TRADE WARS 2002 is real now. Ten sectors, seven ports, twenty-four turns.
The port classes are the actual ones — three letters for fuel ore,
organics and equipment, B where the port buys from you and S where it
sells to you — and the whole economy is finding two adjacent ports that
disagree with each other about what something is worth. The Ferrengi are
in sector nine and they want your cargo, and you can fight, run or pay.
SPECTRE is a real split screen. Two viewports scissored into the same
render target, two cameras, one post pass over both, and a hard seam down
the middle. The speculative timeline lives on render layer 1, which only
the second camera can see — so the right-hand pane genuinely contains
things the left-hand pane never will, which is the entire point of the
section. Steering is mirrored. The token you carry out of the branch that
gets discarded is only reachable in the pane that stops existing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three holes closed:
philes — 40 written, all in src/philes.js so the next 160 is a writing
job and not a code job. P opens a reader: list on the left,
the text on the right, attributed to whoever wrote it in
whatever year they wrote it. Every level now drops at least
one; previously you collected files you could never open.
save — ESTABLISHED. Every hop writes level/ttl/hop/baud/philes/
cargo/flags to localStorage, and the boot screen offers
R — RESUME. A 64-hop game with no save is not a 64-hop game.
MTU — the HUD has been showing your MTU drop as you take files off
the board while nothing happened. Now two files are free and
after that you arrive in pieces, one TTL per extra fragment,
every hop. You can put things down again from the traceroute
map. Lore costs distance, which is the economy the whole
design is built on.
All 13 hops re-swept: clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
You are SYN. You want ACK. Root is the only one who can give it to you.
Three load-bearing ideas, all working:
- TTL is the health bar and it only goes down. 64 hops, no healing.
- Bandwidth is resolution. One render target, one shader; at 1200 baud
and below the 3D scene renders as ASCII glyphs.
- Every header you drop is a piece of clothing. Seven wireframe shells,
one per OSI layer, shed on the way down.
Every frequency is the real frequency, synthesised, nothing sampled:
350+440 dial tone, the DTMF matrix, R1 MF pairs at real KP/digit timing,
2600 Hz, ANSam at 2100 reversing phase every 450 ms, Bell 103 FSK.
Thirteen hops, each a different genre over one renderer — FP tutorial,
OSI descent platformer, walking sim, EFnet twin-stick, 2D buffer overflow,
Morris worm RTS, LBL terminal stealth, a whole BBS with a playable LORD,
the five-boss handshake arena, the copper, a playable blue box, the climb,
and an empty room with an ACK in it.
No engine, no build step, one vendored three.js.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
