Update 31 - Station Layouts

Happy Thorium Thursday!

We're still making progress toward the first Alpha release of Thorium Nova! Here's a quick update on that progress, including a new item added at the bottom:

• ✅ Plugins
• ✅ Flight management
• 🔶 Station layouts - the frame that goes around the station (progress tracked here)
• ✅ Station complement definitions - stations and cards a ship has for a given crew size
• 🔶 At least one card to play around with, probably starting with a simple Alert Condition card
• 🔶 A form for reporting issues, bugs, and feature requests
• Update the documentation for all of the new features that have been added recently.

🔶 means progress has been made, but it's not finished yet. Want to help? Ask how to help on Discord, or take a look at the open issues.

Based on this progress, I anticipate the first alpha being released early next year, so look forward to that.

After that happens, I plan on convening another big meeting like the original kickoff. This will be a feature planning meeting, where we decide what features we're going to work on first and make plans for how we'll approach those. I don't have a date set for that, but look forward to a future newsletter.

We've moved initial discussions into Discord instead of Github Discussions which makes it easier for people to chime in and add ideas and suggestions in a less formal way. After a good bit of discussion, those conversations can be written up as Github Discussions to create a more permanent record of these decisions.

This past week we had conversations about Effects, which are one-off commands that can be sent to stations like "Flash" or "Spark".

If you've got any questions, feature requests, proposals, or other thoughts to share, join us in the Discord server. We love getting new voices adding their ideas to the mix.

That's all for this week. Once again, thanks for being along for this journey.