Ropecon 2019: Essi Santala, Sampo Juustila: Odysseus – Where Code Meets Light and Sound
Ropecon2 HN recommenders · 2021–2026
1K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-08-25
A Ropecon 2019 talk by a lighting designer and a software engineer on how the Odysseus larp spaceship was built, using over ten IT systems, hundreds of lights and dozens of speakers. It covers the lessons learned.
HN people share it as a look at the custom backend and hardware behind a large sci-fi larp.
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There's an active forum for bridge sims that's the de facto community space for EmptyEpsilon: [LINK] There's a Discord that assembles online games run by United Stellar Navy (it's officially an role-playing community, but the EmptyEpsilon games aren't heavy on it): [LINK] They organized a few 50+ player games last year, which have some videos on YouTube. A bit chaotic without context, but if you want to see the upper scope of gameplay: [LINK] EmptyEpsilon also has traction as a LARP platform, thanks in parts to being pretty straightforward to modify in source, using Lua to script scenarios, and having a rudimentary optional HTTP API to trigger scenario events, manipulate game state, and control player stations. A Finnish group used EE in their large 2019 LARP event Odysseus: [LINK] The custom backend for the tech, which included several systems and physical interfaces outside of EE that interfaced with the game, got a good talk at RopeCon: [VIDEO] A French LARP scene has an active fork with features more geared toward that usage: [LINK]
EmptyEpsilon has support for a bunch of DMX flavors as well as Hue lights and custom control surfaces, as well as an optional exposable API that can run Lua scripts on game state. Odysseus LARP paired that functionality with a bunch of RPi Zero W-powered hardware puzzles to represent ship systems,[1] so Engineers had to physically tinker with things in order to get systems back up and running after they broke. That included things like going through crawlspaces and ladders to access certain components, digging through a printed manual when computer systems were "down". 1: [VIDEO]
I love Odysseus so much. On one hand I think it sounds amazing and would love the opportunity to play it one day. On the other, from a technical accomplishment of volunteer work it is amazing! Just the IT work alone. Here's a video I found years ago by one of the volunteers talking about the work they put into the electronics. [VIDEO]