The Director — stream your game like a broadcast

Cosmos looks best from outside the ship, and a stream of it is only as good as the shot it is on. The Director is a console for cutting that stream live: you build a list of shots, you see the next one before it goes out, and you take it to air when it is right.

It is a streaming tool, not a bridge station. It never commandeers a mainscreen or a crew seat — Cosmos has plenty of other ways to put something on a bridge screen, and taking a console away mid-game ruins somebody's game. Instead you open extra clients and tell each one what it is.

Pick Director in the console list. It is part of LegendaryMissions; a mission that loads the director add-on has it.

Two feeds

Feed	On	Showing
PROGRAM	every console that opened as Program	what is going out — capture this one
PREVIEW	every console that opened as Preview	the next shot, or whatever the editor is building, live

Every Program screen shows the same thing, and every Preview screen shows the same thing. Open a second Program window and it stays in step with the first, so you can capture one and put the other on a projector. Preview is where you check a shot before the audience sees it.

Setting it up

Open a client for each screen you want, choose Director, and the entry screen asks one question: what is this console?

Program — an output screen. Capture this window.
Preview — the same, showing the shot before it goes out.
Director — the control console, with the tabs below.

The screen names itself from that answer — PROG01, PRE01, DIR01, taking the lowest free number — so four windows open at once are told apart at a glance without typing anything. The holding page each screen sits on says its own name, so you know which window is which before anything is playing.

Lock it if you want

DIRECTOR.pin gates the console. Set it to "" to skip the prompt entirely; the entry screen still appears, because that is where the mode is chosen.

Rundowns — the running order

A rundown is a named, ordered list of shots. Four come with it and are built from the live game every time they are used, so they track ships that spawn and die instead of going stale:

Rundown	What is in it
Bridge wall	one console view per console type per player ship — the classic multiview
Player ships	a slow orbit of each player ship
The action	a chase on whatever is most exciting right now, best first
Stations & terrain	orbits of stations and named terrain — the establishing shots

Plus any you build yourself. The main page shows them as a tree: each rundown a heading, its shots underneath. The shot on air is green, and so is the rundown holding it — so a collapsed branch still tells you where the show is.

Two ways to pick

A Pick switch decides what the list is for:

Rundowns — the list shows rundowns alone. Tick as many as you like and press Send to Program; the play set is the union of them, and the show advances through it on the dwell.
Items — the list opens up, and picking a shot puts it on air immediately. No Send, no confirmation. Use it like a clip launcher when you are cutting by hand.

Dwell is how long each shot holds before the next one. Stop hands every screen back and parks it; Resume gives the running order back after a hand-picked shot.

Let the game direct

Turn on the auto-director and the running order follows the fighting: it ranks by the same "exciting" signal the engine's own cinematic camera uses, so it agrees with what the engine would have chosen. It holds its choice through noise — a contender has to be clearly better before the shot moves — and in a lull it falls back to the order you built rather than to an arbitrary one.

Building a shot

The rundown tab is the editor: your running order down the left, the tools that make a shot on the right.

Stage is the usual way in. A 2D view fills the top with the science object list beside it — click a contact on the radar or pick its name from the list, either works. Then choose how to film it:

Shot	What it does
Dolly	pushes in and back out
Orbit	circles the subject
Chase	rides behind it as it turns — third person
Tactical	a full-screen 2D view instead of a camera

These are the same shots the bridge already has — the science and weapons On Screen list — so a Director shot and a bridge shot of the same ship look identical. Framing comes from the ship's own hull size, which is why a starbase and a fighter both fill the frame.

Hold sets how long this shot stays up, overriding the dwell — an establishing shot of a starbase can want ten seconds where a chase in a firefight wants three. Leave it at zero and the dwell decides.

Then Add to rundown, or Send to Program to put it straight on air.

The same shot twice is two shots

Wide on a station with a title, then the same shot clean, is ordinary direction — so a rundown holds both. Two entries only count as one when everything about them matches, so a double-click still collapses.

Console is the other tool: pick a ship and one or more console types, and add one item per console. That is what fills a bridge multiview.

Overlays — titles over the shot

Any shot can carry cards, and several at once because each draws in its own place:

Overlay	Fields
Lower third	name, line
Hero	title, subtitle
Top status	text
Letterbox	line

Every Preview screen shows them for real, at full size, as you build them.

The text writes itself

A generated rundown makes one item per ship, so there is nowhere to type "Artemis". The fields take a template filled in from whatever the shot is pointed at:

name:  <<name>>
line:  <<class>>

...gives you Artemis / Light Cruiser on that ship, and the right thing on every other ship in the rundown.

Token	Gives you
`<<name>>`	the ship's name
`<<class>>`	its hull — "Light Cruiser"
`<<side>>`	its side
`<<role>>`	raider, station, monster
`<<race>>`	its origin
`<<comms_id>>`	"Artemis (TSN)"
`<<hull>>`	hull percent
`<<shields>>`	front / rear percent

Write <<class|contact>> to say what to fall back to when a token has nothing to give — a rock has no hull class, and a blank line reads as a broken card. A token you mistype stays visible as <<shpi>> rather than blanking the card, so you can see what went wrong.

Each row has a preset picker — Ship ID, Ship and side, Condition, Contact — and a Save to add your own beside them.

Try it

Open three windows: one Director, one Program, one Preview.

On the Director, pick The action and press Send to Program.
Watch Preview — it is showing what Program will cut to next.
Switch Pick to Items, open a rundown, and click a shot. It is on air at once, and it goes green.
On the rundown tab, click a ship, choose Chase, tick Lower third, and press Send to Program.
Press Resume to give the running order back.

Settings

DIRECTOR:
    enable: true
    pin: "000000"     # "" to skip the prompt