Thorium Nova Alpha 9

Hey there! Happy Thorium Thursday Friday!

Before I start, I want to make a personal request. I'm selling my home in Boston and moving at the end of May. If you know anyone interested in buying a home in Boston, have them get in touch with me. You can see photos of my home here: https://kerryhowellphotography.pixieset.com/960broadwayunit12chelsea/

And on to the good part! 🕺

Thorium Nova Alpha 9 is now available. Release notes and download links can be found here: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alpha.9

This alpha expands on features for managing ship systems, including modeling power, heat, fuel, and coolant. It also expands on the room system allowing you to assign systems to rooms, which allows those systems to access the inventory in those rooms.

It also adds gamepad support. You should be able to connect any USB or Bluetooth gamepad, press a button, and see the gamepad configuration button appear in the lower-right corner of the Pilot card. From there you can configure your gamepad to control everything on the Pilot card, enabling true HOTAS gameplay.

We also have a contribution from Tanner, who delivered the first preliminary Alert Condition card. Thanks Tanner!

Finally, in the past week I noticed some pretty major bugs that many of you might have experienced in the previous alpha. I believe those have been squashed, so if you weren't able to play Alpha 8, now would be a great time to give it a go.

Development is now shifting towards more bug fixes, which are outlined here: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/milestone/1 If you are interested in contributing, now would be a great time to do it, since most of these would work well for introducing you to the codebase. And if you notice any bugs as you play with Alpha 9, report them so they can be fixed in Alpha 10.

Once that's done, work will shift back to finishing the power grid - adding the specific power grid limitations to ship systems and creating a power grid card for managing all of the power across the ship. You can find the currently planned list of features here: https://github.com/Thorium-Sim/thorium-nova/milestone/2

As always, thanks for joining on the journey. Let's rock and roll!

Alex