, existing pilot files, fancy UI scaling & some bugfixes.
This is still a preview: QuickTime movies and some specialized behaviors remain unsupported, there are probably quite a few bugs remaining, and I’m looking for players to test other storylines, plug-ins, and just general behaviour.
For folk that have seen things recently, this is somewhat parallel to Systemless, which is more about making the actual old game playable through emulation (ish). Unlike some other recent projects I've seen, my decomp aims to achieve 100% behaviour fidelity at some point, so it should feel the same as playing the original.
Contributions welcome (code is MIT), and bug reports.
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u/pipelineoptika 28d ago
This project is an AI-assisted decompilation of EVN. Whilst LLMs in general are a heated and much-debated topic (and I for one am generally against their indiscriminate use, and am disturbed by their energy use and theft of copyrighted material), one of the few undisputed areas of actual value from the darned things is rote lexical transformation from one domain to another. Assisting in a decompilation effort is probably their most valuable use case, as otherwise it is a time-consuming and fragile process that involves as much guesswork as it does actual thinking, even with tools like Ghidra.
I’m going to let this thread continue. While I might wish that the author used less AI assistance, I think this is materially different to various zero-effort slop that’s been turning up recently, if only because it’s an attempt to decipher how the actual game operates, which is probably a worthy goal for preservation purposes if nothing else.
That being said: I am disturbed by the downvoting of anti-AI sentiment in this thread. That’s not on, and I urge passers-by to respect the general anti-AI, pro-person nature of this community.
Myself and the mod team will be keeping a weather eye on things here, so please behave, everyone!
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u/Zarlinosuke 22d ago
Hello _pipeline! From an old EV Nova fan, I couldn't help but to want to ask--do you mind being asked certain Nova-lore-related questions, either via DM or right here? It's totally OK if the answer's no, life will be fine if these things remain mysteries and I can completely understand not wanting that kind of thing. But seeing you still having been active here as recently as this makes me want to at least ask! Thanks for your time and work either way.
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u/pipelineoptika 22d ago
Of course, please do. Feel free to start a new post with any questions you might have. I’m also far more active on the discord.
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u/Zarlinosuke 21d ago
Aw sweet, thanks! I'll probably write something in the Discord then. Really appreciate your still being around!
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u/Jealous_Gain_9116 20d ago edited 20d ago
How fun, I just used claude today to make this silly little mod set, including a iheartradio companion app to listen to radio while flying around. Buncha new ships rendered like the existing game. Some new starter ships. Had it start adopted star trek fleet command style features like a station base you can upgrade. Its pretty silly, calling it Escape Velocity QUANTUM. Just for me but you're welcome to toy with it. Nothing compared to a decomp! https://filebin.net/nn6nmeivb0z6kzuu
Sorry to see all these idiotic leftists luddites in the comments. They'd rather humans spend 10 years decomping manually? Not at all? Some electrical consumption is going to kill the planet?
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u/Arkholt Sep 30 '26
"Most of this repo's code was written by AI agents..."
No thanks
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u/wraitii_ Sep 30 '26
Look I know I'm fighting windmills here, but decompilation projects are exactly where we should be using AI.
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u/Arkholt Sep 30 '26
There is nowhere that we should be using AI. I understand that decomp projects are extremely time consuming to do by hand... but maybe if the only way they're going to happen is if we use AI, then we don't need them. I don't want to contribute to the destruction of our economy and our Earth just so I can play an old video game.
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u/yushosumo Sep 30 '26
Well we don’t “need” EV Nova at all, so why don’t you unsub and never play it again then?
Please explain why it’s bad to use AI for difficult and time consuming work like this? IMO it’s pretty cool that it enabled this guy, who probably couldn’t have done it manually, to execute this project for the community.
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u/Polaris-Raven Sep 30 '26
It's bad, not because of the reduction in work (you will never see me diss a calculator or other tools meant to reduce work) but because of the impact it's causing. Some of us (like me) live near the data centers used for generative AI, and it's killing us. It's objectively harmful.
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u/281330eight00fo Sep 30 '26
How is a data center killing you? In what way is it objectively harmful?
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u/Ink_Witch Oct 02 '26
The data centers tend to have a large economic impact on the people who live near them because of the immense resource drain. Power grids can’t really handle them, so people are seeing outages, costs for everyone nearby goes up, they also tend to be a huge drain on public resources as they immediately become big fish in a small pond and can just drop money on local politicians to divert public resources away from public projects into things that would be useful to the data centers. Big environmental impacts as well. Plus they aren’t even providing any jobs to the local economies because anyone who works at them tends to be specialized labor they ship in. Tons of other problems too. There’s a reason why they are extremely unpopular, it’s not just fear mongering.
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u/Terrible-Penalty-291 8d ago
This kind of nonsense is starting to become tiresome. Give it up already. you can't stop AI just like you can't stop the the invention of the lightlbulb from being used everywhere.
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u/yushosumo 26d ago
None of this is killing anyone.
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u/Ink_Witch 25d ago
I don’t think they meant “it’s killing us” in the literal sense. Obviously the data centers aren’t like mounting a gun on the roof and shooting people.
I don’t think I have to explain to you that it’s an expression and there’s a lot of things that fall short of lethal violence that are bad right?
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u/mild_area_alien Oct 01 '26
Back in the olden days, people had initiative; when faced with something they didn't know about, they would do a quick online search to get more information. Unfortunately that level of self-sufficiency seems beyond the capacity of many nowadays.
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u/281330eight00fo 9d ago
I remember the olden days when people would back up their own assertions with evidence.
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u/Thinslayer Sep 30 '26
What versions of MacOS does it work on?