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Stars! Nova

Introduction

Star! Nova is still in development (as of Oct 22 2020).

Stars! Nova is (or will be) a direct clone of Stars! intended to update this no-longer supported game and make it more accessible and enjoyable for future players. Stars! is (or was) an advanced, interstellar, turn based strategy game and a member of 4X genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) of PC games. It was written by Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride with help from Jeffrey Krauss (collectively known as the Jeffs) and published in 1995. It has kept people addicted for years, and still supports a loyal player community. Stars! can still be run on a modern PC by installing it in a Virtual Machine that has an XP operating system. A notable feature of Stars! is the Ship Designer and Battle Plan strategies which (when combined) affect battle outcomes greatly.

The stars-nova project is not yet at beta, but has implemented a large subset of the original Stars! functionality. For now, the information here is primarily aimed at developers and community members interested in contributing to the stars-nova project.

Nova Client GUI Screenshot

Download Link

Getting Started

The [Getting Started] guide provides essential information for installing and starting stars-nova. As stars-nova is pre-beta it still requires some effort to get the game properly setup.

Player Manual

Currently there is no Player Manual for Stars! Nova. Game play is intentionally very similar to Stars!

Manuals for Stars! can be found at either Stars! Wiki, or see the original manual and reference guide.

Forums

For help in getting started with Stars! Nova see the Help Forum

You can also use the Open Discussion Forum for any comments, queries or feedback. You should also post here if you you would like to contribute to stars-nova.

Development

You can also see what the developers are up to in the Developers Forum. Posting here is restricted to registered developers. For more information on stars-nova development see the [Developer Documentation] or the stars-nova Project on Source Forge.

If you would like to help out with Stars! Nova as a developer the best place to start is the [Developer Primer].

There is also a great article here on how to help out with open source projects for non-programmers.

Project Admins:

Daniel Vale

Other Resources

You'll find some interesting discussions on Stars! at the AutoHost Forum.
In particular, you'll find interesting discussions on Stars! clones in the FreeStars Forum.