Preface

Welcome to the Naev development manual! This manual is meant to cover all aspects of Naev development, including both the engine and the lore of the Naev base scenario known as Sea of Darkness. It is currently a work in progress. The source code for the manual can be found on codeberg with pull requests and issues being welcome.

The document is split into two parts: the first part deals with the Naev engine and how to implement and work with it. The second part deals with the Lore of the Naev base scenario known as Sea of Darkness.

What is Naev?

Naev started development circa 2004¹ as an attempt to make an open source clone of Escape Velocity (Classic) that would run on Linux. While the engine itself was meant to be a modern clone of the Escape Velocity engine, the game scenario itself was meant to be unique. The name NAEV (later to become Naev) stood for Not Another Escape Velocity. It is now used as a proper known and has not been changed to confuse users.

Over the time and with the come and go of many contributors, Naev has grown into an advanced game engine with a complex base scenario featuring many new mechanics and features not seen in games of the same genre. While still far from done, since version 0.10.0 plugin support has been added, and initial work has begun on creating this in-depth guide to Naev development in hopes that more people join in on the exciting project.

1. This is roughly 2 years after the release of Escape Velocity Nova on Mac OS. ↩