Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.
Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.
The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.
Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.
At my last job (pre-pandemic) we used to do a weekly Empty Epsilon game – it can be a lot of fun, and EE is flexible enough to act as multiple kinds of games.
If you’re really interested in the kinds of custom bridges that folks have built, poke around in the Artemis Forums – there are lots of people who have built lots of bridges, and even some guides about layouts for small spaces. (https://artemis.forumchitchat.com/?forum=309503)
On our discord server there are also various pictures of built bridges. And it’s always the LARP boys that go all-in with amazing builds.
I remember watching a web video about some dudes who basically made (alas by another name I cannot remember) a red dwarf starbug bridge in an old caravan trailer. The “dungeon master” resided in what had formerly been the bathroom cubicle, and ran the show from there. There were at least three crew stations, and heaps of reference texts crew were expected to leaf through to find clues/solutions to the problems. There were all manner of things that they could encounter if they didn’t deal with things well – invasive alien species (a vacuum cleaner tube with high pressure air driven down it so it flailed about), smoke machines, etc. I was always sad I could never find it again! I hoped VR star trek bridge crew type games might one day get there… But they haven’t yet. It was real Monkey Island style humor!
How wonderful: found it :D
Thanks hackaday!
https://hackaday.com/2014/09/13/an-rv-converted-into-a-spaceship-simulator/
Much respect and admiration for your success with EE. — steve (aka smcameron author of Space Nerds in Space).
Your work is also superlative. I seriously miss the weekly games in the classroom at Tx/Rx. SNIS and other bridge simulators make for a great reason to get together and LAN/Play.
This would benefit greatly by adding AI to it via local AI system such as Ollama, with a link through to Grok3 to be game master, because I know that Grok likes this sort of stuff!
Main software developer of EmptyEpsilon here! Shocked and proud to see it on HaD.
Few quick notes:
– Not being LCARS is intentional. Paramount pictures is very protective of this. So there are zero Star Trek or Starwars references in all of EmptyEpsilon.
– Project has been ongoing for 10+ years. It’s a side hobby project which has a very random development speed. But stuff is still happening and being improved.
– It all started with my dissatisfaction with “artemis spaceship bridge simulator” so it has a lot of similarities with that game.
– There is a weekly online game organized on discord if you want to play online with random people.
– It is made to run on low-end hardware. We initially ran it as the office on laptop that where otherwise going to be trashed.
– All code is FOSS. Which is why LAPS like using it, as they can tweak it a lot for whatever they need.
Oh, and I forgot. The game isn’t limited to 1 player controlled ship. Or record is 70+ players connected, spread over 12 player ships. Which was a hugely complex thing to run, due to all the communication with players involved. But the software ran fine.
That’s a pretty cool feature that wasn’t immediately obvious to me when reading the project & Steam pages. Definitely makes it seem like even more of a LAN party hit that way :)
What is LAPS?
LARPs with a typo. Live Action Role Play. https://www.odysseuslarp.com/ was a huge one for example, which also uses EmptyEpsilon in some bits (it’s just a tiny cog in a giant organization in this case)
Why is it called that?
Why is it called EmptyEpsilon? Uh. Yeah. Funny story, I needed a project name, took a random name generator, and it rolled out a bunch of names some with empty, other with epsilon. So I used EmptyEpsilon as a temporary solution for the project name. And it became a 10 year long temporary solution…
So it means absolutely nothing, there is no deeper meaning.
“Not being LCARS is intentional. Paramount pictures is very protective of this”
Yeah, sort of expected this…pity. However, shouldn’t be too difficult to hook up custom control panels using HID… :-)
“Bruh! Go back to engine room and do your job!”
“I’m not going back to the broom closet.”
Looks similar to an elementary school that’s been going for over 30 years in Space LARPs:
https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org/
They use a system called Thorium (https://thoriumsim.com/). Never played, but described as less automated and more GM centric.
Is Empty Epsilon “The” bridge sim these days?
What Artemis or ‘Space Nerds in Space’?
Artemis is most popular, first to market advantage. And some people prefer the visual style and some of the different mechanics more.
SpaceNerdsInSpace, we know of nobody that actually plays this in our community. The linux only nature makes it a hard sell, so I cannot say much about it.
With EmptyEpsilon being my creation, I am biased. It’s not as popular as Artemis, but being free, and easy to pick up has its advantages.
There is also Thorium, which is more aimed at a GM guided experience. Think more escape room style.
And then there is Starship Horizons, which is a bit of a middle ground between Artemis/EmptyEpsilon and Thorium. And under a lot of active development.
(Not even mentioning the official StarTrek bridge crew game, as Ubisoft abandoned it)
That’s about it for this tiny genre corner.
There’s also Space Nerds in Space, which has been actively developed for over a decade.
https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/
Thanks to the Space Nerds in Space fans. — steve (aka smcameron, author of Space Nerds in Space) Let me know what you’d like to see in the game. https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/discussions No guarantees, but there’s room for discussion. What we really need is more mission scripts, so if you know Lua,and have some ideas, take a look at the Lua API ( https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/master/doc/lua-api.txt ) and dive in.
Ah, yes. Now I can do my Traveler space battles justice.
This should go without saying, but don’t even think about rigging it with improvised explosive devices to enact the violent post-1960s Star Trek movies and TV series. Even very small amounts of explosives can cause serious or fatal injury. The same goes for incendiary devices, fire can quickly get out of control with deadly and destructive results.
Gene Roddenberry’s vision for the original Star Trek series was to depict various concepts from written science-fiction in a TV-friendly manner, not the regular orgies of killing and destruction that the franchise became.