My little one-man indie open source space game supports multi-crew, pilot (navigator), turret gunner, engineering, comms, damage control, science (scanning) and game-master stations. It's called Space Nerds In Space. I also lack sufficient PvE content and PvP density, but I'm raking in $17 a month on patreon.
This looks really cool! How do you feel you currently compare to Artemis, the longstanding party in the genre? I have always been excited about these sorts of things, but don't have enough IRL friends usually that can tolerate this level of nerd, so haven't really tried this sort of thing. ;)
Hard to say as I haven't really played Artemis except once briefly a few years ago. It is indeed difficult to gather a crew. Some differences:
* SNIS is "properly" 3D, as opposed to the "submarine" style limited 3D support Artemis has.
* With the turret gun, SNIS feels a little more "millenium falcon" than "enterprise".
* Graphics in SNIS are miles better, but still no great shakes by modern standards (though the gas giants look awesome, if I do say so myself.)
* Artemis has a lot more mission scripts available. SNIS has a mission scripting system (Lua based), but there are not very many mission scripts.
* Artemis is more properly a game, while SNIS is more of a sandbox. (More mission scripts would help here.)
* SNIS is (I think) comparatively less buggy, and I have run sessions for hours with zero hiccups. I don't get the impression from what I've read that Artemis is quite so stable, but I might be wrong.
* The SNIS server processes are entirely headless with no UI graphical or otherwise, while the artemis server is also the "main screen" client (as I understand it).
* It's possible to have a constellation of SNIS server processes and traverse between them via "warp gates", building an arbitrarily large universe given enough servers to host it all (or, it can auto-start and auto-shutdown servers on a single machine on-demand to give the illusion of an arbitrarily large universe.) Artemis has no similar concept that I am aware of.
There's loads of other differences as SNIS is not really a copycat of Artemis but rather just taking the general idea of a bridge simulator and not much else.
I would be remiss not to mention the existence of another open source spaceship bridge simulator, Empty Epsilon. There's a forum for the genre: https://bridgesim.net
That being said, there's neither PvE content on the scale to need that, nor PvP density to support it either.