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.