9 ms·

Thorium – A Starship Bridge Simulator

300 points by matijash 4y ago

dontbesquare 4y ago
This sounds like such an awesome project! "Bridge Simulators, like Thorium Nova, are cooperative live-action role-playing games set in space. Players act out the roles of a spaceship bridge crew, such as communications officer, navigator, or captain. They work together to complete a set of mission objectives. Thorium Nova adds a flight director, who sits behind the scenes to act as a game master, controlling what happens inside the simulation, acting out the roles of aliens the crew encounters, and guiding the crew through the storyline. Many bridge simulators, like Artemis or Empty Epsilon, focus only on arcade action. Thorium Nova attempts to bridge the gap by offering rich stories in a dynamic environment, while staying simple enough for anyone to enjoy among friends in their living room."
starkparker 4y ago
Thorium is great; it's closer to a virtual tabletop for starship RPGs than a standalone game, built around creating interactive narratives. That sets it apart from the more straightforward game-style bridge sims, like Artemis[1] and EmptyEpsilon[2], which have scriptable scenarios with narrative elements but have more fundamentally game-focused mechanics. All of these get used in a lot of fun ways for live events beyond their design, too. Thorium's "family tree" comes from interactive events at planetariums, and EmptyEpsilon, being open-source with an HTTP API and game-master screen for directly manipulating live game state and pretending to be ships, became a popular front-end for European LARPs.[3] 1: https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ 2: https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ 3: https://www.odysseuslarp.com/blog/steering-the-starship-empty-epsilon https://www.odysseuslarp.com/blog/steering-the-starship-empt...
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
NGL this seems like an Ender's Game scenario waiting to happen
ashton314 4y ago
Ah… I've been on that space ship simulator. (Voyager) I sat in that elevated nook—the engineer's position, naturally. So much fun. Going to the space center was the most coveted birthday party experience. I was mildly disappointed to learn that the whole thing was not an iron-clad simulator (i.e. everything I did as engineer was just busy work—ship systems could still function if the GM decided they would) but once I got into D&D later as an adult, I appreciated the setup much much more. I'm going to have to try this out some time…
- alexanderson 4y ago
  That ship is still the gold-standard of simulator design. The two decks, the many levels on the bridge itself, the nooks and crannies, the two viewscreens, the separate brig and sickbay - ah, it takes me back. The goal for Thorium Nova is to create that iron-clad simulator that you're looking for, where every crew member's job has a real impact on the overall simulation. Right now I'm working on the power grid simulation, which will have huge effects on the rest of the ship. The quartermaster will have to keep fuel and coolant stocked in the reactor room, the engineer will have to monitor the reactor's usage and heat to make sure there's enough capacity for an emergency, and someone else will be in charge of answering the captain's call to "reroute all power to the engines!" Building these simulations is an interesting balance of realism and gameplay enjoyment. Hopefully I get each of those right.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It'll definitely be important to allow that to be overridden (either by just flagging a station "does the right thing" or by building some AIs to fill in) so the game is usable with fewer than the required number of players. But that can come later (last I checked, most bridge simulators don't have that so plenty of time to get around to it). Regarding engines: A random tidbit I picked up about nuclear submarines is that the reactors actually require quite a bit of manual tuning and observation. This was intentional: especially back in the day of the first nuclear subs, automation hardware would have been bulky and (spacewise) expensive, and the alternative was to leave the systems manually-tuned and train sailors to do the job. From a safety perspective, one of course chooses automation... But war has a different safety perspective, and the great thing about a sailor is that when they aren't busy running the reactor they can do something else. They can also react to a captain's needs and get creative in a way that an automated system can't (a major concern for the design was that a captain could be hamstrung in a sea battle trying to get the sub to do something that the safety interlocks disallowed). That aspect of real vessels, that it's possible to "redline" them and run them in a configuration that is temporarily viable but risks damage or makes them more vulnerable in some other way, is an interesting piece to play with in a game environment as a risk players can choose to take.
alexanderson 4y ago
Hey friends. Thorium's developer here. Happy to answer any questions or give more insights. Thorium Classic has been in development since 2016 and is primarily intended to be used in brick-and-mortar space centers out in Utah, like the Space Place[1] and CMSC[2]. As such, there isn't a lot of content and documentation to get newcomers up-and-running with it. Thorium Nova is currently under development and is intended to be used by a broader audience. It will include much more content, pre-built missions, and more integrated tutorials. The project is open-source, so anyone is welcome to contribute[3] and follow along with the progress of each alpha. 1: https://www.thespaceplace.org https://www.thespaceplace.org 2: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org 3: https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova
- matthewfcarlson 4y ago
  While I haven't played any bridge simulator, I am personally a huge fan of collaborative experiences that tech can enable. There are some many interesting things that can be done when you augment a human's storytelling capability with an environment that can change with their story, offering a way for the audience to interact in a meaningful way with each other and the story itself. This seems like a wonderful project with a lot of love. Keep going :)
  - alexanderson 4y ago
    Thanks for the encouragement, and the reminder of what makes this project special.
- myself248 4y ago
  This looks like a lot of fun, I've played some Artemis but not explored the other offerings in the space. One thing that's always struck me as weirdly difficult with the spaceship-bridge genre, but wholeheartedly embraced by generic flight-sims, is custom control surfaces! Everyone wants pedals and knobs and sliders and a big red button in the middle of the console. Kerbal players are notorious for hooking up the most bizarre junk they can find as in-game controls, and the game is richer for it. I saw mention of DMX lighting, but nothing about mapping random HID controls... Another thing we did playing Artemis, was put the "engineering" station in another room, with walkie-talkies so you had to actually "call down to engineering" to ask them to do things. That should be Teamspeak or something now, I suppose, but having the various parts of the ship in physically separate places (perhaps across the internet?) really adds something, IMHO.
surfsvammel 4y ago
I truly hope this project live long and prosper. (And I am saying that honestly, not trying to be Reddit-isch)
unixhero 4y ago
Some screenshots and pricing would be nice!
- rbanffy 4y ago
  It’s open source. I believe you can self-host it.
  - unixhero 4y ago
    Sure, but I won't self host something, and basically contribute as a tester, without knowing what it will look like. This is due to how I value my time.
    - alexanderson 4y ago
      Self-host might not be the right way to think about it. It's more of a video game with a built-in web server, like Age of Empires where one player hosts the game for everyone else. The only difference is all the other players only need a web browser to connect. But you can play the game from a single computer if you want.
- alexanderson 4y ago
  It's under development, so screenshots are few at this point. It's also open-source, so it's free to download! Alpha are in the Github releases page.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
Looks awesome, congrats to the devs. Sidenote as a nuclear engineer: thanks for messing up all my scouring "news" alerts with that name choice.
- alexanderson 4y ago
  True story: When I was coming up with the name I found a HN article about Thorium reactors, thought it was cool, and it conveniently fit into the naming scheme for other simulator controls I've worked on.
kjuulh 4y ago
Sounds super fun! Nitpick: the padding on the bullet points are a bit messed up =D
caseysoftware 4y ago
I did one of these at THAT Conference a few years back with a few friends. In our case, we had the main display and then each person had their own console with their area - weapons, nav, engineering, and science - and the captain had to call out commands and make the whole thing work. We walked in thinking it would be fun but almost silly.. and walked out drained because it was intense. You don't have time to do anything than monitor your own display and make sure you're ready for a variety of things that could happen next. Obviously, there were zero stakes (other than embarrassing yourself) but had a new perspective on what naval battle may be like. If you have the chance to do it - especially in person with the big displays - do it.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The one takeaway I’ve gotten from bridge simulators VS normal video games is how hard it is to coordinate people doing different tasks and looking at different interfaces. Even in a game like PUBG that requires quite a bit of communication, you’ve all got the same type of view from different angles. Having a totally different view makes communication much harder. I can’t imagine how they run a bridge in real life — although as professionals they must have a ton of skills and training at it.
  - starkparker 4y ago
    The training can look unsurprisingly a lot like a spaceship bridgesim: https://youtu.be/oUCoDIrdR_4?t=33 https://youtu.be/oUCoDIrdR_4?t=33
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Oh yeah — I got to tour a bridge simulator while interviewing at some defense contractor (didn’t get hired, though, maybe they could tell I’d want to load a spaceship bridge simulator up on the thing). It is kind of funny, I actually got a “seasick” feeling on it. The simulated “deck” didn’t move, but the image through the “windows” did, I think having grown up near the coast I’d been on enough boats that my brain expected the floor to start moving to keep up with the horizon.
huevosabio 4y ago
I would love this with the setup of the Expanse and somehow combined with the combat of Children of a Dead Earth.
- alexanderson 4y ago
  The game is under active development, and I'm trying to keep an open governance model, where anyone can contribute ideas and shape the direction of development. If you want, feel free to pop into the Github discussions to propose how to build these kinds of mechanics into the game!
ryanianian 4y ago
I haven't played Thorium, but bridge sims are a lot of fun. Especially when playing with colleagues or other engineers. I've found non-tech people can get frustrated and bored with them, but my 70yo non-techie mother is in love with the engineering station of Artemis. It is a lot of work to play the Captain role, and in any event the game is tiring after about an hour. What's really fun is having everyone in the room engaged with a central game (played on the big TV in the room) on their own phones/computers. Usually group games aren't cooperative or interactive to the entire group at once. Jackbox has a few coop BYOD party games, but I really wish this product-space had more options. There's also the case of venues having realistic bridge-sims that are kinda like an escape room (in setting/biz model). Show up to the set and cooperate to solve the task. This seems to be the use-case for Thorium classic (the predecessor to TFA). I've seen these at flight museums. They're a load of fun, but probably rather expensive to setup and run (and still tiring).
- skittlebrau 4y ago
  Spaceteam is kind of a "Jackbox bridge simulator" if you haven't tried it. It's definitely silly and not serious, and in my experience can be enjoyed by a pretty wide audience. https://spaceteam.ca/ https://spaceteam.ca/
  - alexanderson 4y ago
    Definitely one of my inspirations. Spaceteam is an entirely different kind of chaos. I love it.
bovermyer 4y ago
I've played Artemis before. Thorium's promise of a "game master" and a narrative outside of combat sounds interesting. Incidentally, here's a link to the latest alpha: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alpha.9 https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....
anononaut 4y ago
Maaan! Bridge sims like Star Trek, Artemis, and Empty Epsilon have been some of the most fun I've ever had playing games with my friends in my entire life. Mind you, we play it as a drinking game with plenty of space shanty singing and other LARP parodies. As a genre, it has my highest recommendation above all others, but it's hard to get it together.
stuff4ben 4y ago
HAH! I did exactly this with my daughters when they were like 8 or 9. Except I just printed out maps on a piece of paper and we used everyday items for the spaceship. I had a golfclub I used to steer the ship, we had walkie talkies that were scanners too when we explored planets, and I think one of them used a collander as a radar. We cozied up in one of their twin beds with the blankets surrounding us. I basically DM'd the entire thing and they loved it. Weekend mornings while their mom slept in, they'd say "Daddy, can we play space ship?" and then they'd go around the house grabbing things to use as controls for it. Such great memories! Edit: forgot to mention, I would have loved to have Thorium when we were playing. But then again, I loved their imagination.
- matijash 4y ago
  This is an awesome idea, stealing it :)
- mysterydip 4y ago
  When my daughter was ~3, we would use her pop-up fire engine tent as our spaceship, then hop out onto a planet after landing and pick some random stuffed animals to represent aliens. "pickle planet puppy" was a favorite recurring character. lots of earthquakes and volcanoes to create urgency to get back to the ship. Little kids' imaginations are powerful!
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > Little kids' imaginations are powerful! So are the parents’ when they put their mind to it. I’m having a lot of fun playing ‘find the invisible boy’ every morning.
matijash 4y ago
an important question - what did you build Thorium in? How happy are you with it?
- alexanderson 4y ago
  It's built with Node.js and Electron on the backend, a bespoke JSON-based database, a React frontend built with Vite, three.js and React Three Fiber for the 3D views, and an adapted network layer based on tRPC that supports live queries over WebSockets, so data updates are automatically propagated to all subscribed clients. My biggest regret is the database. During gameplay, the database needs to be in memory so the game loop has as little latency as possible, so the database is just for persistence when the app closes. I really should use something built for this purpose, like sqlite. But the database engine I'm using is designed to be transparent and convenient. It uses a JavaScript proxy to track any time a data mutation is made to the in-memory database, and dumps that to the JSON file on a throttle. Everything else is meeting my needs just fine.
andrecarini 4y ago
I'm interested but I have no idea what this actually is, after reading the whole page. > You can play it as part of a larger event, or with your friends in your living room. So this is a video game with couch co-op? > part of a larger event There's an online mode? > The USS Voyager Mk II Is this a simulator that requires you to be in that room from the picture? --- Is this like Space Station 13?
- alexanderson 4y ago
  It's a networked video game. If you're in the living room, folks are expected to bring their own computer. Each computer maps to a station on the bridge of a spaceship, like navigator or tactical. The hope is that the game can be hosted over the internet through port-forwarding or on a VPC. That "part of a larger event" is actually in reference to running the game over a LAN at a convention. The USS Voyager is a physical bridge simulator in Utah, USA that uses the Thorium Classic software, the precursor to Thorium Nova.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    I still don't understand how the game is driven itself, maybe this is more for people who are already familiar with bridge Sims? Do you purchase campaign models and then have a virtual dungeon Master interact with all the players to present scenarios in more of a DND style? Or is this kind of stuff automated and there are levels that are connected to the bridge sim? EDIT: never mind I read the article itself, I don't know how early in development this is but some kind of demonstration would go a long way towards promoting this project even if the demonstration is bare-bones and impromptu.
shaunxcode 4y ago
My first thought was - this reminds me of the space center I went to when I was a kid! It was in pleasant grove utah and built on mac classics with hypercard for the software! Then I scroll down "Alex started working on starship bridge simulators when he worked at the McAuliffe Space Education Center in Pleasant Grove, Utah". Small world!
stuntkite 4y ago
I used to have a pretty sweet Artemis setup. Projector main screen, a central dedicated server and a few tablets. That was really fun. You could get anyone of any age to play. I should set that up again. And I guess make some friends.
jshaqaw 4y ago
Wow a whole genre of geeky awesome I knew nothing about. This is why I love Hacker News. This looks like a blast.
red-iron-pine 4y ago
Kinda reminds me of Highfleet but cleaner
hubblekeat 4y ago
Hi! I also volunteered at CMSEC, don't know if you remember me though. Glad to see you getting good attention on HN.

300 points by matijash 4y ago

This sounds like such an awesome project! "Bridge Simulators, like Thorium Nova, are cooperative live-action role-playing games set in space. Players act out the roles of a spaceship bridge crew, such as communications officer, navigator, or captain. They work together to complete a set of mission objectives. Thorium Nova adds a flight director, who sits behind the scenes to act as a game master, controlling what happens inside the simulation, acting out the roles of aliens the crew encounters, and guiding the crew through the storyline. Many bridge simulators, like Artemis or Empty Epsilon, focus only on arcade action. Thorium Nova attempts to bridge the gap by offering rich stories in a dynamic environment, while staying simple enough for anyone to enjoy among friends in their living room."

starkparker 4y ago

Thorium is great; it's closer to a virtual tabletop for starship RPGs than a standalone game, built around creating interactive narratives. That sets it apart from the more straightforward game-style bridge sims, like Artemis[1] and EmptyEpsilon[2], which have scriptable scenarios with narrative elements but have more fundamentally game-focused mechanics. All of these get used in a lot of fun ways for live events beyond their design, too. Thorium's "family tree" comes from interactive events at planetariums, and EmptyEpsilon, being open-source with an HTTP API and game-master screen for directly manipulating live game state and pretending to be ships, became a popular front-end for European LARPs.[3] 1: https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ 2: https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ 3: https://www.odysseuslarp.com/blog/steering-the-starship-empty-epsilon https://www.odysseuslarp.com/blog/steering-the-starship-empt...

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

NGL this seems like an Ender's Game scenario waiting to happen

ashton314 4y ago

Ah… I've been on that space ship simulator. (Voyager) I sat in that elevated nook—the engineer's position, naturally. So much fun. Going to the space center was the most coveted birthday party experience. I was mildly disappointed to learn that the whole thing was not an iron-clad simulator (i.e. everything I did as engineer was just busy work—ship systems could still function if the GM decided they would) but once I got into D&D later as an adult, I appreciated the setup much much more. I'm going to have to try this out some time…

alexanderson 4y ago
That ship is still the gold-standard of simulator design. The two decks, the many levels on the bridge itself, the nooks and crannies, the two viewscreens, the separate brig and sickbay - ah, it takes me back. The goal for Thorium Nova is to create that iron-clad simulator that you're looking for, where every crew member's job has a real impact on the overall simulation. Right now I'm working on the power grid simulation, which will have huge effects on the rest of the ship. The quartermaster will have to keep fuel and coolant stocked in the reactor room, the engineer will have to monitor the reactor's usage and heat to make sure there's enough capacity for an emergency, and someone else will be in charge of answering the captain's call to "reroute all power to the engines!" Building these simulations is an interesting balance of realism and gameplay enjoyment. Hopefully I get each of those right.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It'll definitely be important to allow that to be overridden (either by just flagging a station "does the right thing" or by building some AIs to fill in) so the game is usable with fewer than the required number of players. But that can come later (last I checked, most bridge simulators don't have that so plenty of time to get around to it). Regarding engines: A random tidbit I picked up about nuclear submarines is that the reactors actually require quite a bit of manual tuning and observation. This was intentional: especially back in the day of the first nuclear subs, automation hardware would have been bulky and (spacewise) expensive, and the alternative was to leave the systems manually-tuned and train sailors to do the job. From a safety perspective, one of course chooses automation... But war has a different safety perspective, and the great thing about a sailor is that when they aren't busy running the reactor they can do something else. They can also react to a captain's needs and get creative in a way that an automated system can't (a major concern for the design was that a captain could be hamstrung in a sea battle trying to get the sub to do something that the safety interlocks disallowed). That aspect of real vessels, that it's possible to "redline" them and run them in a configuration that is temporarily viable but risks damage or makes them more vulnerable in some other way, is an interesting piece to play with in a game environment as a risk players can choose to take.

alexanderson 4y ago

Hey friends. Thorium's developer here. Happy to answer any questions or give more insights. Thorium Classic has been in development since 2016 and is primarily intended to be used in brick-and-mortar space centers out in Utah, like the Space Place[1] and CMSC[2]. As such, there isn't a lot of content and documentation to get newcomers up-and-running with it. Thorium Nova is currently under development and is intended to be used by a broader audience. It will include much more content, pre-built missions, and more integrated tutorials. The project is open-source, so anyone is welcome to contribute[3] and follow along with the progress of each alpha. 1: https://www.thespaceplace.org https://www.thespaceplace.org 2: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org 3: https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova

matthewfcarlson 4y ago
While I haven't played any bridge simulator, I am personally a huge fan of collaborative experiences that tech can enable. There are some many interesting things that can be done when you augment a human's storytelling capability with an environment that can change with their story, offering a way for the audience to interact in a meaningful way with each other and the story itself. This seems like a wonderful project with a lot of love. Keep going :)
- alexanderson 4y ago
  Thanks for the encouragement, and the reminder of what makes this project special.
myself248 4y ago
This looks like a lot of fun, I've played some Artemis but not explored the other offerings in the space. One thing that's always struck me as weirdly difficult with the spaceship-bridge genre, but wholeheartedly embraced by generic flight-sims, is custom control surfaces! Everyone wants pedals and knobs and sliders and a big red button in the middle of the console. Kerbal players are notorious for hooking up the most bizarre junk they can find as in-game controls, and the game is richer for it. I saw mention of DMX lighting, but nothing about mapping random HID controls... Another thing we did playing Artemis, was put the "engineering" station in another room, with walkie-talkies so you had to actually "call down to engineering" to ask them to do things. That should be Teamspeak or something now, I suppose, but having the various parts of the ship in physically separate places (perhaps across the internet?) really adds something, IMHO.

surfsvammel 4y ago

I truly hope this project live long and prosper. (And I am saying that honestly, not trying to be Reddit-isch)

unixhero 4y ago

Some screenshots and pricing would be nice!

rbanffy 4y ago
It’s open source. I believe you can self-host it.
- unixhero 4y ago
  Sure, but I won't self host something, and basically contribute as a tester, without knowing what it will look like. This is due to how I value my time.
  - alexanderson 4y ago
    Self-host might not be the right way to think about it. It's more of a video game with a built-in web server, like Age of Empires where one player hosts the game for everyone else. The only difference is all the other players only need a web browser to connect. But you can play the game from a single computer if you want.
alexanderson 4y ago
It's under development, so screenshots are few at this point. It's also open-source, so it's free to download! Alpha are in the Github releases page.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

Looks awesome, congrats to the devs. Sidenote as a nuclear engineer: thanks for messing up all my scouring "news" alerts with that name choice.

alexanderson 4y ago
True story: When I was coming up with the name I found a HN article about Thorium reactors, thought it was cool, and it conveniently fit into the naming scheme for other simulator controls I've worked on.

kjuulh 4y ago

Sounds super fun! Nitpick: the padding on the bullet points are a bit messed up =D

caseysoftware 4y ago

I did one of these at THAT Conference a few years back with a few friends. In our case, we had the main display and then each person had their own console with their area - weapons, nav, engineering, and science - and the captain had to call out commands and make the whole thing work. We walked in thinking it would be fun but almost silly.. and walked out drained because it was intense. You don't have time to do anything than monitor your own display and make sure you're ready for a variety of things that could happen next. Obviously, there were zero stakes (other than embarrassing yourself) but had a new perspective on what naval battle may be like. If you have the chance to do it - especially in person with the big displays - do it.

bee_rider 4y ago
The one takeaway I’ve gotten from bridge simulators VS normal video games is how hard it is to coordinate people doing different tasks and looking at different interfaces. Even in a game like PUBG that requires quite a bit of communication, you’ve all got the same type of view from different angles. Having a totally different view makes communication much harder. I can’t imagine how they run a bridge in real life — although as professionals they must have a ton of skills and training at it.
- starkparker 4y ago
  The training can look unsurprisingly a lot like a spaceship bridgesim: https://youtu.be/oUCoDIrdR_4?t=33 https://youtu.be/oUCoDIrdR_4?t=33
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Oh yeah — I got to tour a bridge simulator while interviewing at some defense contractor (didn’t get hired, though, maybe they could tell I’d want to load a spaceship bridge simulator up on the thing). It is kind of funny, I actually got a “seasick” feeling on it. The simulated “deck” didn’t move, but the image through the “windows” did, I think having grown up near the coast I’d been on enough boats that my brain expected the floor to start moving to keep up with the horizon.

huevosabio 4y ago

I would love this with the setup of the Expanse and somehow combined with the combat of Children of a Dead Earth.

alexanderson 4y ago
The game is under active development, and I'm trying to keep an open governance model, where anyone can contribute ideas and shape the direction of development. If you want, feel free to pop into the Github discussions to propose how to build these kinds of mechanics into the game!

ryanianian 4y ago

I haven't played Thorium, but bridge sims are a lot of fun. Especially when playing with colleagues or other engineers. I've found non-tech people can get frustrated and bored with them, but my 70yo non-techie mother is in love with the engineering station of Artemis. It is a lot of work to play the Captain role, and in any event the game is tiring after about an hour. What's really fun is having everyone in the room engaged with a central game (played on the big TV in the room) on their own phones/computers. Usually group games aren't cooperative or interactive to the entire group at once. Jackbox has a few coop BYOD party games, but I really wish this product-space had more options. There's also the case of venues having realistic bridge-sims that are kinda like an escape room (in setting/biz model). Show up to the set and cooperate to solve the task. This seems to be the use-case for Thorium classic (the predecessor to TFA). I've seen these at flight museums. They're a load of fun, but probably rather expensive to setup and run (and still tiring).

skittlebrau 4y ago
Spaceteam is kind of a "Jackbox bridge simulator" if you haven't tried it. It's definitely silly and not serious, and in my experience can be enjoyed by a pretty wide audience. https://spaceteam.ca/ https://spaceteam.ca/
- alexanderson 4y ago
  Definitely one of my inspirations. Spaceteam is an entirely different kind of chaos. I love it.

bovermyer 4y ago

I've played Artemis before. Thorium's promise of a "game master" and a narrative outside of combat sounds interesting. Incidentally, here's a link to the latest alpha: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alpha.9 https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....

anononaut 4y ago

Maaan! Bridge sims like Star Trek, Artemis, and Empty Epsilon have been some of the most fun I've ever had playing games with my friends in my entire life. Mind you, we play it as a drinking game with plenty of space shanty singing and other LARP parodies. As a genre, it has my highest recommendation above all others, but it's hard to get it together.

stuff4ben 4y ago

HAH! I did exactly this with my daughters when they were like 8 or 9. Except I just printed out maps on a piece of paper and we used everyday items for the spaceship. I had a golfclub I used to steer the ship, we had walkie talkies that were scanners too when we explored planets, and I think one of them used a collander as a radar. We cozied up in one of their twin beds with the blankets surrounding us. I basically DM'd the entire thing and they loved it. Weekend mornings while their mom slept in, they'd say "Daddy, can we play space ship?" and then they'd go around the house grabbing things to use as controls for it. Such great memories! Edit: forgot to mention, I would have loved to have Thorium when we were playing. But then again, I loved their imagination.

matijash 4y ago
This is an awesome idea, stealing it :)
mysterydip 4y ago
When my daughter was ~3, we would use her pop-up fire engine tent as our spaceship, then hop out onto a planet after landing and pick some random stuffed animals to represent aliens. "pickle planet puppy" was a favorite recurring character. lots of earthquakes and volcanoes to create urgency to get back to the ship. Little kids' imaginations are powerful!
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > Little kids' imaginations are powerful! So are the parents’ when they put their mind to it. I’m having a lot of fun playing ‘find the invisible boy’ every morning.

matijash 4y ago

an important question - what did you build Thorium in? How happy are you with it?

alexanderson 4y ago
It's built with Node.js and Electron on the backend, a bespoke JSON-based database, a React frontend built with Vite, three.js and React Three Fiber for the 3D views, and an adapted network layer based on tRPC that supports live queries over WebSockets, so data updates are automatically propagated to all subscribed clients. My biggest regret is the database. During gameplay, the database needs to be in memory so the game loop has as little latency as possible, so the database is just for persistence when the app closes. I really should use something built for this purpose, like sqlite. But the database engine I'm using is designed to be transparent and convenient. It uses a JavaScript proxy to track any time a data mutation is made to the in-memory database, and dumps that to the JSON file on a throttle. Everything else is meeting my needs just fine.

andrecarini 4y ago

I'm interested but I have no idea what this actually is, after reading the whole page. > You can play it as part of a larger event, or with your friends in your living room. So this is a video game with couch co-op? > part of a larger event There's an online mode? > The USS Voyager Mk II Is this a simulator that requires you to be in that room from the picture? --- Is this like Space Station 13?

alexanderson 4y ago
It's a networked video game. If you're in the living room, folks are expected to bring their own computer. Each computer maps to a station on the bridge of a spaceship, like navigator or tactical. The hope is that the game can be hosted over the internet through port-forwarding or on a VPC. That "part of a larger event" is actually in reference to running the game over a LAN at a convention. The USS Voyager is a physical bridge simulator in Utah, USA that uses the Thorium Classic software, the precursor to Thorium Nova.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  I still don't understand how the game is driven itself, maybe this is more for people who are already familiar with bridge Sims? Do you purchase campaign models and then have a virtual dungeon Master interact with all the players to present scenarios in more of a DND style? Or is this kind of stuff automated and there are levels that are connected to the bridge sim? EDIT: never mind I read the article itself, I don't know how early in development this is but some kind of demonstration would go a long way towards promoting this project even if the demonstration is bare-bones and impromptu.

shaunxcode 4y ago

My first thought was - this reminds me of the space center I went to when I was a kid! It was in pleasant grove utah and built on mac classics with hypercard for the software! Then I scroll down "Alex started working on starship bridge simulators when he worked at the McAuliffe Space Education Center in Pleasant Grove, Utah". Small world!

stuntkite 4y ago

I used to have a pretty sweet Artemis setup. Projector main screen, a central dedicated server and a few tablets. That was really fun. You could get anyone of any age to play. I should set that up again. And I guess make some friends.

jshaqaw 4y ago

Wow a whole genre of geeky awesome I knew nothing about. This is why I love Hacker News. This looks like a blast.

red-iron-pine 4y ago

Kinda reminds me of Highfleet but cleaner

hubblekeat 4y ago

Hi! I also volunteered at CMSEC, don't know if you remember me though. Glad to see you getting good attention on HN.