Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator

I'm probably the geekiest geek we have, so when I heard about this, I got pretty excited.

So, what is this thing?

It's a LAN game. One computer is the server, and runs the Main Viewer (a suitably large monitor or something).

Arrayed around the room are three to six people. If you have the free demo, you're limited to three folks (helm, weapons and the captain, although you could have spectators in the room). The seats, five of which are computerizes are as follows - Helm, Weapons, Engineering, Science and Communications. The Captain has no computer.

What do you do?

The simulation is that of a spaceship bridge. The Captain makes decisions based off of available information, and the crew executes the mission, usually, blowing something up. There's various scenarios you can rig up, or you can simply turn on invasion mode and kill as much as you can until you blow up.

The Helm flies the ship, controlling speed, heading and docking with friendly space stations.

Weapons fires the weaponry of the ship, selects which torpedoes to load, and which frequency to tune the beam weapons to. He also raises and lowers shields.

Engineering manipulates the powerplant of the ship, directs damage control efforts and overcharges certain ship systems as needed.

Science scans the area, identifies threats and areas of interest and provides detailed target information.

Communications contacts friendly ships and stations, can order enemy ships to surrender (or simply taunt them) and can tell neutral ships to clear out of the area. They also receive distress calls.

So the people with the computers manning a station actually play the game. The guy playing as the Captain plays through them, since he doesn't have any controls on his own. There is provision for the Captain to have a non-interactive map of the region, though.

In a way, it's like Freelancer, only that instead of everyone flying their own individual ships, everyone is working together to fly ONE ship. And hopefully, have fun.

There's some hilarious youtube videos running around; noob crews are quite entertaining.

There is provision for Bridge versus Bridge action, meaning that if you had another bridge crew elsewhere, you could organize a ship to ship action, pitting one group of players against the other.

if can try to make it work during the lanparty, but it would not be the main attraction till next lan party if enough people are intrested.

All I'll need for the demo is three machines - one to run it, and two to log into it. Then I'd need two volenteers, one to fly Helm, and a second to run Weapons. The other three stations are disabled for the demo.

Might be something to do if we're waiting for folks to show up, iunno.

(which means I can run the demo by myself, with the hardware I have, if it was at my new place - which it isn't. Saw a vid with an Asus EEE PC netbook running it, so it's not very demanding on computer resources. If you can run DirectX 9, you can run this.)

Cough up forty bucks, pass the full client to whoever, and we're cooking with gasoline.

So is one full copy good enough for everyone or do we all need to pay $40 each? Is doing the demo video only get one person the copy of the game?

No, only one person needs to buy the game. Then they install it on whoever want to run it on whatever machines they have laying around. Be that six people or sixty.

But everyone who wanted to play it would need the full install. Or demo version, if we were cheapskates.

Here's a demo-play vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1piHx81ZWA

THIS WAS LOTS OF FUN.

Looking forward to doing this again, but we need regulars to form a good group (and if we had two groups, you can do PvP). Yes, you can double up certain stations if you don't have a full crew, but it's much more fun with the complete set.

So, who's in for this? As far as I know, I can do whatever station, the missus likes Science, we have David Jonathan who likes Helm, and a bunch of Roman's co-workers who did everything else.

Are there others interested in this? Or is it a bit too geeky for most folks?

I like it and would want to only play Artemis the whole night. So yes this is a recruitment effort. We need at least 6 to 9 people for the next lanparty. All other games will planned on a different lanparty. So who wants in on the game? Again the next lanparty will not have other games. I would actually want play this time. I ended up helping everyone and their mother last time instead of playing. I want to thank Jason for letting me play for 20 minutes on Unreal though. It was fun.

Sounds like a plan. You can definitely count me in.

The Missus is also definitely in.

Some thoughts I had: give out points to those who participate in a game (defined as starting the server and running it to completion)as a named crewmember, so that players earn points over time. If you run two stations, you get twice the points (more work).

This tracks their progress in mastering the game. Once a crewmember has twenty points, all of them from playing one station, they're now given priority seating for that position, to reflect their expertise. Also, points determine rank. Should the usual Captain not be available for whatever, or simply want to go use the can, the second-in-command then takes the Conn (from their station) and runs the ship until the CO returns.

For the sake of example, I have six points, having played five games, one of them as Helm and Weapons combined. David Jonathan ran Helm at least four times. I ran out to grab drinks, so I'm sure I missed at least one game.

The Captain also has the ability to award bonus points to crewmembers who put on a good show/did really well/whatever during a match. May be a vote amongst crew, just to make it fair.

Then make up a rank table so that at x amount of points, you're promoted to Grand Poobah Master Fifth Class or whatever (could use naval officer ranks just 'cuz they're not that complicated).

If we end up with a seventh person, we could designate them as Gamemaster and have them throw problems at the crew. The GM can spawn stuff and basically controls the map.

Sounds cool.

Romanovski wrote:I like it and would want to only play Artemis the whole night. So yes this is a recruitment effort. We need at least 6 to 9 people for the next lanparty. All other games will planned on a different lanparty. So who wants in on the game? Again the next lanparty will not have other games. I would actually want play this time. I ended up helping everyone and their mother last time instead of playing. I want to thank Jason for letting me play for 20 minutes on Unreal though. It was fun.

Who momma did you help? Don't forget to wipe!

Probably Angela. Well, not really, that was my job, since I just HAD to bring my kids to the LAN party.

Looking forward to doing the next run. You have two players standing by for that.

...now I just have to figure out a point system...

Okay, the session on Saturday went great.

..except for that one cloak-capable ship that trolled us, and those Energizer Bunny Torpedoes that kept chasing us down. Oh, and almost running out of power while dealing with said cloaked ship.

Good times. Will have to do that again shortly.

Trying to figure out how to run DirectDraw on the Dell 4100's nVidia 2Go graphics card, all 32MB of it. Artemis bombs out when executed with a DirectDraw error.

...curious what chipset the 2Go video card is, and if it's even replaceable, like a mini-PCI card or something. But with RAM pegged out at 576MB, I might be wasting my time with this.

Need a power brick for the Runt's netbook; we lost it in the move.

I will be busy piecing the Desktop together tonight, if the Case showed up today. I hope to get it all together except hard drive and see how BIOS likes everything.

Man just throw it in the rubbish already, brah.

At approximately 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969 in the Stanford Research Institute, the first precursor of the Internet was activated for the first time. In the intervening 43 years the usage of the internet has spread to the point that as of June 6, 2011 the United Nations counts internet access as a basic human right. The most advanced educational and research tool ever constructed, enabling global communication on a never before seen scale. Social networking has spread to the point where the degree of separation between any two individuals is declining faster that the population is growing, so we are witnessing the formation of a truly global, international, unified and anarchistic-democratic society. We are alive at a time when humanity is on the cusp of moving from tribal nationalism to complete international connectivity.

And with this free old laptop, all I need to do to partake in that new global society is to waltz into Starbucks or Third Cup, order a big cup of java, plug in my powerbrick, and connect to a treasure trove of free information. And you wish me to throw it away? You might as well condone book burning.

...I just wish it ran Artemis - Captains Map or something would be all I'd use it for.

I don't even...

As it stands, I have four comps that can run the game - well, currently only ONE, since:

-The Runt's netbook powerbrick died and we need to buy a replacement.
-Ang ripped the HDD out of her Laptop for use in the Desktop, but maybe I can make it work with scavenged hard drives. Might use something other than Windows 7 Professional on the hard drive for it, not sure. Maybe Linux for the lulz. O HAY, I KNO, LETZ USE DOS.
-Said Desktop needs a SATA cable so we can even put the HDD into it, so it's a footrest.

...and my computer trudges on...

bro, all the uber people use windows 3.1 don't know what ur talkin bout

Bah, 3.1 was just a shell slapped over DOS anyway. Can't tell you how many times I closed Windows on accident and ended up staring at the DOS prompt.

Windows 95 was revolutionary for two reasons - one, becuase it totally sucked, and two, it did away with slapping a GUI over DOS. The GUI was the Operating System.

Don't insult my first OS! Well of course I used DOS just as much. Mostly to launched Wolfenstein 3D!

Bluh, I'm sick of being sick all the time.

Anyway, it appears that my thermal grease redo is a go, since it appears to run a whole lot cooler now. Might be able to toss the bottom cover back on and call it good to go.

Server lag on my server appears to be better, too, the benefit of running it on an i7 desktop. Only managed to get it to work with 6 gigs of RAM, but for all the hardware that we have in it (grab bag of junk), it mostly idles. She cranked up the graphics to full-blown and saw really good FPS numbers. Is impressed.

Anyway.

We'll be trying to get a sitter so we can partake in some Artemis action this Friday. Probably bringing my laptop and maybe the Netbook. If we can't find a sitter, I'll be coming by myself, although we might get lucky and have a sitter.

Romanovski, any idea how many will show? I assume that you'll have a crew set up in the livingroom with a second (if we have enough come out) in the garage? Or maybe your office nook, if it's a partial crew.

Only thing is a lack of command for the second crew, unless Troy comes. Your second crew need not bee full-staff, either.

Are we having a bunch of noobs come out? Might be better to do a cooperative thing with two ships, as opposed to PvP the first run or two. Two ships working in concert? Could ratchet up the diffuculty to 5 (although with noob crewmembers, this could be more than they could chew). Maybe do a level 2-3 run (since level 1 is for CREAMPUFFS) to get their feet wet, then go PvP.

Dunno. Just my two cents, since I'll probably have to babysit a crew.

Typical LAN rules apply, yes? Bring your gear, bring a cable, bring refreshments, and bring a good attitude?

Okay, so I think that Saturday's takeover of the CKC side went pretty good. Roman figured out how to run two ships at once, which was pretty awesome. We had Jarrod, Roman and myself (a skeleton crew, basically) in Artemis, and a glut of kids (and my wife) on Intrepid.

Captain Carter of the Intrepid engaged a large enemy battlegroup at approx. 1720 hours in sector D2, but due to crew inexperience, crew casualties and massive battle damage, was rendered immobile and written off as a total loss. Despite DS1 being just ten thousand meters away, Intrepid could neither move under her own power or even maneuver.

Captain Williams moved Artemis to assist, and since the helmsman on Artemis was also cross-qualified as an Engineering Officer, was able to render battle-damage assistance, so that the Engineering crew on Intrepid was able to get the powerplant operational again (the problem was due to no power being allocated to engines or maneuvering - allocating energy to those systems got the ship moving once again). However, Intrepid only served as a mostly-stationary missile platform until Artemis dealt with all remaining enemies in the region, pulling in some enemies so that Intrepid could contribute to the battle by firing off her remaining missiles.

Following this action, we moved back to one crew and set up in a nice configuration around a single table, with the big screen at one end. Jarrod found this to be more or less ideal, since the entire crew was more or less in one spot - seating arrangements are most important for proper communications amongst the crew and captain, and even with newbie crewmembers filling auxiliary positions, we did pretty well.

I was looking forward to a chance to command (having played Helm, Weapons, Engineering and Science at least once each that day), but we had to get the kids home...

http://artemiswiki.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/59336027/TSN%20Officer%27s%20Handbook%20V1.pdf

This is a good read. Feels like pros wrote it (that or they're prior service).