Training Mode

Before crews can go off and save the galaxy, they first must learn how their ship works in the first place. Training in Thorium Classic took two forms:

Text annotations that would walk through each element on the screen for each card and explain what those elements did. This was the default training that shipped with Thorium Classic.
Video or audio recordings that would walk through the entire station. Space Centers would have to record these themselves.

Neither of those is particularly effective, though.

You still had to set up the training conditions, adding sensor contacts and tractor beam targets.
There was no automation for responding to sensors scans or long range messages.
Having a big video player on top of your screen made it hard to see and use the actual controls, so it ended up being a very passive experience.

By the end of the ideal training, just about any crew member could walk away knowing exactly what steps they need to follow for any of their job's responsibilities, whether it be setting course or loading and firing weapons. Even multi-step actions should become second nature for a fully trained crew member.

So what does this ideal training look like?

The Ideal Training

For starters, it's interactive. No watching a video or mindlessly pushing buttons without any proper feedback. Instead, it will be like an actual simulation - a simulation within the simulation. The controls will have actual messages and actual damage to repair and actual contacts. And these things will respond in a very real, but controlled, way specifically tailored to help the crew learn their jobs as best as possible.

And there will be no rushing through the material. The ideal training builds on previous concepts, walking the crew member through each control and testing their knowledge as they go. Only when they have proven proficiency will they be able to move on.

Hmm... A series of linear steps which interact with the simulation and have checks to see if the crew has completed some action? Sounds a lot like a timeline...

They are timelines. Trainings are timelines.

Training Timelines

Each station will have its own training timeline that will walk the crew step by step through all of the controls on their station, including relevant cards and widgets. Everything. And training will automatically advance when the crew member completes the relevant task - that's the power of Thorium Nova's timeline system.

Trainings will generate contacts, automatically send messages after a delay, and respond in all the other ways that are necessary, as if it were a real mission. All fully automated.

I'm adding special timeline actions for highlighting elements on the page, so crews will easily be able to see what buttons to click or where they should direct their focus. Thorium Classic did the same thing with the on-screen training, but it was a little clunky. This should be much smoother and easier to follow.

Like Thorium Classic, it will be possible to have the built-in text-to-speech read the training text for each step, but each step can optionally include an audio file to give the training a more personalized flair.

By splitting up the training, including audio recordings, like this, it makes it much easier to create new trainings. If you just want to change one segment of the training, you only have to re-record that segment. Or, if you want to rearrange the order of things, it's as easy as rearranging the timeline steps or opening the training file in a text editor and copy/pasting the appropriate sections.

This will be especially necessary, since I'm planning on having trainings for all of the permutations of stations, from single player fighters to 12 crew capital ships - that's a total of 78 total stations (though some of those will be reused). Writing all of those from scratch would be a pain, but the way Thorium Nova stores its training files means I can grab snippets from one training and easily slot it into another training.

And in case it wasn't clear, all training is completely customizable, but Thorium Nova will ship with a full suite of trainings for every station.

One other big wrinkle has to do with training mode itself. Since trainings have the power to spawn objects into the universe, it doesn't make sense to activate training in the middle of a flight. I'll make it so there is a static overlay info system that crews can bring up if they need a little refresher in the middle of the flight.

But for the actual training, I need to come up with a way of keeping simultaneous training crew members from clobbering each other or getting distracted by contacts and objects that are part of another station's training. In Thorium Classic, it is not uncommon for an unruly Operations officer to remove all the power from the warp engines right as the Flight Control officer is trying to learn how to jump to warp. These kinds of disruptions are avoidable.

My current plan is to have a single flight, but each station gets its own dedicated ship in some random part of space. Since the stations are on separate ships, they have no way of interfering with each other, so they can do their training in peace. I think it will work, though it might be a bit confusing to organize. We'll see.

In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing how Training plays out in practice. I can say that what I have outlined above is more sophisticated and user-friendly than Thorium Classic, or any other bridge simulator that I know of. We're pushing the state of the art for training, just like we're trying to push the state of the art in every other way too.

Let me know what you think! Until next time!