Ah, EV. I must have sunk hundreds of thousands of hours into those games across the years.
The plug-in community was what really made the game come to life: Tim E. Isle's Empire series sprawled into a trilogy of total conversion plug-ins and two spin-offs, each of which had hundreds of completely new missions, systems, ships and weapons that were essentially standalone games. Martin Turner's The Frozen Heart was practically an interactive novel in the form of a plug-in for EV Override, that features one of the most novel forms of ship combat I've ever experienced. And when the teased expansion for EV Nova, New Breed failed to materialize, ARPIA basically took its place; the
Arpian Sylvatha is still one of the most bad-ass ships I've ever flown in an EV scenario.
It's such a shame that Ambrosia Software just...evaporated, with nothing so much as a whisper of what happened to it. I really wish one day that someone will port their games over to more modern OSs and release their games on a place like GOG.