Thorium – A Starship Bridge Simulator
thoriumsim.com
thoriumsim.com
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
This seems like a wonderful project with a lot of love. Keep going :)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
If you want to help guide what's included and how they fit together, I'm happy to entertain proposals in the Github discussions or Discord.
I should add that Thorium Nova will include a lot more inter-ship controls. Things like security officers, system maintenance, medical teams, cargo transfer, power grid distribution - that kind of thing. Adding all of that will effectively double the max-crew size of the typical 6 you see in other bridge sims.
Fortunately, the scope of this is significantly less than Star Citizen, since all of the first-person content of the game is supposed to happen in real-life, LARP-style.
It might be easy enough to do this sort of thing on the user side anyway, in Artemis Spaceship at least you can of course just use multiple stations if you want. So you just need a ship without too much going on, I think.
We once did an away mission where the crew was stranded on a remote planet and running out of water. We split the crew, where one half we going to find a viable water source and the other needed to track down a local scientist who had the parts we needed to repair the ship.
After dressing them up in our weirdest costumes, we trekked them outside. The water group were sent to a local convenience store with a couple of dollar bills and told to "act natural" as they picked up some bottled water. I was happy to find that they absolutely did not act normal.
The other group went to a local staff member's house, which had been decorated to look like the scientists laboratory.
Needless to say, the whole experience was quite memorable, and highlights how the computer controls are only part of what makes the simulation fun.
Edit: forgot to mention, I would have loved to have Thorium when we were playing. But then again, I loved their imagination.
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.
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/#/
2: https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/
3: https://www.odysseuslarp.com/blog/steering-the-starship-empt...
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.
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.
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.
p.s. first time I've seen a real em-dash in someone else's HN comment, very nice :3
I’ve limited social media like hackernews to just my iPhone (at least picking up the phone is a conscious decision to take a break, having the social media in my browser is a big distraction). The phone just translates hyphen hyphen to em-dash.
I have absolutely no experience with ships beyond small sailboats, but watching the video gave me a very strong ‘that’s not a ship’ feeling, and it all comes down to it being a rock solid environment.
All this is indoors and inland. It's in a water tank. It's a big simulator for an entire crew, a hundred or so at once.
The U.S. Navy does have bridge training simulators, but not enough of them. That's come out after some ship accidents due to bad coordination and ship-driving on the bridge.
Anyway, probably the Navy and these space simulators are a lot more fun though.
aside:
[bridge simulator] is another one of those unsearchable terms -- the other type of game dominates. Though atm [bridge sim] is relatively relevant in Google, but not Bing.
Amusingly, Yandex returns a balanced mix of the two domains for both queries.
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…
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.
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.
So if you have fewer players, you can play on a smaller ship that doesn't have any non-player crew members. Or, conversely, a large group will have additional stations to spread the work out a little bit.
Hopefully everything feels meaningful and impactful at every crew and ship size and nothing feels like busywork.
"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."
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).
Sidenote as a nuclear engineer: thanks for messing up all my scouring "news" alerts with that name choice.
> 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?
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Is this like Space Station 13?
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.
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.
Incidentally, here's a link to the latest alpha:
https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....
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.
It's also open-source, so it's free to download! Alpha are in the Github releases page.
Nitpick: the padding on the bullet points are a bit messed up =D
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.