Happy 30th Birthday, Escape Velocity

BY BOBBENS, ON MAY 5TH, 2026

It seems like almost yesterday, but Escape Velocity is now 30 years old! Originally released on the Cinco de Mayo in 1996 by the now defunct Ambrosia Software, it led to two sequels with Override and the most popular Escape Velocity Nova. Escape Velocity was the main inspiration for Naev, and the reason it exists in the first place, as it was originally created to try to capture the same magic Escape Velocity had. There are also several references to Escape Velocity in the game, be it the mighty Kestrel-class cruiser, or the humble planet Levo.

So to go full circle, a plugin to play the original Escape Velocity in Naev has been released as “YAEV: Classic”. It’s already in the plugin manager, so installing it is straight forward, however, do note that it requires a nightly version of Naev. So you’ll have to either install it manually or enable it via the opt-in beta in steam. Also, not everything is implemented, however, it is fully playable.

This as done by creating a program to directly convert the Escape Velocity data to a Naev plugin, called evn-to-naev. Why evn? Well, as we weren’t able to get the original data decompressed easily, we instead decided to use the port of Escape Velocity to Escape Velocity Nova. EVNEW was used to convert the format to text data, and then the rest was just handled in Rust.

However, not all functionality was able to work right away. Also, many bugs were found when using niche API and engine functionality, which required a lot of fixes. These have made it into the nightly version of Naev, but are not in the 0.13.x releases, so nightly is required for the plugin. In some cases, the functionality did not have a one-to-one mapping, so reasonable adaptations were done. This can be seen in how Heavy Rockets accelerate. In the plugin, they use an acceleration value and are physics-based, while in the Escape Velocity Nova engine, they accelerate based on a percent of the current speed.

Now, this is not meant to be a perfect replication of the original Escape Velocity, but a reasonable port. In particular, the following large changes exist: 1. You jump via jump points instead of a distance from the center, as this was found to be more interesting than the original Escape Velocity mechanics. 1. You can’t hire ships, but you can deploy your owned ships as escorts. If it was a captured ship, it does not have a daily cost, but if was as ship you bought, it incurs a daily cost as if it were a ship hire. Please do note that, like Escape Velocity, there is permadeath for your escorts. 1. Spaceport bar missions appear from NPCs instead of just upon visiting the bar. This lets you know when there are new missions available with the exclamation mark, and also choose if you want to start it or not. 1. To have a similar outfitting system, all outfits are intrinsic outfits. All ships have 3 slots which are filled with locked outfits and are just used to fire your weapons. So you have a “Primary Weapon”, and “Secondary Weapon” outfit always equipped, that will fire weapons similar to the Escape Velocity. There is also a weapon set to cycle through secondary weapons.

So, while this is a fairly complete port, some things are still missing: 1. No asteroids at the moment. 1. Decoy flares, and tractor beam are broken. 1. You can’t recover your own fighters from a fighter bay.

Next steps are to fix more bugs, finish functionality, and then move on to Escape Velocity Override! Override shares most of the engine with the original Escape Velocity, with the exception being visbits that are a bit tricky to implement. Once that is implemented, and other issues that crop up are fixed, it should be easy to get Override running too, however, Escape Velocity Nova will require significant more work, so it’s not on the table at the moment.

Additionally, Escape Velocity feels a bit aged in some places, so an “opinionated” version that strays a bit from the original to give a better player experience is also planned, with things like no permadeath for escorts, brighter proton weapon sprites, and the likes.

For any issues, please report them either on the forums or the codeberg repository directly.