fers-ui is the official graphical user interface for the Flexible Extensible Radar Simulator (FERS). It provides a professional-grade, visual workbench designed to streamline the entire simulation pipeline—from asset creation and scenario construction to simulation execution and results analysis. By offering an intuitive and powerful toolset, fers-ui dramatically improves the usability and accessibility of the core FERS engine.

Key Features

Multi-Panel Scenario Builder: A fully resizable workspace featuring an interactive 3D viewport for object placement, a hierarchical scene tree for organization, and a context-sensitive property inspector for detailed configuration.
Interactive Timeline: A dedicated panel for visualizing and editing time-based events, such as platform motion paths and radar pulse schedules, with full playback controls.
Hierarchical Scene Tree: An intuitive tree view for all simulation elements, enabling easy selection, parenting, and organization of complex scenarios.
Integrated Simulation Runner: A focused workspace to configure global simulation parameters, trigger the FERS core engine, and monitor progress.
FERS XML Import/Export: Generate a valid FERS XML configuration file directly from the visual scenario, or load an existing one to begin editing.

Future Roadmap

The following major features are planned for future releases:

Centralized Asset Library: A dedicated view for creating, managing, and reusing simulation components like radar pulses, antenna patterns, and timing sources across different scenarios.
Dynamic Results Analysis: A post-simulation view for loading FERS output data to visualize target trajectories, platform movements, and analyze collected signals.

Technology Stack

fers-ui is built with a modern technology stack to provide a powerful, cross-platform, and maintainable application.

Application Framework: Tauri (v2) - Provides a lightweight, secure, and performant way to build a native desktop application using a web front-end.
UI Library: React with TypeScript - Offers a robust, component-based architecture for building complex UIs with the safety of static typing.
Component Library: Material-UI (MUI) & MUI X - A comprehensive library of UI components that accelerates development and ensures a consistent, modern design.
3D Rendering: Three.js via React Three Fiber - Simplifies managing a 3D scene within a React application, powering the visual scenario builder.
State Management: Zustand - A minimal, fast, and scalable state management solution for a centralized application state.
Schema Validation: Zod - A TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library, used for ensuring the integrity of scenario data on the front-end.

Software Architecture

The application is architected as a multi-modal "Workbench" to provide a clean, context-focused user experience.

App Rail & Views: The primary navigation is a vertical AppRail that allows switching between distinct workspaces called "Views" (e.g., ScenarioView, AssetLibraryView). This isolates different stages of the simulation workflow, preventing UI clutter.
Layouts: The top-level MainLayout component orchestrates the active view and global UI structure.
Views: These are high-level components that represent a complete user workspace. Each view is self-contained and manages its own panel arrangement (e.g., ScenarioView combines the 3D world, scene tree, and timeline).
Components: The UI is built from small, reusable React components (SceneTree, Timeline, PropertyInspector, ResizablePanel) that encapsulate specific functionality and are composed within Views.

Design Principles

Context-Focused Workflow: The UI is designed to only present tools and information relevant to the user's current task. Switching from the "Scenario" to the "Asset Library" view changes the entire workspace context.
Component Modularity: By breaking the UI into a clear hierarchy of Layouts, Views, and Components, we ensure the codebase is maintainable, testable, and easy to extend.
State-Driven UI: The application relies on a centralized state managed by Zustand. UI components react to state changes, ensuring consistency across all panels and views.
Ergonomic Layout: The use of resizable panels gives users full control over their workspace, allowing them to tailor the interface to their specific needs and monitor size.

Getting Started

This application is part of a monorepo that includes the core C++ libfers library. To set up the complete development environment, please follow the unified Development Setup guide in the root README.md.

Once the environment is set up, you can run the UI from the repository root with: bash pnpm ui:dev