Neutron Stars and UI

In the past weeks work on Sine Fine has progressed in several directions. Simon, who is collaborating with us on the special VFX related to astronomical phenomena has created this beautiful and physically accurate real-time rendering of a fast-rotating Neutron Star, also known as a Pulsar.

Neutron Stars are the collapsed cores of supergiant stars. Despite their name, these stars are relatively tiny, around 10 km of radius, while being comparatively massive. Most neutron stars we know of are pulsars, a type of neutron stars that rotate with periods ranging from the milliseconds to a few seconds. These are characterised by very strong emissions of particles along its two magnetic poles as seen in the video. However, “older” neutron stars, astronomically speaking, would have lost their magnetic fields and likely cooled down, which makes them hard to detect with our current technology.

In the game

In terms of gameplay, neutron stars, and other “exotic” astronomical phenomena, will be represented as star systems that the player can (and should) explore for a variety of purposes. Players might want to build orbital research stations, communications relays, or also explore the astronomical history of the system: being the remnant of supergiant stars, perhaps something survived from before the star went supernova?

The closest Pulsar to Earth is PSR J0108−1431, located at about 424 light years away. Can you imagine how long it would take to reach this star at fractions of the speed of light? To be the first to see a Neutron Star and live to tell the tale, What an achievement it would be!

Hopefully this is just the beginning and we’ll be able to bring more astronomical phenomena to Sine Fine!

User interface

Now, for a completely different topic, let’s talk about the user interface! Wait don’t leave!

Games like Sine Fine, as well as other 4x or “map-staring” games, live or die on the responsiveness and immediateness of their UIs. While I would not call myself a UX designer, my academic professional background is actually in Human-Computer Interaction, so I do have an affinity with finding what we call “usability issues”, that are mostly known as “Quality of Life” issues in the gaming industry. Since players will spend a considerable amount of time with the game’s UI a lot of effort and care is going into making sure that pressing buttons and staring at data can be an enjoyable and responsive experience in itself. We absolutely don’t want to give a “spreadsheet in space” feeling.

In the past weeks I have been working on improving a Tailwind-like system for the game’s UI. In the webdev world, Tailwind is a css framework, a collection of utility classes that, when assigned to an HTML element, will give its look and feel. Unity’s UI toolkit is a slimmed down version of HTML and css and it unfortunately lacks several features that are available in modern browsers. However, I do like it and wanted to reuse my experience with webdev to create more interesting and “sci-fi” looking controls.

The above video shows the look and feel of the “default theme” of Sine Fine, with some animations for the button clicking behaviour. The “beauty” of it is that the whole system is automatically generated given a palette of colours for the “semantic” types (the colours associated with labels such as “primary”, “success”, “danger”, etc.). The system then generates all the various palette shades (the numbers going from 950 to 50) and provides a way to express which specific shades to use in relation to the various “states” an element can have (like hovered, selected, clicked, etc.) and automate this state management.

While the real Tailwind is not “opinionated” in the sense of how buttons should look like for example, a game will typically end up having elements with specific functionalities associated to it. Using this system, a future Sine Fine modder who wants to create a new theme for the game will simply have to define a new palette and, optionally, a new stylesheet to override the default style. But here’s hoping you like the default!

This is of course not the final look. A future improvement will be to add some variation to the actual shapes of the elements. For example, instead of the classic rectangle for buttons, it could be possible to have more elaborated shapes, like octagons for the fans of Battlestar Galactica.

Many controls had to be built from scratch, since they don’t exist in the library of built-in Unity UI Toolkit components. For example, this “accordion”:

Or a “sidebar”:

Others, like this dropdown list, had to be rebuilt to leverage the styling system I have built.

With these basic components built, I can now focus on finally designing some of the main UI windows for the game. Next on my list is the “Build Ship” interface, allowing players to specify where to “order” the construction of a ship, given a set of saved designs from the Ship Designer interface (here is an early look, 3D ship components coming soon). That will also allow me put the GOAP AI I showcased earlier to full use, by kickstarting the resource gathering system.

The Bobiverse

Many of you have spotted some similarities between the story of Sine Fine and the “Bobiverse” series of books, by Dennis E. Taylor. I have now finished reading the first book and I am really liking the story. In short and without spoiling too much, these sci-fi books tell the story of several Von Neumann probes / automated exploration ships where a self-conscious AI “lives” onboard the ships and explores the galaxy at relativistic speeds.

Before ideating the story of Sine Fine, I had not read the Bobiverse novels. There are some notable differences, though. In Sine Fine, for story reasons, it is not the self-conscious AI who explores the galaxy. The Sine Fine supercomputer is statically located on a “secure” location in the Solar System and does not physically move.

The automated ships are coordinated by this “central authority” and are less independent. The Bobiverse ships also seem to start with much more capable engines than players will in Sine Fine. Be prepared to spend hundreds of years to visit the nearby systems instead of a decade!

Finally, the major difference that would probably break the main gameplay mechanic, is the communication speed. With faster-than-light communications, it would be impossible and useless to have the time-delay dynamic. In Sine Fine you will hear of events happening in other star systems once signals reach the Solar system at the speed of light. With faster-than-light communications, you could potentially know of distant events as soon as they happen, which is basically the norm in almost every space 4x.

All being said, I am already hooked into the Bobiverse and I am looking forward to see where it goes. I also now need to think where to put a Bobiverse-themed easter eggs for fans of the book! Suggestions welcome!

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