This looks really cool! How do you feel you currently compare to Artemis, the lo...

smcameron · on Oct 16, 2018

Hard to say as I haven't really played Artemis except once briefly a few years ago. It is indeed difficult to gather a crew. Some differences:

* SNIS is "properly" 3D, as opposed to the "submarine" style limited 3D support Artemis has.

* With the turret gun, SNIS feels a little more "millenium falcon" than "enterprise".

* Graphics in SNIS are miles better, but still no great shakes by modern standards (though the gas giants look awesome, if I do say so myself.)

* Artemis has a lot more mission scripts available. SNIS has a mission scripting system (Lua based), but there are not very many mission scripts.

* Artemis is more properly a game, while SNIS is more of a sandbox. (More mission scripts would help here.)

* SNIS is (I think) comparatively less buggy, and I have run sessions for hours with zero hiccups. I don't get the impression from what I've read that Artemis is quite so stable, but I might be wrong.

* The SNIS server processes are entirely headless with no UI graphical or otherwise, while the artemis server is also the "main screen" client (as I understand it).

* It's possible to have a constellation of SNIS server processes and traverse between them via "warp gates", building an arbitrarily large universe given enough servers to host it all (or, it can auto-start and auto-shutdown servers on a single machine on-demand to give the illusion of an arbitrarily large universe.) Artemis has no similar concept that I am aware of.

There's loads of other differences as SNIS is not really a copycat of Artemis but rather just taking the general idea of a bridge simulator and not much else.

I would be remiss not to mention the existence of another open source spaceship bridge simulator, Empty Epsilon. There's a forum for the genre: https://bridgesim.net