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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_Velocity_(video_game)
Your instructions say that spacebar is "thrust," but the first pop-up says "press enter/thrust" to begin actually should say "spacebar" ..?
Simplified physics though. Ever considered a Jebediah Kerman edition?