2025-02-11

Last modified: 2025-02-12 10:56:26

• Circles game
• Clock

Circles game

So the idea is something like Nightdrive, where the entire world exists only as circles of lights, everything else is black, but instead of passively watching, it is kind of a game where you are flying a spherical space ship.

The terrain in nightdrive is just some random combination of sine waves, and if the line from the camera to a circle intersects the terrain then the circle isn't drawn. We could do the same thing but allow "black spheres" in space to occlude lights behind them.

Then you can imagine a black sphere in the centre representing a planet, and you can fly around it, are maybe influenced by gravity a little bit.

You could draw a black sphere at the centre of every "spaceship", to occlude the lights on the opposite side.

You can make particle effects out of these dots as well.

I don't know what the actual game is. You can fly around in a spaceship, interact with gravity, fire some sort of projectiles. Then what? Draw rings of dots in space as checkpoints you have to fly through? Would you make it purely single player? Make it a puzzle game?

I think for now forget about the actual game and just make a thing where I can fly around in space near a planet, influenced by gravity, and shoot bullets out. And then think about how to make it "fun". If I haven't run out of interest by then.

Easiest place to start is to copy the useful parts of the renderer out of nightdrive.

I have it kind of working now, there are 2 balls in space, and you can use the mouse for aiming and WASD to apply thrusters.

But there is an annoying bug: Firefox is continuously giving me mousemove events with movementY=-1. The same thing happens on https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/pointer-lock/ - I wonder if it is a fractional scaling bug?

I could mitigate it by subtracting out the mean of the mouse movement events of the last 1000 frames or something?

I've updated Firefox and the problem is gone, will ignore.

It is mostly working now, except the rotation is kind of messed up because of gimbal lock.

Todo is:

• fix gimbal lock problem
• add occlusion spheres
• add bullets
• add a planet in the centre with gravity?

Clock

I have printed the threads and lid for the weight tube, and glued the threads on. It's been hanging from the pulley mount overnight and hasn't broken, so I think it is strong enough for now. Just need an M5 bolt to hold the pulley and then I can try to use it to run the clock.

Good, it's hooked up and on the string now.

One issue though is that there is now too much torque and it has ripped the screw through the 3d print on the winding drum:

Also it is visibly bending the shaft.

So maybe this shaft wants to have a higher diameter. And obviously a reprint of the winding drum, maybe higher diameter would be enough to stop the screw from ripping the print because it would reduce the torque on the screw? Or maybe needs a rethink.

I also noticed the string was very stretchy, I have ordered some 1mm fishing line.