[myself248]

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.

[alexanderson]

I've actually got WebGamepad support built into the pilot station. Start up the game, start a flight, and load up the pilot station. Then plug in your gamepad, wiggle it so the browser recognizes it, and a config icon will appear in the bottom right. From there you should be able to configure every control on that screen to work with the buttons and sticks on your gamepad.

DMX and other show-control features will come much later, after the main gameplay features are completed. But they're my favorite part, so I'll definitely get to them eventually.

[starkparker]

EmptyEpsilon has support for a bunch of DMX flavors as well as Hue lights and custom control surfaces, as well as an optional exposable API that can run Lua scripts on game state.

Odysseus LARP paired that functionality with a bunch of RPi Zero W-powered hardware puzzles to represent ship systems,[1] so Engineers had to physically tinker with things in order to get systems back up and running after they broke. That included things like going through crawlspaces and ladders to access certain components, digging through a printed manual when computer systems were "down".

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE7j1SgUpKs

[sgtnoodle]

I made a KSP controller about 7 years ago. Even made it to hackaday. http://www.sgtnoodle.com/projects/kerbal-control-panel/

One time we played Artemis in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX. It was nice having professional headsets. My team was winning, until someone on the other team used the IT system to shut down our computers!

[samplatt]

>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

I love this idea for realism (and, tbh, to minimise the 'talking-over-each-other' factor... but for me I'd prefer to be in the same room as my friends. I want to see the smiles and hear the laughter. Without that, engineering would just feel like a job well done.

[midoridensha]

The engineers need to be near the warp core and other engineering stuff, not on the bridge. How are they supposed to crawl through Jeffries tubes if they're hanging out with the captain?