cb22239363
The last structural promise in the design doc. No level gets a chord any
more. Every bed in the game is derived from a real number belonging to the
era it plays under, and src/score.js says which one and why in a comment
above each line.
coldboot/stack 1000 Hz, the reference tone every piece of telecoms test
gear on earth agrees on. The fortress is tuned to a
calibration signal.
timewait 50 Hz mains and its harmonics. The room's own hum was
always the entire score; now the bed agrees with it.
war the 1800 Hz V.32 carrier folded down, with dial-up hiss
under it, because everybody on EFnet was on a modem.
smash 0x90 is the NOP. Read as a number it is 144, so the sled
has a pitch and the level is tuned to the byte you slide
down.
worm seven partials, and the seventh one is detuned. One in
seven, as a chord.
cuckoo 45.45 baud — the Model 33 rate, 22 ms a bit. Fifty of
them in a basement is what he actually heard all night.
board the 1200 Hz V.22bis carrier folded four times, which is
the doc's exact phrase: a modem carrier detuned into a
pad.
shell the 750 Hz terminal bell over Helsinki's 50 Hz mains.
handshake silence. The fight is the score; anything underneath is
noise competing with the only thing in this game that
has to be listened to.
copper 20 Hz ringing current, 50 Hz mains, and Strowger stepping
at ten pulses a second. Three real clocks, and the
cathedral is the beat they make against each other.
bluebox the six MF tones at once. That is literally what is
inside a blue box.
climb all of it, layered.
root 2600 Hz folded six times until it is a low room tone.
The number the whole game turns on, finally at rest.
ESTABLISHED gets its own cue rather than a bed: 350 and 440, which is the
dial tone the handshake arena opened on and called the sound a line makes
when nothing is happening — with something finally on it.
Fixed while building: the pulse gate was driven by a bare square
oscillator swinging -1..+1, so its off half was not silence, it was the
same tone phase-inverted. Tremolo where a clock was wanted. DC offset now.
All 14 hops swept clean, and no voices leak between them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
153 lines
8.1 KiB
Markdown
153 lines
8.1 KiB
Markdown
# HANDSHAKE
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> *a love story in 64 hops*
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You are **SYN**. You want **ACK**. Root is the only one who can give it to you.
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Design doc: [DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md).
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## Run it
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```bash
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python3 /Users/johnking/Documents/handshake/serve.py 8123
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```
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Then open `http://localhost:8123/`. Headphones — every frequency in this is the real
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frequency and half the mechanics are inaudible without them.
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`serve.py` is `http.server` plus `Cache-Control: no-store`, because ES modules cache
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hard and it makes every edit look like it did nothing.
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## Controls
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| | |
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|---|---|
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| `WASD` | move |
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| `SPACE` | jump / hold 2600 Hz |
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| mouse | look (click to capture; dragging works too) |
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| `E` | use |
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| `M` | traceroute — the level select, and where you drop cargo |
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| `P` | philes — read what you've picked up |
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| `` ` `` | hop select (dev) |
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| `ESC` | release the mouse |
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It saves. Every hop completes a handshake with the world and writes to
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localStorage; the boot screen offers `R — RESUME` when there's something to resume.
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## What's here
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Fourteen playable hops, each a different genre, one renderer.
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| id | hop | what it is |
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|---|---|---|
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| `coldboot` | 1 | FP tutorial in a 512-slot NIC ring buffer, then the DMA rips you out |
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| `stack` | 2–8 | 7-floor descent, **one verb per layer**: transcode, keep the session, reassemble in sequence, route within a hop budget, listen-before-transmit with real exponential backoff, ride the waveform. Stateful FIREWALL boss |
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| `timewait` | 9 | walking sim. beige room, 50 Hz hum, half-open connections in plastic chairs, FIN by the door |
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| `war` | 10–16 | EFnet twin-stick. netsplit riding, ops crowns, and a **trojan arms race** — four weapons the level patches 70 s after you first use one |
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| `smash` | 17–20 | 2D side-scroll `char buf[64]`. canary, return address, NOP sled, shellcode — then **NX lands** and you build a **ret2libc** chain out of other people's platforms |
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| `worm` | 21–28 | Morris worm RTS, 1-in-7 reinfection locked on. An **antidote you can release** that travels only over live links, while you are killing links |
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| `cuckoo` | 29–34 | LBL 1986 terminal. connection time is visibility. you get caught |
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| `board` | 35–44 | the BBS, over **three days**. busy signal, ANSI painting at live baud, ratios, NUP gate, ANSI bomb, the sysop watching you type, FidoNet, playable LORD *and* Trade Wars — then LAST CALL, and it closes |
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| `shell` | 43–44 | kruuna.helsinki.fi, 1991. always on, 38 users at once, talk(1) character by character, the comp.os.minix post, and a kernel compiling in the background while you use the shell |
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| `handshake` | 45–50 | five-boss rhythm arena. dial tone → DTMF → ANSam → V.8bis → carrier |
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| `copper` | 51–58 | FP through duct, load coils, a Strowger cathedral, a lineman's handset |
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| `bluebox` | 59–63 | playable 13-button blue box. 2600, KP/MF/ST, tandem stacking, then SS7 |
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| `climb` | 63→1 | on-rails reverse ascent, **one gate per era** testing the verb it taught you. Spectre is a real **split screen**, plus Rowhammer and Log4Shell |
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| `root` | 64 | the room is empty. then the ACK comes back — and on Tuesday, so does your FidoNet message |
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## The three load-bearing ideas
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**TTL is the health bar and it only goes down.** 64 hops, no healing, ever. Levels
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aren't hard, they're *expensive*.
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**Bandwidth is resolution** — [`src/link.js`](src/link.js). One render target and one
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shader. Your baud rate sets the target height; at 1200 and below the scene renders as
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ASCII glyphs. `HS.link.setBaud(0..6)` in the console to see it. The V.8bis fight sets
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this for real.
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**Every header you drop is a piece of clothing** — `makeSyn()` in
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[`src/kit.js`](src/kit.js). Seven wireframe shells, one per OSI layer, shed as you
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descend.
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## MTU
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Files taken off the BBS are lore, and lore is paid for in distance. Two is free;
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after that you don't fit down the next hop in one piece and every hop costs a TTL
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per extra fragment. You can put things down again from the traceroute map. That's
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the whole economy: everything worth reading costs you some of the distance you have
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left.
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## Retrain
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The line doesn't stay the way you negotiated it. Somewhere after hop 51, wherever you
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happen to be, it degrades and takes a baud rate off you — and the way to claw it back
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is the ANSam beat from hop 47: `SPACE` on the phase reversal, 450 ms, four clean ones.
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Terminal levels opt out with `noRetrain: true`, because stealing `SPACE` from someone
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mid-sentence isn't a mechanic, it's a bug with a story attached.
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## Audio
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[`src/audio.js`](src/audio.js) — every tone is oscillators, nothing is sampled, and
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every frequency is the real one: 350+440 dial tone, the DTMF matrix, R1 MF pairs with
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real 100 ms KP / 60 ms digit timing, 2600 Hz, ANSam at 2100 Hz reversing phase every
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450 ms, Bell 103 FSK. About 300 lines and zero megabytes.
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## The score
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[`src/score.js`](src/score.js) — no level gets a chord somebody picked because it
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sounded nice. Every bed is derived from a real number belonging to its era:
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| hop | built from |
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|---|---|
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| coldboot / stack | **1000 Hz**, the reference tone every piece of telecoms test gear agrees on, folded down |
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| timewait | **50 Hz** mains and its harmonics — the room's own hum is the whole score |
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| war | the **1800 Hz** V.32 carrier, folded, with dial-up hiss under it |
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| smash | **0x90** — the NOP byte read as 144 Hz, so the sled has a pitch |
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| worm | seven partials, and the **seventh one is wrong** |
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| cuckoo | **45.45 baud**, the Model 33 teletype rate, as a clock |
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| board | the **1200 Hz** V.22bis carrier, folded four times — the doc's own instruction |
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| shell | the **750 Hz** terminal bell over Helsinki's 50 Hz mains |
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| handshake | *nothing.* The fight is the score and anything under it is noise |
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| copper | **20 Hz** ringing current, **50 Hz** mains, **10 pps** Strowger stepping — three real clocks beating against each other |
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| bluebox | the **six MF tones**. Literally what a blue box contains |
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| climb | all of it at once |
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| root | **2600 Hz**, folded six times until it is a low room tone, finally at rest |
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Some come out beautiful and some come out ugly. That's correct — a 1980 exchange
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wasn't tuned to A=440, and pretending otherwise would be the same lie as setting the
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ANSI art in a proportional font.
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## Layout
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```
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index.html shell, all CSS, importmap
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serve.py dev server, no-store
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src/main.js router, TTL, traceroute map, the loop
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src/link.js bandwidth → resolution. the post shader.
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src/audio.js every tone in the game
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src/term.js 80x25 cell terminal, pipe colours, CP437 blocks as geometry
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src/kit.js body/collision, camera rigs, SYN, labels, seeded rng
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src/input.js keys, pointer lock, the ANSI bomb's remap table
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src/hud.js status line, subtitles, title cards, NO CARRIER
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src/levels/*.js one file per hop
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vendor/ three.js r17x, vendored
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```
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Each level exports `{ id, hop, title, via, baud, mount(ctx), update(dt,t,ctx), unmount(ctx) }`.
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`ctx` hands it a fresh scene, camera and collision world, plus `say/card/hint/phile/
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spendTTL/setBaud/next`. Genre switches are just different camera + controller modules
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over one renderer — that's the whole trick.
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## Dev handles
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`HS` on `window`: `HS.goto(id)`, `HS.link.setBaud(n)`, `HS.game`, `HS.philes`,
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`HS.run(n)` — drives `n` frames by hand, because `requestAnimationFrame` is throttled
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to zero in a hidden tab and that makes the game look broken when it's only asleep.
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## Skipped
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- **Multiplayer (`CHECKSUM`)** — the Journey-style anonymous pass-by. Needs a server; add when there's something to connect to.
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- **Playing both fragments** — fragmenting costs TTL, it doesn't split you into two packets you alternate between. Add when a level has a corridor narrow enough to need it.
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- **The 200 philes** — 74 written in [`src/philes.js`](src/philes.js), all readable with `P`. Adding the next 126 is a writing job, not a code job: put the text in that file, call `ctx.phile('id')` wherever it should be found.
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- Levels run 3–8 minutes against a design doc that asks for 5–20. The genres, mechanics and set pieces are all in — the *duration* is still short. See [STAGES.md](STAGES.md) for a per-hop breakdown of what's in and what's next.
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