alexanderson

They mention in the post they are working with Theo to absorb tsgo-rs into tsrs.

Thought this was a new AWS product for half a second.

Apple has always been a hardware company first - think of how they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the consumer business; I don’t want to get into all the other stuff Microsoft does).

Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.

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.

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.

This is why I hesitate to attempt any fundraising. Stretch goals and donor rewards scare me.

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.

Back in my day, we used to do 17-hour overnight missions, where the crew would have to sleep in ships, since the simulation would continue through the night.

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.

psst. If you're still living in the area, they do group missions for adults too. If you've got the time and willing friends, definitely opt for a 5-hour mission. It'll be just as much fun as you remember.

Definitely one of my inspirations. Spaceteam is an entirely different kind of chaos. I love it.