I remember working on a Visual Basic "OS" back in 2005 with something similar in mind. I don't remember going further than implementing a basic desktop and a calculator. Fun times.
“I made an operating system UI within Unity”
161–170 of 185 posts
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#162It'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.
There are now projects such as Dear ImGui / Nuklear - Immediate Mode Graphical User interface that are just that: GPU accelerated UI.
Here is something I am coding with Dear ImGui:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZsE7ACXrw
Even on an old MacBook, it keeps running at 60 FPS.
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#163It was very clean and impressive work, but the longer I watched the more I realized how disconnected I feel from all these weird "apps".
- Music player without connection to the real world (spotify/youtube)
- Notes app without connection to the real world (the file system/other platforms)
- Messages app without connection to the real world (sms / messenger / whatsapp / etc etc)
- Photos app without connection to the real world (some kind of cloud synced file system)
- Notifications ... I really still have not found a use for them, except for IM on my phone
Stop bundling these things :( It looks nice, but the real world use is so limited. Focus on really enabling other stuff instead
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
As stated in the link (although it mightn't be clear if you're not a game dev), it's so you can make games with operating system UI, such as Emily Is Away[1]. The linked one is particularly polished; it would have taken ages to implement all those little details. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/417860/Emily_is_Away/
Ah. I missed that. Thanks.
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Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#165Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#166He did a great job, but I wonder if unity optimizes the runtime for components that doesn't need update every frame?
I believe Unity does this if the scene is split into several separate UI canvases:
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#167It was very clean and impressive work, but the longer I watched the more I realized how disconnected I feel from all these weird "apps". - Music player without connection to the real world (spotify/youtube) - Notes app without connection to the real world (the file system/other platforms) - Messages app without connection to the real world (sms / messenger / whatsapp / etc etc) - Photos app without connection to the…
1. This is more of a design study that anything else, having unity provide your os shell is ridiculous.
2. You shouldn't consider your own needs the standard. I for myself would be very happy with
- A music player that doesn't integrate with user hostile, walled garden drm garbage
- Ditto for messaging
- Just using your own file sync for documents and pictures
Also, well, notes without filesystem access feels really useless, we can agree on that one.
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, what was this used in, and where/how can we play with it? Preferably in test/debug mode so we can directly poke at the different features. (But source not necessary.) Also - the ANSI graphics example... it honestly looks bitmapped, not like a bunch of colored character cells. But then the graphics example (link 2) also looks bitmapped, so I think I'm missing something.
The ANSI is on the screen on the right on that example, the Blocktronics original file is here: https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics_16colors/k1-shack.ans Colors are a little off in retrospect, not sure whether I ever fixed that. The screen on the left shows the bitmap graphics mode with the alien from Alien: Covenant. I should upload it somewhere for people to play with and give feedback. The UE4 project build is abo…
Ah, it was a bitmap image. But TIL about 16colo.rs, which is really cool.
The screenshots you've posted definitely look interesting to poke around with. Do the keys press as you type? :D
1GB is sizable but not too out of reach for those interested. Sounds like there are a lot of assets/interesting stuff elsewhere in the project?
I wondered about a good "somewhere" to put it online for a bit - I don't have a good answer for this. I checked itch.io, which apparently has a 500MB limit that can be expanded to 2GB on request. (https://itch.io/t/324861/need-help-with-size-limit-on-game-u..., https://itch.io/t/46291/uploading-large-games-faq). Archive.org would probably work, despite the most likely reaction being at least one raised eyebrow.
(And... hm, user-specifiable disk images are probably something you've already thought of.)
Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#169Re: “I made an operating system UI within Unity”
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is 2020 and everything is slow even on current gen technology. That is the most disappointing fact about the current state of technology.
The disappointing fact about the current state of mobile apps is that companies no longer think it's necessary to build two native apps.
It shouldn’t be. We never want to build the same app multiple times. What I (as a developer) want is for OS companies to stop with all the proprietary crap and cooperate so I can write an app once. Web apps and web-as-native (and previously, cross platform GUI frameworks) are our reaction to this lack of cooperation.
See also: compilers, libraries, ORMs, autotools, Docker, ... We as an industry go to extreme lengths to work around crap that’s incompatible for no good reason.