Space Station Simulator – Components Desk and…That’s all, folks

Before visiting the Components Desk in our first saved game we thought we’d pop up to the station to see how the ‘nauts were doing, and here is part of the conversation between out astronauts:

“You’re so nice.”

“You are the bee’s knees.”

“You’re so nice.”

Fascinating, eh? They went on like that, in Puppy Love mode. It was all so schmoopy. And all this while Ground Control was sending up warnings about a shortage in the water reserves. True, that would be my responsibility, but heck, even if the crew could do nothing, they might have been a little more discrete about fraternizing. 

The whole Sims in Space angle is gag-worthy.

Back down to earth, at the Components Desk you get to see some of the more mechanical issues with the software. Here you’ll scroll a list of available equipment in categories like  Health, Food and Water. You buy components with “flags” of one or the other of the participating, space-faring nations. Looks like some effort was made to sort out who was contributing what to the project at this point, some equipment costs more flags if you buy them from Russia, say, than the US. or vice versa. But there is nearly nothing in the way of explanation.

We’re told that components built in “yellow condition” tend to require more maintanence. We  saw some yellow things on the screen, a button, some arrows, some text, but no hint at what yellow conditions might be and how to avoid them. It was only after applying flags that we noticed the progress bar illustrating the amount of flags applied had yellow steps in the middle range. Perhaps if you stopped applying flags before the bar became green the component would be sent up to space in this “yellow condition.” If this is the case then there was a red condition as well. So that simulates the ability to send poorly constructed and/or defective equipment into space, we suppose. Intentionally.   

 And we knew our crew needed water but there was no room on the launch vehicle since we are busy spending what must have been the equivalent millions of dollars/yen/euros/rubles and/or rupees to get the suggested exercise bike into orbit. So we launch and what happens? The sounds of a lift-off, then nothing. No obvious way presented itself to trace the progress of the launch vehicle and its precious gym equipment payload. The Big Screen in Mission Control did not change. And the technicians stayed young and perky.

In the Components Desk there appeared to be at least one frustrating dead end in the controls. Configure one component, click on Buy Next then try to configure something you don’t have room for, attempt to go back and you’ve lost the first component. Maybe there’s a way to do it that we missed, but bottom line is the controls are not at all clear in this area. And so you might assume they would be that way in other areas of the program as well.

The Components Desk is the only place seen so far to get information about equipment. Click on the INFO link when configuring something and a brief summary of the piece is spoken to you. We found no place for random access to technical information, history or equipment specs. And nowhere did we see any mention of science missions or payloads. Audio equipment, video games, yes. No telescopes.

We’re not really getting overly engaged by the Space Station Sim at this point. It’s not meeting the Paul Prudhomme test for good gaming. Prodhomme says that food can be judged good if it makes you want to keep eating it. The cutesy astronauts, the over-young technicians, the tutorial that seems to drop you on your own far too soon and the lack of lots of hard information a space fan would expect in a game of such cosmic scope all conspire to make this sim only moderately digestable.

Space station simulator is stable and handsome , but not a serious or informatiove investigation of space stations. This may be the last we see of it.

Another game is on the way. Stay tuned.

Space Station Simulator – Session 3

An all-too brief session 3. Got back to the first game started and quickly got the crew into trouble Went back and created another astronaut. Haven’t gotten to the Components Desk yet. Had a tile-setting disaster over the weekend. It rained on our grout. What a mess. Well, live and learn. Always know where your tarp is. Better yet, make sure you have one before you start an outdoor tiling project.

 Just some few random thoughts on our experience so far:

* At the end of last session I noticed that the two astronauts in the station from the tutorial were both quite smitten with each other. Looks like “Puppy Love” is one of the possible behaviour modes. That’s a bit awkward now considering the recent diaper-driving unpleasantness that got one of our love-struck astro-gals fired. We guess it’s possible and the behavioral model might no be complete without it but we wish it hadn’t come along this early in our experience. Kind of trivializes it a bit. Then again, I may have given my gal a couple extra points in the Social area. Might be my own fault.

* Of  the traits you deal out when creating your astronauts physically, noticeably missing from the list is AGE. Looks like your space station is to be crewed by some very accomplished 20-somethings. It may not have been necessary to skew the game so young. A few gray-beards around would have added to the favor (not to mention the realism).

* Again, I miss a comprehensive resource into which one could dip for some information on objects in the game. Soon after revisiting my first game the indicators started flashing red. The station was in trouble but I couldn’t figure out what needed doing. There was an O2 alert but the candles were on. Should they have been? I don’t know. CO2 level went high and it looks like I corrected that. Couldn’t have needed the Components they suggest at the end of the tutorial because one was a toru (control panel) and one was an exercise bike. Neither of those seem like they would have helped. As the atmosphere in the station soured so did the disposition of the crew. They were no longer cooing at each other, but crabbing. You’d expect nothing less. Puppy love didn’t last.

Space Station Sim – The Tiny Tutorial

I’ll try to keep up the pace but I have to get some themes I picked out weeks ago up here at some point.That cool song “Mission Control” in the opening movie is by one Julia Othmer. It might be the second song that comes up once you enter her site. Was for me, twice.

There is quite brief tutorial in Space Station Sim? After that the narrator recommends going off to the Components Desk and told to follow the instructions there. Other than that, looks like the mysteries of the game are left for the player to disover on their own. The main in-game control screen is a depiction of Mission Control, with each desk reperesenting a different aspect of the mission. Erring on the side of inclusion it looks like the game makers have been a bit generous on gender and age diversity; there’re significantly more women than you’d expect and the age scale skews way way young. Good for marketing demographics, we suppose, but  not very simulating.

NASA Space Shuttle Mission Control

Space Station Sim Mission Control Screen

In the tutorial you’ll learn how to move around the station to view it from all angles and how to open it into the cutaway view to look inside. Once in there you’ll learn how to assign tasks to the crew and about the various indicators of both crew and station health.

When it ends be sure to listen closely to the two items it mentions you’ll need to build in the recommended next step. If not then you’ll have to sit through the whole astronaut tutorial again.

Unless you’re reading this post, that is.  What the guide says is “toru” and “exercise bike”. If you don’t know what a toru is then you may not think you heard right and your brain is likely to go blank. This led to the question of whether there is a central database of information, a Space Station Simopedia of general knoweldge, for the game and so for the real thing as well. So far we see no evidence of one.

On the computery side, it looks like the SS Sim takes over the presentation resources of your computer completely. You cannot ALT-TAB the PC between it and other running applications. Annoying for the reviewer-blogger, yes, but perhaps a turn off as well for those who enjoy letting games run in the background while doing work or surfing the news. Nope, if this sim is running it demands your total attention. Not a good aspect in this multitasking day-and-age. Some may not turn oit back on. The only way to switch away via the Windows Task Manager. Not quite the same.

We’ll pick up tomorrow at the the Components Desk.

Space Station Sim – Out of the Box

Finally got a hold of this simulation of human activity in LEO – Low Earth Orbit. Thank you, Mr. Mueller. And so this will be the first post of an in-depth as-we-experience-it InfinityBound software review.

LEO, along with the space stations and humans that work in it have a special place for us hereabouts, and hoefully soon we’ll be in a postioin to elaborate. For now though, we’ll take the arrival of this interesting title as a good omen.

We had our InfinityBound elves install the software while busy elving for others at work today and soon as we were able we started it up. The install must have gone well or the elves would surely have called in for help.

On start-up the sim immediately scanned for updates, so we brought down the 31-meg patch that takes us to version 2.2.0.0. The Conf igure button on the main screen has, among others, a tab for Updates that toggles the automatic update scanning.

Start up was clean and with no saved games in the big white window somewhat empty.

Not a screen we’ll spend a lot of time in, though, so not a big deal. 

The package comes with its disk and a full-color book, a quite thin one, but a book nonetheless. Give it that over any package that ships merely with PDFs on the disk. Scanning through the book will take just a few minutes and gives you all the basics to get you started.

So let’s see how it goes.