Show HN: Moon simulator game, ray-casting
mooncraft2000.comDid this a few years ago. Seems apropos. Sources and more here: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Mooncraft2000 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. Why can't accelerate to my hearts content?! We're trying to get in to orbit here! 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. Cool game. The sound keeps glitching on and off. Also, maybe I'm just dumb, but I couldn't figure out where to go or how to land. When you're at a base it will tell you the directions and distances to other nearby bases. You can pick which you want to go to, remember what direction it is in, and then fly in that direction until it comes up on the minimap. It will show as a red/green area on the ground, and you have to land in the middle square. Took me a while too. Go north for a while and you'll come across red lights. Aim for those! The README is phenomenal, it really tells the story of how the game was built. Very slow on Firefox (both wrt frame rate and actual game speed) and gets down to single digits FPS after a while. But the slow speed and weak acceleration (did you forget that v = v + a*dt and not just v = v + a? :)) feels actually nice and meditative, if only the FPS were smoother. Tried it on Chrome and it's a much more dynamic and fast-paced experience on it. (Edit: took a look at the README, loved it!) 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) Copyediting: Your instructions say that spacebar is "thrust," but the first pop-up says "press enter/thrust" to begin actually should say "spacebar" ..? love this game. Hardest part is figuring out how to get more fuel and where to navigate., Neat little time waster, but enjoyed every minute of it. Awesome to see this on the front page! Ever since you posted it on HN Arcade its been one of my top games :) and its also one of the most visited! Love this retro visual, reminds me of early windows days flash game Game is broken with adblock btw (UBO) Nice game! Just having two thrusters fire at the same time sounds a bit distorted. Are you generating the engine noise procedurally? 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? how can I land without crashing? :'( This is pretty cool! Almost reminds me of the modern No Man's Sky =D Need a VR version of this, please Why can I just go 30? Feelsslowman Love this game 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. Hello