This is by no means a full engine yet. It handles the opening sequence and gets the main menu to this state. Utterly useless to a player of the game. However this represents a major milestone.
For this screen to be rendered properly using nothing but the Nova data files, it needs to be able to decode rlëD and PICT resources, as well as understand bespoke Nova resources such as cölr and spïn. There are still a lot of other resource types that need parsing to make the engine complete. Not to mention replicating all the game logic!
I’m building the game in SpriteKit. This means that it should be possible to get it to run on macOS, iOS and tvOS all with the same basic codebase, although control systems are going to be more problematic. EV Nova’s built in system only really works with a Mac.
I think I’m probably going to make the UI (things like interaction, new pilot, settings, etc) be a little more friendly to touch environments on iOS, whilst leaving it as is on macOS.
OpenNova 
If you get EV Nova to run on iOS, I will shit my pants from happiness. After that, my family will probably leave me, so I’ll have a lot more free time anyways to keep playing
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Project dead?
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@adam: Not dead, but progressing very slowly. I’ve been swamped with work recently and not had much if any free time to progress the project. Hoping to rectify that soonish.
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Forgive my ignorance. Can any of the information that you are mining be apllied to the windows version of Ev Nova?? Do you plan on doing this in the future?
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Do you have permission to use their graphics assets? Although their license servers have been down for a long time, so I can’t renew my license to install the game on a new computer, their website is still up and you can still download the game. I’d love to see this port, but I’d hate for it to be taken down a week later for using graphics assets without permission.
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I wouldn’t be using their assets. Not directly at least. If I ever do release this, it will a clone of the engine only. It will just use the original Nova Data files. You could technically provide it the data files of a Total Conversion, and it should work fine.
That said, currently I’m viewing the project as more of a personal project, in which I document some of the progress of. If I get to a point where the game feels playable, then I may try and contact AmbrosiaSW about it, and find out the situation.
I meaning to put together a new blog post at some point with some more of the progress that I’ve made in the last few months.
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