#Starfield Companion App

26 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fluid heath
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I will try to make something barely feasable (and barely usable) again, also reviving some old project of mine: The game Starfield has an in-game watch displaying various player stats, environment stats and alerts like "Would you please step out of radiation zone so you don't die?". The collectors came with a physical watch (codename LPV6) which annoyingly did not connect to the game (instead being not much more than a normal watch). I experimented a bit with changing that, creating a game plugin to extract the in-game data and creating a separate Desktop application to send the data to the watch. Ultimately I stopped as the LPV6 is very slow to the point that drawing too much at once breaks the BLE connection. Combined with a higher resolution than Pebble (240x240 round, 16Bit color) this was not much fun. I will probably come back to the original watch at some point but this is Pebble Hackathon so let's talk about Pebble.

The Pebble Time Round is an obvious alternative and I hope the OS is a bit more stable than LPV6. I will start with the main screen containing a O2/CO2 meter, Planet time shown as sun "shadow" and current permanent effects (e.g. broken bone, blood loss, radiation zone) and see whether I have time for the other elements. I have taken the liberty to update the game plugin and the desktop application ahead of time (please Bethesda no more patches this week) and checked that I could send some AppMessage from a Windows Application (currently either BL Classic or Developer Connection).

Below I have sketched the screen layout with blue areas being reserved for a compass feature. The curved planet name might be problematic though, so the inner blue area might have to go for something actually readable.

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mellow kraken
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Yo I love Starfield, I recently started playing again! Sadly don't have a time round but excited to see what you create

craggy orbit
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This is cool! I've always wanted to create a basic implementation of the Pip-boy companion app

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A quick google and it appears there are more libraries for interacting with the game than last time I looked, so maybe this is something I'll revisit

fluid heath
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For Fallout 4 there even was an official companion app, so maybe decompiling the Android app is sufficient?
(all the more sad that they did not do the same with Starfield...)

fluid heath
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First day done. Unfortunately I wasted a lot of time on two approaches for the curved text which both did not pan out.
I then rather shifted towards the communication at least between an emulator and a mocked game.

Tomorrow more hardware testing and more features like the sun shadow. In the best case I would get the scanning screen and the alert screen done tomorrow as well with the coming week for bug fixes, curved text and release preparations.

craggy orbit
fluid heath
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Another quick one: The sun highlight based on the local planet time
(I took the math from the original LPV6)

fluid heath
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And yes, it also works on hardware and in-game.
Now onwards to the scanning screen

PXL_20250302_0953567722.jpg
mellow kraken
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amazing! might get a pebble time round just for that /hj

fluid heath
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Reading that I got interested what a pebble would currently cost on ebay and such. I found not a single round, but instead a PTS for 10k€ oO

mellow kraken
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yeah I wouldnt look on ebay, I mostly look in #1019713118135398500

patent moon
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@fluid heath Do you plan to display the “real” stats on the watch when no game is running? It would be really cool to seamlessly transition between the real world and the game world—showing real stats when no game is running and switching to in-game stats when the game starts.

fluid heath
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There are certainly some stats that could be reasonably done, but I think that would fit better into a watchface.
It might be better for users to show some diagnostics in the app when something is wrong with the game connection (e.g. no bluetooth connection, no game detected, etc.)

patent moon
fluid heath
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The results of today: sun highlights, the scanning screen and space background for when flying in the spaceship.
No alerts yet and the desktop app missing polishing.
So far I think the timeline for release is possible (even though day job continues tomorrow)

pebble_screenshot_2025-03-02_18-36-43.png pebble_screenshot_2025-03-02_18-36-10.png
craggy orbit
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This may make me finally buy starfield 😁

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Is the software extracting the game state windows only?

fluid heath
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Currently yes. I would have thought the bigger problem would be running Starfield on Linux/Mac at all. If it does work with the SFSE mod, the desktop app could be modified to support Linux. (although no bluetooth, only dev connection)

fluid heath
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Only a quick note: Both alert types are implemented, so I declare the app for feature-complete (for release, neither the curved text nor the compass feature have made it in)

But I'll try to be conservative and take the rest of the time for polishing and releasing (probably Saturday)

vague crag
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I need this on my wrist while waiting my flight on Space X! 🔥 🔥

mellow kraken
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I should buy a pebble time round just for this /hj

fluid heath
mellow kraken
patent moon
woeful sparrow
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This is so cool