Artemis Agent is an Android app designed to be used as a partial Comms client for Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. It is the successor to Artemis Messenger, which received and parsed incoming Comms messages about side missions and organized the information into a neat, accessible and readable table, making it much easier to keep track of what side missions were available, what rewards they offered, and how much progress had been made. Later, it was expanded to include status details reported from ally ships and stations as well, and later still, to also calculate efficient routes to complete all side missions and assist ally ships that needed help.
Artemis Messenger has become obselete, and Artemis Agent has taken its place. It restores all the features of its predecessor and adds new ones. Users can toggle red alert status, activate secret code cases, send commands to ally ships, track BioMechs and remotely freeze them for a limited time, track scanned enemy ships, taunt them and request surrenders. The UI has been greatly modernized to take advantage of Android's newer capabilities.
At the start of a simulation, the app will send status request messages to friendly stations. These messages are resent when certain events occur, such as docking, undocking, and the completion of missile production, but they can also be resent manually by pressing the Status button. The information shown in the Stations view includes shield strength, direction and range, replacement fighters on board, ordnance stocks, production speed, the type of ordnance that is currently being built, and how much longer its production is expected to take. Pressing the Standby button requests that the station stand by for docking. You can also choose what type of ordnance the station should start to build as well as which station has its information displayed.
The app also sends hail messages to ally ships at the start of a simulation, which can be resent manually by pressing the Hail button. Information on ally ships is displayed in a scrollable list, including shield strengths, direction, range and current status. Commands can also be sent to an ally ship by pressing the Command button, including directions to move, turn, rendezvous with another ship or station, or attack a nearby enemy.
In Deep Strike mode, there is only one ally ship; as such, the command buttons will always be shown.
A side mission is a task within a simulation that entails the transport of supplies or data from one location to another, with a reward offered for doing so. Generally, when the player receives a message about a new side mission, the message begins with the line "Help us help you". It then lists specifics about the task itself, namely the location to visit first and the reward that is offered by the sender of the message; the ship or station that sent the message is the location to visit after the location mentioned in the content of the message. When one of the two locations is visited in order, that location sends a message that is parsed by the app, and the app updates the status of the side mission accordingly. Side missions in the list show where to go to progress their completion, including direction and range, along with the rewards.
There are five types of rewards: Battery Charge (extra energy), Extra Coolant (extra coolant for Engineering), Nuclear Missiles (two Nuke torpedoes), Production Speed (doubled at the station that issued the mission) and Shield Boost (stronger front and rear shields). The side missions in the list can be filtered by their type by going to the Settings page.
There are two ways to configure the Route view. If it is configured for tasks, the view will list all the stops to make to complete all side missions and assist ally ships with their needs as quickly and efficiently as possible. If it is configured for supplies (e.g. restocking on missiles or replacing lost single-seat craft), the view will simply list the stations that have the required supplies in order of proximity. Whether you use the Route view or not, communication between the Helm, Science and Comms officers is key to effective and efficient acquisition of rewards.
The app also lists enemy ships that have been scanned by Science in a scrollable list. Each entry in the list has buttons for requesting an enemy's surrender or accessing taunts. If the enemy has been scanned twice, intel will also be displayed to guide the user away from ineffectual taunts.
Similarly, there is also a list for BioMechs. The entries in this list can be used to temporarily freeze BioMechs just by tapping them.
The app communicates with a running Artemis server and receives packets from that server, which it then parses to obtain all of the information it uses. You can connect to a server if you know its address, but if the server is running Artemis version 2.7.0 or later, the app can broadcast a server discovery request and find a server address that way.
Absolutely! This project is open-source, so you can fork it and make PRs. If you have any issues or detect any bugs, you can report them in the Issues section on GitHub.
This app uses IAN (Interface for Artemis Networking), a Java library written by Robert J. Walker. It has been adapted for various purposes, including backwards compatibility with Artemis 2.3.0 and later. The 3D modeling features have been removed as they are not needed and are not compatible with Android.