Quartz 4

SSG-293

10 min read

Building off from SSG-292

Probably, the other big goals would be to improve responsiveness, clearness of “next steps”.

Adding consensus

Consensus/imbox viewport

  • See posts to review. Make sure Comments facility is functional

  • Imbox component that shows comments & votes on your post - INBOX-1 ✅ 2025-10-21

  • Re-add RecentDiscoveries into imbox - INBOX-2 ✅ 2025-10-21

  • Add a third tab to show other users’ discoveries - INBOX-3 ✅ 2025-10-21

  • Some sort of ‘live popup’ (like the iPhone’s Dynamic Island) that shows classifications available for voting & commenting. This will probably be some sort of Countdown widget that I will work to implement next sprint (the final sprint!)

  • New layout for Next scene ^^ I’m also going to need to take a look at how the layouts will work and what sort of things users will be commenting, for each classificationtype.

Show conflicts - e.g. if two people have surveyed the same planet

Not really sure how this will work, yet

Resource extraction/mining

  • Add the mining/extraction research types (for vapours, ices and minerals) ✅ 2025-10-25 - AI4Mars-17
  • Simple animation & scene in the Inventory Viewport - AI4Mars-15 ✅ 2025-10-24
  • New inventory table, delete deposits (or “drain” them). Possibly some sort of GH action to archive drained deposits - AI4Mars-16 ✅ 2025-10-26

Confirmed that draining works:

Planets

NGTS Integration

  • Download anomalies & add to both providers - NGTS-1 (anomalySet : NGTS) ✅ 2025-10-26
  • Update upload.py to add to both providers - DATABASE-1 ✅ 2025-10-26

Need to make sure this is done without exposing secrets to GH

  • Add a research item to unlock new lightcurve types - RESEARCH-11 ✅ 2025-10-26 | |
  • Telescope can find these new anomalySet entries - different colour DEPLOY-14 ✅ 2025-10-26
  • New classification component - NGTS with new annotation models/types? - NGTS-2 ✅ 2025-10-26 |

|

Bumble

Bumble

  • Make almanac a new page with consistent styling & layout/dimensions - ALMANAC-2 ✅ 2025-10-20

Bee minigame

Just getting it distributed will be the goal (for this sprint), I think. Then, we can figure out things like more plants, animations and additional scenes (e.g. transitioning to different planets available in your archive). Around that point, we can figure out if Expo/React Native is the way to go for Bumble. I have a feeling it is, simply because the animations required aren’t too heavy, so far the sprite support is alright and it’s a 2d top-down game.

UI Improvements/changes

Deployment changes

Satellite

For the satelliteCount upgrade, here’s the basic debugging/implementation flow (suggestion):

  1. Determine number of satellites user has available
  2. Sidebar shows deploy button if the user has >0 ^⇐4 linked_anomalies but >1 total satellite
  3. If >1 total satellite, show two satellites & the deployment status in the sidebar
  • Maybe an i button for each stat (including Spectroscopy ) that shows info on the source (e.g. who classified) ✅ 2025-10-27
  • If a planet has a confirmed type, show it on the deploy page DEPLOY-12 ✅ 2025-10-27
  • If a planet has a confirmed type, filter the linked_anomalies cloud types for the Weather mission - DEPLOY-13

Possibly a new satellite viewport layout, especially for the weather satellite mission/deployment type.

Rover

  • Initial React Native/Expo setup - AI4Mars-13 ✅ 2025-10-21
  • Integration of 3d models - AI4Mars-14 ✅ 2025-10-21 |

What would be a good milestone for this week for Roving?

  1. Users can make deployments
  2. Rover moves
  3. Scene (background/surface) moves
  4. Battery & currency earn
  5. Classification?

stupid terminal interface https://github.com/Signal-K/roving/commit/70f468cc8c1a64e14b474664a17fc228493c5655 - this was actually for the surface changes

I’m going to try and force something through with a 3d interface, but a birds-eye view would be the fallback.

Eventually it might be worth looking at Godot but I want to get some early versions out first using Expo.

| Hmmm. Can we do something with lakes so that the missing space just looks like it has liquid? Lol.

Maybe we could have multiple scenes/maps?

If the 3d scene is too hard, we could have a birds-eye view and a minimap component that shows “from the rover’s camera” or someth.

| So this is where I’m at at the end of Tuesday. So building a UI window around the landscape, improving load time & load UI, and reducing the size of the rover (while scaling the camera positioning) is probably going to be my goal for Wednesday.

Wednesday

First up, I’m working on reducing the size of the rover:

  • Reduce size of rover in gameplay scene ROVER-1 ✅ 2025-10-22 |. This is probably the best I can do

Then, the introduction of smooth loading is probably a good start:

  • Improve smoothness of loading transition for 3d scenes in Roving - LOAD-1

Bugs

Research

Research

  • For some reason, after some time, tech that has already been researched (i.e. is in researched table for the user) are appearing again in the “Available” section - RESEARCH-9 ✅ 2025-10-21 Follow-up to this point:

When the page first loads, it shows everything inside the available section before then moving them to the correct ones

Post-sprint ideas

  • Push notifications will not be touched in this sprint
  • I have a feeling that I may want to get the Telescope & Satellite Deploy pages with the same layout, for the V2 “release”.
  • Adding more info/dialogue for research items and maybe a research animation when the user does something
  • More ways to earn Stardust - CRITICAL
    • Maybe converting/selling minerals into stardust?
  • Improving the animations for things like extractions?

Daily reports

Thursday 23 October

Well, we seem to have completely bricked up the 3d scenes in Expo (to put it politely). If I can’t get the basic scene that I got to yesterday fixed, I think I’ll just restart from scratch and make sure it’s running on iOS/Android builds first - just trying it in the web interface won’t suffice going forward. Builds for things like Bumble appear to work fine…but for 3d scenes, there appears to be a support discrepancy between web and native builds.

After building in the new UI for the resource extraction, I need to make some changes to the deploy layouts for the Telescope & Satellite. See ^972fa2.

Voting/Consensus & comments are something that I’ve highlighted as one of the priorities of this sprint, as well as this integration period. This could become one of the primary tutorial missions, I think (another point on ^972fa2 - a key goal for next week would be organising the layout and maybe allowing for custom orders of panels & viewports. What is the best order of things?).

Milestones & “getting started” missions will probably go into a new panel. So I will need to start a sample panel and one of the missions will be voting.

Highlighting the utility of voting/commenting in the Imbox section, simply, will be a key requirement for this feature to succeed.

I will have to investigate if the table definitions will need to change. In V3 ^4008fc we will need to have multiple comments tables and types for basic dialogue and sub-classifications.

Writing and content gen can wait, building off Obsidian should probably suffice.

Friday 24 October

Well, I was stuck at the Open Source / EU conference in Copenhagen for the entire afternoon so didn’t end up getting anywhere outside of some basic planning proposals (see above section). However, I have begun the process of attempting to get a 3d build working in expo by creating a (temporary, of course) new expo project where we just get a 3d model working:

└─# Create new Expo project with TypeScript
npx create-expo-app@latest expo-3d-test --template blank-typescript
 
# Navigate to project
cd expo-3d-test
 
# Install core dependencies
npx expo install expo-gl expo-three three@0.160.0 @types/three
 
# Install navigation and UI packages
npm install @react-navigation/native @react-navigation/stack
npx expo install react-native-screens react-native-safe-area-context
 
# Install state management and utilities
npm install zustand
npm install @react-native-async-storage/async-storage
 
# Install animation library
npm install react-native-reanimated
npx expo install react-native-gesture-handler
 
# Install additional UI components
npm install react-native-svg
npx expo install expo-linear-gradient
Creating an Expo project using the blank-typescript template.
 
✔ Downloaded and extracted project files.
> npm install

If we can get a basic shape working, I’ll try and get a single .glb model rendering in iOS, and then if we can get multiple, that’s the way to do it.

But I was watching this video by Ben Awad and it got me thinking about how building this sort of game in React Native. It makes more sense, if I want to have the 3D scene for the rover, to use Godot or Unity - and I’m fairly sure I could brute force my way to a semi-decent UI with the help of Copilot in one of these engines. The issue, though, is that I’m not sure what sort of game this will be. The actual visuals don’t really matter, though - whether it’s a full-on simulation of the Martian surface or not, the game loop is what will cause people to play this game. Really, that’s the case for any game.

I think having the 3D model of the rover, though, is fine regardless of the layout (makes for a cool icon, at least). Surely iOS natively can handle that.

When it comes to the main client, there are three main tasks for the extraction scene:

  1. Get the animations & mineral extraction visuals/components integrated
  2. Update the tables (mineralDeposits and the new table)
  3. Extraction drains deposits and saves minerals to the user’s inventory

|

  1. Make the extraction scene full-height
  2. Add the new nav/top bar to the scene, replacing the “back” area

Well, I’ve just discovered this: | New Bug - Satellite Deploy scene is currently overflowing from the Viewport

  • Satellite deploy viewport experiences overflows - VIEWPORT-3 ✅ 2025-10-24

Another thing I’ve thought about is that I want to add significant offline-caching for users using Star-Sailors via the PWA.

  1. Add Recommendations Next steps section to Imbox Panel / Viewport

For Bumble, I just saw this - https://farcaster.xyz/limone.eth/0xfa9ec69a

Saturday 25 October

Well, I had quite a nice tour of the Copenhagen Suborbital facility and it’s given me some ideas. But, that has obviously cut into the time remaining for the sprint. |

I still need to get some NGTS images and finish off the craft doc for Rhys.

I’m also going to try to improve the Docker environment so it doesn’t force a complete container rebuild every time I start my laptop.

Another issue: /research route not showing all researched items: |

Media & Notes

I want to investigate the ESI minigame idea later.

Post-V2 ideas

Actual use of spectroscopy data will be kept for the v3 releases, I think. #v3

It’s imperative I have a think about the games/godot scenes I’m going to build over the next 1-2 months after v2 starts wrapping up so I stay engaged while still building the ecosystem.

The new fish project from Zooniverse - once “evolution” of the bacterium > coral > fish… hits a point…

Will AWA come back before the end of V2?

In V3, we could try doing what Posthog have done with their website - i.e. turn the whole thing into an OS-styled frontend. #post-sprint

Rovers can go across multiple planets…

Graph View

Backlinks