A fan rebuild of EV Nova, the 2002 space classic — written from scratch in Swift so it runs natively on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV. Unofficial, unaffiliated, and bring-your-own-data. See Legal.
EV Nova (Ambrosia Software / ATMOS, 2002) is one of the deepest space trading-and-combat games ever made — and it's PowerPC/Carbon code. It won't launch on a modern Mac, it never came to phones or tablets, and the one serious open-source revival went quiet in 2023.
NOVA Swift rebuilds it from scratch in Swift: resource parser, flight, combat, AI, missions, economy, and UI. Not a wrapper, not an emulator. Point it at a copy of EV Nova you already own and it plays your data natively, with touch controls built for a screen you hold.
Runs today on macOS, iPadOS, iOS, and tvOS, all tested on real devices. A Godot port for Linux and Windows is in progress. AI was used to help build it; every change is checked against the real game's behavior.
| Flight | Galaxy map |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Touch controls and the classic status bar. | Services, governments, hypergates and wormholes. |
| Story map | Multiplayer |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Every campaign in your data, drawn against your pilot's progress. | Co-op lobbies over local Wi-Fi or Game Center. |
| Plug-in store |
|---|
 |
| Community plug-ins and total conversions, installed in-game. |
Things EV Nova never shipped with, all of them optional:
| Story Guide | Multiplayer stakes |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Every campaign in your data as a step list — where you are, what's locked, and which mission unlocks it. Reads your plug-ins too. | Host a co-op session and set the rules: PvP on or off, real damage or friendly sparring, friendly fire, permadeath, player trading. |
| Presentation presets | Gameplay dials |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Classic, Enhanced or Nova Swift as one click — then flip any individual modern touch on or off. Classic is pure 2002. | Difficulty, traffic density from 0.5× to 8×, auto-target, auto-landing, tutorial hints and a flight-training range. |
| Plug-in manager | Debug suite |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Import a plug-in or .zip, reorder the load stack, toggle any of them off — total conversions and small tweaks side by side. |
Filtered live logs, a frame-time breakdown by subsystem, a ship/planet inspector and a command console. |
It's 1177. The Federation is rotting from the inside, the Auroran Empire is tearing itself apart over honor, the Polaris won't say what they know, and you're in a Shuttle with a few thousand credits and no particular plans.
- Fly and fight — the momentum-heavy flight the original was built on: you
don't turn, you swing the nose around and keep going the way you were. Lock a
target, strip its shields, watch the ion cannons leave it drifting. The ships
shooting back run EV Nova's own
düde/flëtdecision tables, reconstructed rather than rewritten as scripts. (docs/AI.md) - Explore and trade — hyperjump between hundreds of systems on real fuel and work the spread, then trade the Shuttle up through a Starbridge to something with real guns on it.
- Play the story — pick a scenario and take the missions people offer you. Fly for the Federation or defect to the Rebellion, get pulled into the Auroran succession, find out what the Vell-os are. Campaigns branch; the news reacts.
- Fight dirty, and lose for real — board a disabled freighter for its cargo or fly the hull home with a prize crew. Demand tribute from a planet and it pays you daily. Shoot the wrong ship and the government remembers.
- Meet the locals — named captains with their own lines turn up in the shipping lanes, hired escorts draw a wage whether they're useful or not, and there's always the holovid races to throw credits at.
- Play together — the one thing the 2002 original never had. Your friend keeps their own galaxy and pilot, but in a shared system you fly it together: same NPCs, same fight, real damage. PvP stakes are yours to set. (docs/MULTIPLAYER.md)
Anything that wasn't in the 2002 original can be switched off.
- Touch controls built for a handheld screen, not a desktop UI on glass.
- Full controller support — twin-stick flight, every button remappable, on all four platforms. (docs/CONTROLS.md)
- A live story map of every campaign in your data.
- An in-app plug-in store for community plug-ins and total conversions.
- iCloud data sync — import once, and your other devices restore it automatically. (docs/ICLOUD_SYNC.md)
- Apple TV with a 10-foot UI, controller required. (docs/TVOS.md)
- Classic / Enhanced toggles to opt into the modern layer piece by piece.
- A built-in debug suite — AI visualization, live state editor, stress test.
You can play the whole game today, start to finish, on all four platforms. Flight and combat, the economy, branching campaigns, boarding and capture, planetary domination, named captains, hired escorts, explosions and particles — the systems that make EV Nova EV Nova are in and playable. Call it ~90% of a full port.
What's left:
- Fidelity — AI, flight feel, spawn cadence, and the hundred small behaviors that separate "complete" from "hard to tell apart from the original."
- Hardening — bugs, crashes, and performance as more people play on more devices.
- Multiplayer polish — wider multi-device testing, finer PvP toggles, and smoother authority handoff when a host drops mid-session.
- Smarter opt-in AI — better evasion, coordinated fleets, ammo discipline, behind the same brain the base AI uses.
- Optional HD art and audio — layered over the originals, never replacing them.
Found something off? The issue tracker is the best place to say so. Plans live in docs/ROADMAP.md and docs/MODERNIZATION.md.
The simulation, data layer, and story runtime are portable Swift with almost no
Apple coupling — only the UI and rendering are SwiftUI/SpriteKit. So a second
frontend on Godot 4, bridged through
SwiftGodot, reaches Linux and
Windows without forking any game logic: both builds run the same World.step.
In progress. The Godot project flies a ship on the engine's real flight model at the same fixed 30 Hz tick the Apple build uses, and renders ships, planets, shots, beams, asteroids and explosions decoded from your data — plus a working HUD, radar, target lock, landing/launch and a first spaceport screen (the commodity exchange). Sound, the galaxy map, the rest of the spaceport, and the story runtime are next. Status in docs/GODOT_LAYER.md.
Builds for all four platforms are live on TestFlight — one link, no build step:
→ testflight.apple.com/join/3FBzwwq1
You supply your own EV Nova data.
We ship the code; you supply the data. EV Nova's content is owned by ATMOS, so
this repo contains zero copyrighted game data and never will. NovaSwiftKit
reads your own legally-owned copy at runtime — classic resource forks, .ndat,
or the modern BRGR .rez container — the same model as OpenMW and OpenRA. The
reasoning is in docs/CHARTER.md, which governs every decision
in the repo.
Requires a Mac with Xcode and its command-line tools. Your EV Nova data stays on your machine — it's git-ignored and never uploaded.
# 1 · clone
git clone https://github.com/SirStig/MacOS-iOS-iPadOS-EV-Nova.git
cd MacOS-iOS-iPadOS-EV-Nova
# 2 · fetch open-source dependencies
scripts/setup.sh
# 3 · add your EV Nova data into data/base/ (see docs/GET_THE_DATA.md)
# 4 · (optional) free community plug-ins
scripts/fetch-plugins.sh
# 5 · quick check from the command line
swift build && swift test
# …then open the app in Xcode to play:
open app/NovaSwift.xcodeprojPick a target and hit Run. Data steps: docs/GET_THE_DATA.md.
docs/ Charter, roadmap, architecture, data-format reference
Sources/
NovaSwiftKit/ Data layer — resource parsing, typed decoders, sprite/PICT decode
NovaSwiftEngine/ Live sim — flight, combat, AI, spawning, diplomacy
NovaSwiftStory/ Mission/story runtime — mïsn/crön/NCB engine
NovaSwiftPluginStore/ Plug-in catalog + download/install pipeline
novaswift-extract/ CLI inspector/harness that drives the libraries end-to-end
Tests/ Unit tests per library
app/NovaSwift/ The multiplatform SwiftUI/SpriteKit app (the game itself)
godot/ Godot 4 frontend + SwiftGodot bridge (Linux/Windows, in progress)
data/base/ ⬅ your legally-owned EV Nova data goes here (git-ignored)
Start with the Charter — the authoritative goal. Then Roadmap, Architecture, and Data format.
Deep dives: AI · ship system · missions & story · multiplayer · mobile & plug-ins · controls · tvOS · iCloud sync · Godot port · reverse-engineering
EV Nova and its data are copyrighted, and this project never redistributes them — you supply your own legally-obtained copy.
- Base game data → you must own EV Nova; the tools only extract from your copy. It is never bundled here.
- Community plug-ins → freely distributed by their authors; the fetch script and in-app store pull only free downloads, under their own licenses.
- This project's code → open source (see LICENSE).
A fan interoperability / preservation effort in the spirit of OpenRA, OpenTTD, and devilutionX. Unaffiliated with and unendorsed by Ambrosia Software, ATMOS, or the original authors.