History of Naev

Origins

Naev started development when bobbens (current lead developer) was roughly 17 (circa 2004). He wanted to make a game and was doubting between two of his main childhood games Spiderweb's Software "Exile II" or Ambrosia's "Escape Velocity". Given the modularity and open worldliness of "Escape Velocity", he set off to create an "Escape Velocity" clone that would work on Linux at a time when getting sound mixing and opengl running on Linux was not a simple feat. Due to lack of a better name and no inherent creativity, bobbens called the project NAEV (Not Another Escape Velocity) and around 2007 put the code on the now defunct google code, with very primitive and simple gameplay.

Beginning

Development was centered around IRC and due to the lack of publicity, only few people were aware of NAEV's existence. However, a core devteam was formed by BTAxis, Deiz, and bobbens, who, with a lot of other contributors, implemented most of the features needed to clone Escape Velocity. One of the main innovations of the time was integrating Lua scripting to be able to create very advanced missions. The first set of missions was the "Collective Campaign" which was meant to be a tech demo showing off the diversity of missions and things that could be done with the scripting engine. During this time development was very fast thanks to most contributors being students with too much free time. Eventually, the NAEV acronym was deemed to be detrimental to the project by portraying the game as just another clone, and it was turned into a proper noun: Naev (not to be confused with NAEV).

Cold Age

Around 2013, due to the devteam getting busy with real-life, development slowed down significantly. Many people assumed Naev was inactive and/or dead, however, there was still a trickle of commits and improvements by mainly external contributors. During this period, Naev somehow managed to get greenlit and publish on steam, and 0.7.0 was released.

Recent Times

As bobbens' personal life settled and he came back to more active development, a flux of new contributors helped accelerate the development once more, leading to the release of 0.8.0. However, given how ambitious Naev is, and the fact that although the engine has come far along, the storyline and missions are still very very pre-alpha, we still have another 20-30 years of development ahead of us.