I love this gorgeous and evocative little time waster and come back to it every now and then. Notes:
It starts out buttery smooth but over time its performance slows to a crawl. Changing window geometry seems to do some sort of garbage collection and it speeds back up. I just hit F11 twice real quick.
The optimal strategy is to try and make the trip parabolically with a single large burn at liftoff.
Gravity physics is of course symmetrical on ascent and descent, so the optimum time to start your deceleration burn is approximately when your downward velocity is equal to whatever your upward velocity was when you stopped burning.
Hey I really liked this. Reminded me a tiny bit of Lander on the Archimedes, Hardwar (underrated!), Wing Commander-y visuals.
The extensions suggest themselves - some progression (financial) beyond merely guild hierarchy; some adversarial element (could be economical like bidding for routes.)
Only bit I struggled with was the car-like handling when you turn left and right; I would expect you to orient using yaw axis and then have to use thrust to change your velocity vector. But it certainly is simpler the way you have it.
The "car-like handling" is still physically accurate - thrusters automatically align your velocity vector to match your view direction. You can think of it as simply an interface - view direction is both a command and a display.
I love this gorgeous and evocative little time waster and come back to it every now and then. Notes:
It starts out buttery smooth but over time its performance slows to a crawl. Changing window geometry seems to do some sort of garbage collection and it speeds back up. I just hit F11 twice real quick.
The optimal strategy is to try and make the trip parabolically with a single large burn at liftoff.
Gravity physics is of course symmetrical on ascent and descent, so the optimum time to start your deceleration burn is approximately when your downward velocity is equal to whatever your upward velocity was when you stopped burning.
Hey I really liked this. Reminded me a tiny bit of Lander on the Archimedes, Hardwar (underrated!), Wing Commander-y visuals.
The extensions suggest themselves - some progression (financial) beyond merely guild hierarchy; some adversarial element (could be economical like bidding for routes.)
Only bit I struggled with was the car-like handling when you turn left and right; I would expect you to orient using yaw axis and then have to use thrust to change your velocity vector. But it certainly is simpler the way you have it.
The "car-like handling" is still physically accurate - thrusters automatically align your velocity vector to match your view direction. You can think of it as simply an interface - view direction is both a command and a display.
The README is phenomenal, it really tells the story of how the game was built.
The controls are very awkward on iOS safari. The thrust plus 3 direction buttons are on the top row and one direction button is on the bottom row.
Why can't accelerate to my hearts content?! We're trying to get in to orbit here!
Very neat. Reminded me a bit of Terminal Velocity from a purely visual perspective (even though they used a more standard texture mapped 3d engine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_Velocity_(video_game)
Oooh, very neat, it's a voxel map with real elevation data? Yes, yes it is. VERY neat.
Simplified physics though. Ever considered a Jebediah Kerman edition?
Nice game! Just having two thrusters fire at the same time sounds a bit distorted. Are you generating the engine noise procedurally?
Love this game