Console Choice Screen

When a client connects to the server (using the IP address given on the Server Control Screen) the Console Choice Screen appears. This screen displays a list of potential player ships to the left, and the list of consoles, or stations, to the right. Usually the first ship, Artemis, will be automatically selected, but if you are playing multiple ships, you may need to determine which ship you will be a crewman on. Once a ship is selected, you can select a station, or even more than one if you are playing multiple roles. The Helm, Weapons and Engineering stations can only be played by one player per ship, and "Taken" will appear next to that station if it has already been chosen by another player.

 

The Game Master console (overlapped by "Ready To Play" in this image, as it is of a 800x600 resolution screen) can only be played by a single player as well, and even if there are multiple ships, there may still only be a total of one Game Master. The button is offset from the other console buttons to indicate this. On a low resolution screen like this, clicking on the exposed part of the button will select it, while clicking on "Ready To Play" will activate that button.

 

If you choose either Helm or Mainscreen a button will appear to the bottom right of your screen which will allow you to customize your ship. This Ship Customization Screen was introduced in Artemis 2.4. (In Artemis 2.3 and earlier, a name field, a warp/jump drive selector and a ship class selector will appear in this location. These controls can be used similarly to those functions as defined on the ship customization page, but they do not open a new screen.)

 

Whether the Customize Ship button is displayed or not, directly underneath that location to the bottom right of the screen will be displayed an indicator to show the status of the connection to the server. If the server has not started, the message "Simulation is not running" will appear as shown. If the server has started, a yellow bar will indicate the connection strength to the server. If the bar is full, the client has a good connection to the server and will update in near real time. If the bar is not full, either the server or the client is lagging, and performance will be limited.

 

Client Options Screen

During normal play of the game, the Client Options Screen can be accessed for any client by clicking on the Options or "OPTN" button at the top left of the screen. This screen can be used to edit certain configuration options for that client, or return to the Console Choice Screen to change the selection of consoles.

 

The top option, "Continue Playing", leaves this option screen and returns to the normal client screen. The last option, "Back to Console Choice Screen" returns to that screen as described above. The three slider bars under the buttons give the player the ability to modify the sound volume of the game. Game sounds, such as beam blasts and engine noise, and Game Music can all be adjusted to a comfortable volume independently. The Game Comms Volume control may have no effect on clients, because clients do not play Comms audio files. However, it may affect the volume of the Red Alert sound.  The default volume can also be adjusted via registry settings.

 

The other options on this screen are as follows:

 

Show Beam Arcs

This will determine if beam arcs are displayed on Helm and Weapons.

 

Relative Display Mode

If checked, the top of the compass display on Helm and Weapons will always correspond to the direction the ship is facing. If unchecked, the direction will be 0 degrees. 

 

Damage Vis

Indicates how the console reacts when damage is taken by the ship.

• Type 1 - No change
• Type 2 - The screen shudders and breaks up
• Type 3 - The screen turns red 

 

Autonomous DAMCON Teams

This option will indicate the default condition for the Autonomous control on the Engineering console.

 

Note that although you can return to the Console Choice Screen and, if you have the Helm or Mainscreen console selected, click on the "Customize Ship" button to bring up the Ship Customization Screen, any changes made to the ship after the game has started will not be applied. Once the game has begun running, the ship class and appearance is "locked in" and cannot be changed until the game ends. New ships may be added, if they log into a running game, but once created they cannot change class or name. Any changes made to the Ship Customization Screen will apply the next time a game is started.