NAEV

NAEV is a free, open source 2D space trading and combat simulator first released in 2008. It is inspired by Ambrosia Software's game, Escape Velocity.
The current release of the game is 0.4.2, released on January 31, 2010. NAEV is cross-platform, so it is available for a variety of different operating systems and hardware platforms, with plans to release for the Pandora handheld game console. With code released under the GNU General Public License v3 and media primarily under the GPL, Creative Commons licenses as well as in the public domain, it is free software.
*Empire: The Empire is a political bloc assembled from the remnants of humanity after the first galactic war. Its formation was assisted by the four Great Houses: Dvaered, Proteron, Sirius and Za'lek; and granted them their titles and political power as a reward. Due in part to the loss of many of its core systems in the Incident, the Empire's power is greatly waning.
*Dvaered: A relatively technologically-antiquated faction, House Dvaered is deeply divided into two prominent castes. Within its culture, the military does its own duty as well as that of a traditional government's. The majority of its non-militarized citizens exist with a far lower quality of life than can be expected by those of most other factions.
*Proteron: Situated to the north of the nebula, none have heard from the Proteron since the Incident.
*Sirius: A highly-religious faction, the Sirii culture is centered around its worship of the Sirichana, viewed as a living God. While devout, the Sirii also possess considerable military assets.
*Za'lek: The Za'lek are known for their scientific, and consequently, technological prowess, with the majority of their society being dedicated to research, and their planets being littered with scientific facilities and computer installations. In part due to their nature, they are highly isolationist. None know the true extent of the Za'lek military, but extrapolating from their other technologies, they are thought to be a major galactic power.
*Goddard: A Minor House related to the Dvaered, they are known primarily for being a major trade hub, and the production of Goddard-class cruisers, one of the most fearsome vessels available to civilians.
*Frontier Liberation Front: A terrorist organization that demands freedom for the Frontier worlds from their Dvaered oppressors. Their hit-and-run tactics have cost many Dvaered lives, but none doubt that many Frontier citizens tacitly approve of their actions.
*Collective: Though unknown in origin, the Collective appeared shortly after the Incident. A race of self-replicating, seemingly autonomous drones, their goals remain unknown, though they have responded in a hostile manner to all outside contact.
*Galactic Pirates: A loosely-cohesive faction, aligned more by threat of retribution than by camaraderie, pirates are the bane of ill-prepared space travellers.
Editing
NAEV has several utilities designed to make content creation easier, most of which are written in the Python language. Ships consist of sprite sheets generated by rendering 3D Blender models and combining the output with the mkspr utility. Shell scripts are used to resize the large renders to a size usable by the game. Planet images are also generated using scripts.
A resource-editing utility, Resedit, is included with the game, allowing quick creation of planets and star systems.
Sound effects and music are stored in the Ogg Vorbis format.
Development
As free software, NAEVs source is easily acquired and modified. The core of the game is programmed in C and makes use of OpenGL, SDL and OpenAL, among other libraries. The AI and missions are written in Lua, with most data files consisting of XML. It is cross-platform, and is known to run on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
While NAEV possesses a mailing list, the majority of its development discussion occurs on its IRC channel, #naev, located on the Freenode network.
While not possessing a plug-in architecture like Escape Velocity, the open formats used by the game ensure that it is easier to contribute content to.
Releases
Though the game had been in development for several years, binaries were not publicly released until November 14, 2008. The last of the 0.3 line, 0.3.9 was released on April 24, 2009. Following this, a substantial amount of features were developed and included in 0.4.0, released on September 18, 2009.
NAEV is currently available in FreeBSD Ports, the Arch Linux AUR. and the Ubuntu Linux PlayDeb.net repository.

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