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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

The feel of this interface is incredible. What's most interesting is that it evokes lots of memories from the games I played more than 20 years ago, and yet it is very distinct and doesn't copy any of them. Feels almost like something very familiar, but you can't quite grasp where you saw it.

This is incredible and I'll be following this project, and probably will do something with this framework, too.

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This actually shows something interesting: that there is a coherent visual language for interfaces within the sci-fi subgenre of graphic design that just kind of appeared by implicit consensus. Which I guess can be said for many visual design trends - many of us can guess both when and for what purpose a product was designed based on its graphic design.

Btw, the Holo interface we saw in Android 4 was very influenced by this type of design. It was rather stylish, even if difficult to use consistently. But of course since then it was replaced by Material Design, starting with Android 5.0

God, I miss holo. It was so much nicer on the eyes. "Dark Mode" is... ugly. I'm glad it exists, but it's still uglier, than holo was.

Problem with Holo it was hard to follow this concept and create visually distinct apps. They would all be cold white and blue. Material design gives for more variability.

Some apps did change the accent color, but it was very non-trivial. Material design comes with tintable controls out of the box.

There were two Holo themes: dark and light. You'd pick one and extend it with the style of your brand. My only gripe with it was that there's no built-in mechanism to add shadows to things — you have to use pre-rendered shadows as bitmaps or generate them on the fly.

Anyway, "dark mode" is totally doable with Holo.

Of interest to me is that a lot of the graphics and sounds are based on '70's and '80's tech with the constraints of the circuits and display technology that were "state of the art" then, but then "futurized". Such that advanced tech now spends computer cycles simulating analog circuits, CRTs, etc, for the purpose of nostalgia...

You might like the book "Make It So" [0] about interface design language in science fiction.

[0] https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/make-it-so/

Also that coherency is probably why many Star Trek reboots often look off

It definitely is for me. The LCARS interface is as much of a character of the story as the as the Enterprise herself (substitute with Voyager, Defiant, or São Paulo if you wish) and I’d go a step further of saying ship interfaces and systems inform us as much about the era of Star Trek one is watching as does the plot and narrative at any given moment to the discerning and attentive Trekkie :)

Strongly agreed. Which is why I was glad to see LCARS returning in Lower Decks, and the series is experimenting with tweaking the design a little to include some lessons in UI design learned over the past decades. Despite being animated comedy, I like it better than post-Enterprise installments, because it brings back the design language of TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT era.

ENT in particular was interesting, when I went back and re-watched it after finally getting to TNG/DS9/VOY (ENT being the first one I saw): They IMO successfully crossed real-world interfaces with TNG-era LCARS [0], creating something that looks vaguely like a tiled window manager, has a minimize function akin to the Windows start-bar (the icons on the right are minimized windows, used on rare occasion in the show for discreet messages), but with a whole bunch of hints of a natural progression into what it would become later in-universe.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Desktop_monitor?file=22...

It's also interesting how they included design hints of how this would evolve in to TOS era design later (the bulky monitor for example).

It's kind of ironic actually: we as viewers expect that kind of historical consistency, and complain about changes that feel disconnected, but in reality the history of interface design is full of such kind of radical shifts!

That sounds really interesting! Could you share some examples?

It's various minor things. Like PADDs being proper LCARS tablets with a bit more space for content, smaller bevel[0] and even portrait mode[1]. Or the experiments with circular (radial) elements on display, which arguably are now decorative, but still they fit in, so are a good starting point for further exploration.

Or, and I can't find a screenshot of it now, that one tiny joke that made me almost spit out my tea. A scene on the bridge, the captain talking to someone over the viewscreen; she makes a gesture to cut off audio, the tactical officer presses a button on his console, and a small icon of a crossed out speaker appears on said console. Immediately recognizable even for non-StarTrek audience, and still they made it fit the style.

[0] - https://www.yourprops.com/PADD-replica-movie-prop-Star-Trek-...

[1] - https://www.yourprops.com/Medical-PADD-replica-movie-prop-St..., though there was precedent in DS9, AFAIR.

Everything old is new again.

If you take away some of the animations and sound, this looks like around half of all the websites I visited in 1998. (Which mainly revolved around hacking and Quake.)

Flash websites used to look incredible. Completely unusable, and without accessibility, but they did look gorgeous.

The UI reminds me a bit of a mix between the EoC:IW2 UI (https://gamefabrique.com/games/independence-war-2-edge-of-ch...) and the ingress web UI. The fonts are doing a lot of the leg work for that.

Maybe a bit of EVE Online too.

I got instant and intense flashbacks of Deus Ex.

God I loved that game (IW2). Wasted so many hours just flying around with the physics in that game. I'm in total agreement, I get the same vibes.

Amen, my brother-in-space. It's the game that defined my childhood. The game that made me wish Star Citizen would be better managed.

If I had infinite time I would fuck around Elite Dangerous all day these days, with flight sticks and everything.

StarCraft

more like Homeworld / Outpost / Ascendancy / Invisible Inc / Mass effect 1 to me. But not direct ripoff any of them.

The visuals aren't don't evoke StarCraft to me, but the sounds 100% put me back in to playing StarCraft in high school.

It reminds me of the StarCraft briefing room: https://superiorrealities.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/screen...

Invisible Inc, the sounds are even on point.

I think it's more Freelancer

Syndicate (1993). https://youtu.be/ACVZ5b8wW14?t=5954

System Shock (1994). https://youtu.be/qKchS2GeimE?t=9

Maybe even more so the sequel Syndicate Wars

https://youtu.be/ECHmCzXMFb8

The sounds are very Starcraftian

It's also cool that this is simply a web app. If I want the full desktop experience, I can write the missing components myself (lol) and make this app fullscreen. Nice!

It feels very much like the Introversion games UI’s to me. Especially the hacking game (of which the name escapes me for a bit).

That would be Uplink.

https://www.introversion.co.uk/introversion/#games

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