SciFiUI

SciFiUI

A retro sci-fi CRT terminal built entirely with ncca.ngl and OpenGL based on the Nostromo's MU-TH-UR 6000 from Alien (1979).

The central window is a wireframe terrain fly-over drawn as stacked ridge lines in the style of the pulsar plot on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures cover. Around it sits a full terminal interface: clickable buttons on the left, a scrolling system log on the right, and header/footer status bars with a blinking cursor.

uv run SciFiUI/main.py

There is also a WebGPU version in the same folder:

uv run SciFiUI/WebGPUmain.py

How it works

Two-pass CRT rendering. The whole interface is drawn in monochrome into an FBO, then a full-screen triangle pass (shaders/CRTFragment.glsl) applies the CRT look: phosphor tint (green or amber), barrel distortion, scanlines, a slot mask, a slow rolling bar, per-pixel noise, mains-hum flicker and a vignette. Because the scene is monochrome and the tint is applied in post, switching between green and amber phosphor is a single uniform change.

Unknown Pleasures terrain. Each ridge is a GL_LINE_STRIP row of a height field sampled from vectorised numpy value noise, with an amplitude envelope that is quiet at the edges and active in the middle (like the original CP 1919 plot). Flight is simulated by advancing the noise-space z offset each tick and re-uploading the vertex buffers. Hidden-line removal uses no depth buffer at all: rows are drawn back to front, and each row first draws an opaque black "skirt" (a triangle strip from the ridge down to a floor) that occludes the rows behind it basically the painter's algorithm trick.

UI without a widget toolkit. Panels, frames and buttons are batched into one dynamic VAO in pixel coordinates each frame and drawn with an orthographic projection (UIBatch). Buttons are hit-tested against the mouse in framebuffer pixels, highlight on hover, flash on click, and write their actions to the system log. Text is ncca.ngl Text rendering; the log clips with a scissor rect and the newest line "types" itself out.

All rendering lives in SciFiScene, which knows nothing about Qt — MainWindow is a thin QOpenGLWindow shell that forwards events, so the scene can also be driven headless (e.g. by GLFW) for testing.

Controls

Input	Action
Left click	Press a button
Left drag (in the terrain panel)	Rotate the view (pivots about the terrain centre; angles are clamped so the painter's-algorithm hidden-line trick stays valid)
R	Reset the view rotation
HOLD / Space	Pause / resume the fly-over
VEL + / VEL - / Up / Down	Change flight speed
PHOS / P	Toggle green / amber phosphor
SCAN FX / S	Toggle the CRT effects
PURGE LOG	Clear the system log
Esc	Quit