Show HN: Moon simulator game, ray-casting

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.

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!

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!)

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.

Why can't accelerate to my hearts content?! We're trying to get in to orbit here!

The README is phenomenal, it really tells the story of how the game was built.

Why can I just go 30? Feelsslowman

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?

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.

Love this game