The
Artemis Spaceship Bridge
Simulator website offers a new version 2.0 of this spaceship bridge
simulator for networked Windows computers. Here's word:
Artemis ships
play in real 3D now, with climb/dive controls (button, keyboard, and joystick).
Players can fly OVER a black hole, and come up underneath enemies.
The UI art has been completely revamped, new crisper fonts, custom screen
controls torpedo controls, and significant changes to every game screen.
Artemis 2.0 can now support up to eight simultaneous bridges, which means up to
48 players. Multi-ship games got special attention during the development, with
known bugs fixed and a lot of UI changes.
By popular request, there is now a full-fledged Player Versus Player mode, where
any number of sides and teams can battle each other in arena sectors that can be
tuned to limit torpedo and ship types, as well as the number of NPC ships on
each side.
Four new NPC non-combatant ships now ply the spacelanes, offering many new
scenarios for Artemis crews. These ships can be broken down, hijacked, blinded,
held hostage, and more.
Proper pathmaking AI has been added to all NPC ships. No longer can players rely
on the stupidity of enemies that blunder into black holes and minefields.
The Skaraan enemy race has always bedeviled Artemis players with cloaking,
warping, and other special abilities. Now the number of these abilities have
doubled, including tractor beams and drone launchers.
A mysterious new race was introduced. The BioMechs. These ships aren't normally
antagonistic, and just drive around mining asteroids (and occasionally
anomalies). They'll attack if a ship gets too close, though, and if anything
hurts them they will become aggressive as a group. They come in four types, and
if left to themselves, they will eat and "evolve" into the next type. The final
type (known only as type 4) can be communicated with. If the group is in
aggressive mode, the Comms Officer can talk to them repeatedly and calm them
down, at least until the next time something shoots at them.
As with any major release, there are also many, many adjustments, bug fixes and
corrections, thanks to the feedback from the enthusiastic players of the
game.