Update 33 - A Christmas Miracle
Happy Thorium Thursday!
More progress on the first Alpha release of Thorium Nova! Here's a quick update on that progress:
- ✅ Plugins
- ✅ Flight management
- ✅ Station layouts - the frame that goes around the station
- ✅ 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.
Wait a minute... that's everything. All of them are checked off.
Huh.
Well, I guess that means I'd better release the first Thorium Nova alpha.
Okay, before I do that, an important disclaimer - this is pre-release software. It's missing a million features. It has bugs. Here be dragons! 🐉
With that out of the way, here's the link to the release page with all of the downloads. Pick whichever one is most appropriate for your platform.
Note: This doesn't include a headless build, but that will come in the future.
So, what all can you do with this? Not a whole lot...
- You can view and edit plugins
- You can create template ships in plugins
- You can create station themes with CSS
- You can start a new flight
- You can connect clients to the Thorium server and assign them to stations in an active flight.
- You can play around with the officers log card
That's about it. Obviously, more features will be added in the future. (And I want to know what features you want! Read on for more info)
So, what should you do with it? Play around! Test things out. Try and use it. Find and report bugs. You can either create issues in Github manually, send a message on Discord, or use the integrated issue tracker. This is available to anyone who has created a Thoriumsim.com account and connected their Github account to it. Once you've signed in on the Thorium Nova app, you can find the issue tracker in the top-right menu.
As for new features, I'm enjoying a little break for the holidays, but I plan to jump back in in early 2022. My first item of business is to start planning features and triaging tickets. This is where you can help.
I want to hear what features you want to have included in Thorium Nova. I've created this discussion for that purpose. Propose any feature you want, including the most obvious ("Ships should have engines") to utterly fantastic ("Flight directors should be able to use their camera to show a 3D avatar on the crew view screen"). And, of course, you can also suggest features on Discord which I will add to the discussion.
Over the next few weeks, we'll collect feature ideas and start discussing the nitty-gritty details for each of them. Once we've reached consensus on a feature, I'll outline the tasks needed to create that feature in Github Issues, which can then be picked up by developers interested in contributing. Once that happens, we'll convene another meeting to kick off developer contributions to Thorium Nova.
These are exciting times, and as usual I'm glad you're along for the ride. I hope you and yours have the happiest of holidays, and a most excellent new year. I'll see you in 2022.
Alex