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“I made an operating system UI within Unity”

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Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#141

Post by exikyut »

Nition wrote: post #127
pwthornton wrote: post #114

This is like Windows Vista Aero UI on crack. There is a reason that UIs don't look like this. The transparency alone is a major issue for usability, accessibility, and productivity. It's an interesting project. I wish this person would have pushed themselves to think of new paradigms, rather than trying to use more effects to very staid looking interaction design concepts.

Most games of the sort the creator is targeting here (games with a built-in fake OS) have their UI look fairly familiar, since it's more about creating a believable world than doing something exciting and new with the OS itself.

...Which then goes and excludes the demographic of people for whom "believable world" means "exciting and new".

As in, tell me something I don't know - I'll be able to believe [in] that much more effectively than a revamp of some old dead thing I've been staring at boredly for the past X amount of time.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#142

Post by klingonopera »

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #94

Am I the only one who thought it was going to be an OS navigated in a FPS environment, like the old Doom sysadmin port? Looks pretty slick though.

Kinda ironic, that when they were actually using real PC tech, people were claiming they weren't, whereas now Hollywood sins the crap outta the hacker-type, and nobody bats an eye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

EDIT: Come to think about it... back then, the tech was probably just about mature enough to make such a thing just about possible, certainly today it can beautifully be done, and can maybe even more efficient (for the user/work, not hardware) than classic terminal/GUI approaches. I've never used a third party file explorer, apart maybe from WinSCP, but what sounded ridiculous could actually be pretty genius.

Anyone here on a 3d filesystem explorer?

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#144

Post by taneq »

Answerawake wrote: post #3

Looks like a generic Linux distro. Am I the only one getting "visual fatigue" over seeing flat design? I just feel like we need a trend change. Its been way too long. I find myself looking at the old Windows Vista, Windows XP, early Mac OS X, or even Windows 3.1 designs and longing for that simplicity.

I don't think flat design is the issue (although I agree that it's getting to be as overdone as skeuomorphism back in the early '00s). The real issue is that it's discarded all of our carefully built up visual design language (ie. what makes things feel 'intuitive') in favour of a churning mishmash of beautiful new impediments to understanding. The disappearance of top menus. Inscrutable icons instead of text. Hamburger menus, arcane X-finger-slide-from-Y-edge style secret handshakes, it just keeps getting worse.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#145

Post by PragmaticPulp »

kick wrote: post #16

reddit's modern userbase is really interesting. There are some incredibly interesting people who use it, but you also find a bunch of accounts that are under a year old with lines like this: Please don't. I would like to see you get rewarded for your hard work. Screw the parasites. Their new UI seems to be doing its job, but I wonder if the decline in thread quality was worth it.

> reddit's modern userbase is really interesting. ... you also find a bunch of accounts that are under a year old with lines like this:

You should visit /r/cscareerquestions and sort by New some time. Many of the younger posters have some wild expectations about CS careers, compensation, and the workplace.

90% of the young people I interview, hire, and work with are wonderful these days. However, a small minority arrive with unchecked entitlement and bizarre expectations, and I think sites like Reddit and Twitter are to blame.

I think there's a small subset of people who grew up watching that "Fuck you, pay me" video on YouTube, combined with a hot job market and an economy that hasn't seen a recession in their adult years. Combine that with stories of Google engineers making $200K+, and you end up with a small minority of developers with an extreme sense of entitlement.

I've seen developers try to invoice companies for time spent in on-site interviews, junior developers who couldn't pass basic FizzBuzz-level coding challenges demanding $250K compensation, and a surprising number of /r/cscareerquestions threads justifying "ghosting" your employer. Not to mention the meltdowns that happen when people get put on performance improvement programs. And of course, the never ending comments encouraging people to sue their employers for trivial things.

Reddit has some gems, but it's a breeding ground for keyboard warriors. Upvotes tend to follow what people want to hear rather than the best advice. It's easy to be an internet tough guy, but a lot of that grumpiness and entitlement breaks down when they meet the real world.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#146

Post by kllrnohj »

exikyut wrote: post #140
kllrnohj wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phrasing of this is a bit unclear. I think you mean that no "real" UI redraws when nothing has changed. But otherwise most operating systems do run in full GPU mode all the time. The true-mobile ones, so iOS & Android, are almost always using dedicated hardware to handle composition without spinning up the GPU (although both use the GPU to render, so whenever something does change it's immediately back on the GP…

TIL hardware planes (the "dedicated hardware" you refer to?) != the GPU. I presume these are inside the GPU die, though? Probably near the display controller logic?

Whether or not it's inside the GPU die would depend on if the display controller is part of the GPU die or not. On a mobile SoC everything tends to be on the one die anyway so... sure. On a discreet desktop GPU I have absolutely no idea. They might not even bother having one at all?

The mobile ones though are pretty good, though. They can do like ~6 composition layers with alpha blending, cropping, rotation, and apply a color matrix for display calibration. All in the dedicated HWC silicon, GPU can be powered off (or doing something else like rendering a game)

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#147

Post by kllrnohj »

exikyut wrote: post #139
mbf1 wrote: post #70

It's a nice looking display, and it's running at a nice 60FPS. However, operating systems don't generally run in full GPU mode all the time -- it's a huge amount of power to be re-drawing the screen that often, and that scales to poor battery life on mobile and expensive power costs in servers. So that's one of many reasons practical OSes don't do their UIs with GPU shaders when they can otherwise get away with less.

- Redrawing the entire screen on every frame is indeed disastrous - Redrawing entire application windows every time something gets moved around a bit and something gets a paint event is also higher load than necessary - Drawing things that won't change every frame into textures (not shaders), and then compositing those textures together on every frame, is by far the most efficient approach today, on all platforms I a…

> Drawing things that won't change every frame into textures (not shaders), and then compositing those textures together on every frame, is by far the most efficient approach today, on all platforms

Not really true. It's a lot more efficient to draw quite a few things from scratch than it is to use a cache texture. Texture composition requires a lot of memory bandwidth, which tends to be a rather constrained resource. It is very effective to do things like put each window in its own texture, yes. Within a given window using caching textures tends to be a net-loss, though.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#148

Post by vzttzv2 »

kick wrote: post #16

reddit's modern userbase is really interesting. There are some incredibly interesting people who use it, but you also find a bunch of accounts that are under a year old with lines like this: Please don't. I would like to see you get rewarded for your hard work. Screw the parasites. Their new UI seems to be doing its job, but I wonder if the decline in thread quality was worth it.

For context, the OP have a few others similar UI pack for sale.

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#149

Post by GuiA »

nineteen999 wrote: post #106

Well, no fancy UI, but I did port a Z80 CPU which could run a full Operating System (CPM 2) to Unreal Engine: https://i.imgur.com/2nagJS4.png I did implement graphics hardware as well, so in theory you could write a GUI along the lines of Contiki or something https://i.imgur.com/DmnVA2I.png The hard drives were configurable (up to 4MB hard drive images supported) and as per the pic above, the light on the drives ligh…

That's dope. I'm sure the original post in this thread was a solid learning experience for its creator but unlike what you just showed, it doesn't do anything particularly novel or clever. You should write up a blog post and submit to HN!

Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”

#150

Post by jonny383 »

Awesome! If it's a hobby, who cares about the platform. Have fun and learn stuff.

This reminds me of being a kid, and always having the "hacker" mentality. Use whatever you have available to make something awesome.

I remember having my first "computer" based project around 2001 for school. We had to create some kind of presentation "using any tool" available to us on our home computer (or available in the school library).

I opted to create my presentation using RPG Maker 2000. It had animations, sound effects, and even a little quiz at the end. I handed the project in to the teacher on a 1.44MB floppy* drive containing only the compiled windows binary.

The teacher loved it and placed me in a regional school advanced IT program where I was first introduced to QBASIC.

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