Suggestion for Version 2.0

I can think of only one thing that I really, really would like for 2.0, and it was mentioned about ten pages ago before being summarily ignored-

FSUIPC-Like integration options for those of us with a bit more ambition on bridge building projects.
The ability to read out state from the game and write data back would be a tremendous advantage for people who want to create something a bit more thematic than the typical touchscreen-with-wooden-housing option.

Say for example I wanted to add something like this damage control board from BSG, but tailored for Artemis. As it is, there are no options to do so without completely reverse-engineering the networking protocol.
Other options like having engineering power and coolant distribution controlled by sliding potentiometers, digital readouts of heading and speed (such as on seven-segment displays), and physical output of incoming communications messages (A friend of mine loved the idea of a retro-futuristic bridge idea that had incoming comms routed to an old dot-matrix impact printer) are all impossible without the ability for this hardware to talk directly to the game.

As it is, no-one can build a bridge with consoles more customised than a touchscreen and perhaps a keyboard (or keyboard equivalent).

I'm with you 100% on this Arania
Love the com printer idea, could be done with a smaller receipt printer, that would look awesome.

edit
My absolute dream build are portable consoles without screens, to have all the information and buttons you need right there, blinking lights, analog gauges, and as you wrote linear potentiometers.

Also, you can set the energy use factor in the artemis config file. Just set it to the lowest setting and you'll definitely see a difference. You can also increase the total energy you get from the stations in the same config file. If you also change the system energy usages to their lowest values, you actually charge pretty quick when you're just using impulse and shields.

And, if you are running through energy too quickly, you probably aren't doing things efficiently--for example, going to warp with shields up burns through energy in a hurry. Also, instead of going to Warp 4 everywhere, go slower, and you'll burn through less energy. There are a lot of little tricks to saving energy, and your Engineer can do a lot to help with that.

Even your weapons officer can help by converting homing torpedoes to energy.

I want to see this:



- Graphics for shield status.
- Shield on/off
- Battery-like bar for energy.
- Different bar for Warp drive with larger increments.
- Smooth semi-transparent arc display for beams

I like the clean presentation of information you've put together VictorWir, might you have an alternate take on the Weapons console?
A current pet peeve of ours is engaging an enemy to our 'south', the torpedo tube buttons obscure the target requiring either circling around to a different vector, or having to close to <3K to get a weapons lock.

VictorWir your design is very clean! A little cluttered, but I'm assuming the screen size is 800x600 so it is expected.

I like how you approached the enemy ships on the radar. Having their designations in boxes makes it much easier to read. The other part that is nice is that the designation boxes are dynamic in their position to the ship. I know when I have multiple bogies clustered it's hard to distinguish their names since they overlap.

Yeah it's quite cramped, I wouldn't say cluttered because the individual elements are quite large and I do think the gui should be a quite oversized for clarity.
It's way too minimalistic on larger resolutions.
I don't think players are supposed to sit with their faces glued to their screens to check out tiny details or read percentages.
And now that it's on phones and tablets it's even more important to consider the sizing of the GUI.

I might take a look at the weapons console, I think that all of the consoles can be streamlined a lot more. But one that stuck out to me the most was the engineer, so I recently made another mockup of it, you can see it in the other thread on these forums.

I was so amazed at all of the ideas for alterations and mods that I wanted to make a LCARS UI. I started with the Science station by converting it, then adding a few things.

On the top there is a detailed view of the scanned ship.
On the right of the sensor map you can choose to display a list of either friendlies, enemies, etc. This data will include whether or not they have a weapons lock on you, their current distance from you, their shield strengths, and their shield frequencies.

On the far left I also thought of a new responsibility for Science, or Comm, or both, or a new station. I read some people mention hacking the other ships. This reminded me of Battlestar Galactica with their Cyber Warfare. You would figure out their Comm frequency and then send false data to sensors, jam their sensors, jam their visuals, jamm their Comms (can't call allies or talk to DamCom), or maybe find their shield code to make their shields drop for a couple seconds (like in Star Trek 2).

Still just a dream with no real applicability on my part haha, but I thought I'd share my ideas.

Having configurable Observer console views would take care of a few desires.

I imagine the Observer console having a configuration option (.ini?), or a list of checkboxes for views that it will cycle through;
► Flyby
► Chase cam target
► Chase cam player
► View extents (camera able to see all ships involved in combat)
► Missile cam (if torpedo is in flight)
► Forward
► Left
► Back
► Right
► Up
► Down
► Player defined (x,y,z camera position relative to the player and direction to face
Cycle time could be configured with a slider or numeric input as well

By default, it would cycle through the standard Observer views, but to specialize it, simply uncheck all but the view(s) you wish to see and it becomes a dedicated viewscreen in the orientation(s) you wish.

After a weekend of Artemis sessions at a convention, I would like to again request either an DMX event for Artemis Destroyed/Mission Ended or a change of the current behavior to drop the lights for 3-5 seconds and then come back up to running lights.

I had to restart the mission each time in order to easily provide a safer exit for the players by bringing up the running lights.

After running 48+ hours of Artemis this weekend, I feel the new 3d flight needs to be an option that can be turned off, as many people have a hard enough time with 2d flight.

I would also like DMX Commands for level of shields up, Its nice to see shields up and down, but when your front shields are taking a pounding I would like to change the lights showing how strong they are. So Shields at 100%, 90%, 80%, etc could be 10% or 20% at a time, and or front and rear individually so that we could have front and rear lights different.

Jump Drive defaults to 0, when you start typing have the 0 go away. as it is a limited and if you try to type 300 you can get 030 by mistake.

GM SCREEN
GM Mode was fun to play with but there is a ton of missing functions.
- CUT AND PASTE - messages
- Clear message button (so you do not have to backspace a lot.) Many times the start of the last message was still hidden under the fold and was included on the beginning of the next message. I found you needed to hold backspace until the message button grayed out.
- I like being able to type from "Anything" but a selection list like comm's so I can select ships in the sector. (or just click them)
- Ability to redirect NPCs (Friendly and Foes); Change fleet targets, multiple unit selection, move to position, Hold, Circle, link, follow, set leader set attack mode
- Attack mode, AI choices like flank, missiles over beams, fast attack, recall fighters, launch fighters.
Better data on the ships, shield frequency, missiles, energy, damage etc.

More advanced RP level abilities
- Effect Systems, Damage, Crew.
( I had RP messages about medical quarantine, computer viruses, crew desertion, system malfunctions, closed star bases, scouting reports by transports and other things. This was all done in message form, but had no way to back this up with in game options. Ability to give upgrades, or even down grades i.e. coolant leak -1 coolant.)
And Cut in Paste, so I can store a file of canned messages, better than that a GM XML file that One can select messages from.
The ability to select a ship and have the message come from them. (Plus if that ship is an enemy, the message needs to match the enemy color red.) One astute player quickly figured out that enemy messages in white were not important.


Upgraded AI.
Ships should not fly into mines and black holes. Some basic path avoidance would be great. I can see not seeing something until its to late in a nebula, but its space, cant they just go around?

Ability to talk back to Artemis when they tell a ship to fly into a mine field. "ARTEMIS: Tr45, Turn 90", "Tr45: Are you crazy, there is a mine field directly in front of me."

Ability to draw from a list of comments so that everything is not the same:
Request Dock, Hit with a [Missile/ECM/Nuke], Order to (turn/defend/etc), rammed
and so on.

Server time limits in 5 min steps, up to an hour. I was running 55 minute games, but if they died and needed to be restarted, it could be 15 minutes into the hour and now I need a 40 minute timer.

On Timers a message to pop up says 5 minute warning, 1 minute warning.

Server default setup values on the mission file so you do not need to change values every time you reload the server.

Ability to hide ships from being selected. If I only have 1 bridge, I only want Artemis ship one selected. I have seen 4 or 5 times someone clicked on a different ship and there were 2 ships in the sector. Not so bad when it was comm's, or captains map. Real bad if it was weapons.


I am tried but will try to dump more.

Presets. The engineer programs in a setting and clicks save in one of the slots for future use.

That already exists. Though I don't know the commands for it.

Prioritizes certain systems for repair crews, but otherwise works as if automated

I'd LOVE to see this.

Shield modulation

I'd also love to see this. Both against the Artemis, and from enemies remodulating.



Just as an aside for people who keep designing themes and GUIs very close to LCARS: paramount gets a little litigious around things like that, so they may not be too feasible - see the Tricorder app that was up on the google play store several years ago.

Here are a few feature proposals. Most of these features have to do with mission scripting.

1. Campaign Mission State Storage: I would like to have some method to store or maintain state from one mission to another. It would be great to have a second mission pick up decisions or outcome variables from a previous mission in order to maintain state. If that is based on creating a state file, that would be fine. This would allow story mode campaigns to be created. You run the first mission in the campaign, then the next week when you run the 2nd mission, the mission loads up state data and can continue along without any user input required to know what occured in the previous mission.

2. Player ShipName Variables (ShipName1, ShipName2, etc) - To facilitate writing missions without having to specify a ship name, have a shipName variable for each player ship name, so that the variable can be used in mission code in place of a static ship name (like 'Artemis').

3. Send audio to stations. Currently, audio files can be played to main screen. This works great for LAN play, but for online play (like with the RP Community), most of the stations don't have access to main screens. It would be nice to fully program a mission so that one or more stations can hear the audio. Perhaps this is limited to comms, but even sending to all would be nice for 'on-speaker' communications, or for pre mission briefings that are audio based.

4. Video mainscreen. I am a big fan of 'on-screen' communications (realizing as opposed to item 3, this would need to be limited to LAN play on main screen only). Whether that it prerecorded video for a mission , or using skype or something like that, I would love to see that kind of functionality added. I consider this more of a pie in the sky in relation to other game play needs.

Apologies if this has already been requested.

Is there a way that a loop mechanism can be added to mission scripting? What I am thinking is running the same code on multiple objects (like setting brain stack on a fleet of ships). Now it seems that every ship is set manually.

This would greatly enhance the ability to make complex missions in an easier to script fashion.

Thanks!