thorium-nova VS EmptyEpsilon

I've played Artemis before. Thorium's promise of a "game master" and a narrative outside of combat sounds interesting.

Incidentally, here's a link to the latest alpha:

https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....

You can build it from the source on Github, or download the latest alpha release here: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1....

I've got a quick demo of the current alpha here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li51J9c1Wpo

The engine is built on FOSS: https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/

Looks like they're working off a fork of a fork: https://github.com/clockwork-dog/EmptyEpsilon/commits/main/

Thorium is great; it's closer to a virtual tabletop for starship RPGs than a standalone game, built around creating interactive narratives. That sets it apart from the more straightforward game-style bridge sims, like Artemis[1] and EmptyEpsilon[2], which have scriptable scenarios with narrative elements but have more fundamentally game-focused mechanics.

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...

Empty Epsilon bridge simulator: https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon

The game itself is fun, but the best stuff I've seen is it being reused, modified, and adapted for LARPs and crowdplay.

Out of Orbit is a great and ongoing example, a Finnish escape room-ish experience that also has a Twitch game putting stream chat in the role of the ship's AI: https://outoforbit.fi/ and https://www.twitch.tv/outoforbitgame/about

Empty Epsilon powers the game part, with integrations using its DMX interface and HTTP API to provide hardware interfaces and things like Twitch chat commands modifying the game state.

EmptyEpsilon - a free multiplayer bridge simulator. Each ship is typically crewed by 3-6 people, but you can run multiple ships in the same game or get mods that add/change roles.

"the open source": Empty Epsilon. A little more complex of a simulation than Artemis, but feels much more limited from a mission standpoint, mostly due to lack of development from that aspect. Does away with the "Star Trek" feel of Artemis for a more industrial feeling.

If you want to look at an interesting open source C++ game project that (iirc) uses SFML, you could check out Empty Epsilon.