What is it?
EmptyEpsilon is a spaceship bridge simulator game. It’s fully open source, so it can be modified in any way people wish.
What does this mean?
EmptyEpsilon places you in the roles of a spaceship’s bridge officers, like those seen in Star Trek. While you can play EmptyEpsilon alone or with friends, the best experience involves 6 players working together on each ship.
Each officer fills a unique role: Captain, Helms, Weapons, Relay, Science, and Engineering. Except for the Captain, each officer operates part of the ship through a specialized screen. The Captain relies on their trusty crew to report information and follow orders.
Like Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator?
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator was the inspiration for EmptyEpsilon. It’s pretty good as a bridge simulator, but we had some issues with it that we wanted to fix. Since Artemis isn’t open source, our only solution was to start over by ourselves.
For example, the “comms” station of Artemis is pretty limited and can be boring for the player. The game could fall out of sync, confusing the players. Also, its Game Master screen didn’t do everything that we wanted.
All in all, Artemis is a nice game. We wrote our own to be able to implement new features and extensibility.
Empty Epsilon
To run a standard bridge for EmptyEpsilon, you need the following equipment:
4-6 devices, 1 for each officer except the captain. These can be laptops, desktops, or Android devices.
One big screen (large monitor, TV, or projector).
A stable network. Wifi can work, but we recommend a wired LAN.
If playing over the internet, voice chat is strongly recommended.
All but 1 of the officers operate "stations" that control different parts of the ship. The last computer is for the main screen, which does not need any input and should be visible to all players.
Designate 1 player as Captain, whose computer can serve as the ship's main screen. The Captain's only duty is to communicate with the other officers and tell them what they should do.
The other officers each operate one of the ship's stations, which are described in the Stations tab.
Running the game
After starting the game on the computer serving as the main screen, you can also configure it as the game server. The other stations can then connect to the game server as clients.
After starting the server, select a scenario (we recommend the "Waves" or "Basic" scenarios for first games), then spawn a player ship for everyone to join.
Everyone should select the same ship and choose their designated station. That's it! You're now in command of a fully functional spaceship.
Internet play
A crew can play EmptyEpsilon over internet connections. This means the game server needs to be accessible from the internet. The server runs on port 35666, which needs to be open in your firewall and forwarded to your server if you are behind a router.