3fd58110f4
2 Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
m3ultra
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77615b23bd |
Saturation is the firebreak: make bonding matter
The arena ran ten seconds at 116 atoms and formed exactly ZERO bonds. Valence, the twelve elements, the open sockets and the bond wrestle — the best idea in the codebase — were all decorative, because building something had no effect on anything. A radical now abstracts from an OPEN VALENCE SLOT, so an atom with every slot spoken for is a wall the wound cannot cross. Bonded H2 is the cheapest firebreak in the game; a lone carbon with four open sockets is the best kindling. Three things had to follow: - The wall must be breakable or one good build wins forever. A blast snaps a bond and both halves come away radical; Q breaks every bond in radius with 40% going homolytic, so it is finally the igniter the design doc describes rather than a free crowbar. - Walling a radical in kills it in 3.8s and credits you. That is the payoff for building, and the only way to kill the LAST radical, since clearing needs zero live and terminating needs a pair. - Two starve timers, far apart. Starving anything with no prey deleted the meltdown outright: at 34 atoms over 1280x720 the mean spacing is ~130px against a 70px reach, so nearly every radical is momentarily alone. Boxed-in is 3.8s, merely adrift is 11s. Legibility. Radicals wore element colour — the one enemy arrived in twelve of them and at 30 on screen you could not tell threat from fuel. They now draw as a dark hole with a white rim. Molly drew BEFORE the radicals and was buried under thirty additive white glows; she draws last, over the fire, with a hard dark ring that more white cannot wash out. Bonded groups render as one silhouette, teal when sealed. The field grid. The flat lattice is now displaced by the Coulomb field the sim already computes. 0.41ms/frame at worst case. The score is the player's. CHAIN counted radical hops, so the one big number on screen went up only while you were losing. It counts terminations now, with a streak that stacks and lapses. Neon was defined but never spawned. Now that saturation stops fire, a zero-slot atom is a free firebreak — drawn from the spice table the densest arena rolled 3 to 9 of them, and at 9 it stopped melting down at all. Fixed per-arena counts; all 8 seeds now melt in 17-32s. Also: prod-safe module loading (the absolute /v<ts>/ prefix fell through nginx to the lander's index.html and was served as text/html, a silent dead title screen), an opt-in F frame-time readout, a deploy script, and removal of a full O(n^2) scan that ran every frame to angle some 3px rings. 29 new tests in test/firebreak.test.mjs; 68 passing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
|
6263672134 |
Molly Cool: arcade science-action vertical slice
A nanoscale arcade game. Shoot charge across the room, wrestle atoms together until they snap, and contain a chain reaction before it eats the field. Vanilla JS + Canvas 2D, no dependencies, no build step. Core systems: - Charge: give/take as the only two verbs. Opposites attract, likes repel. - Laserhands: ranged proton/vacuum bolts with real travel time. Bolts are charged bodies, so they curve through the field — bank shots are real. Give spends from an 8-proton ring, take earns them back. - The wrestle: bonds can't form on their own. Every pair has an activation barrier that parks them at arm's length; Molly's hands are the only way over it. Hold, squeeze, release -> SNAP. - Radicals: the enemy, with no mind. Every 0.32s one grabs its nearest neighbour, completes itself, and hands the wound on. Can't be shot dead — terminated by wrestling two together (barrierless, so 0.38s vs 1.56s). Two that drift into contact self-quench, which gives outbreaks a natural equilibrium instead of unbounded growth. - Overload: keep feeding one atom and it goes critical. The blast tips its neighbours, so density decides whether you get one pop (34 atoms) or 84 detonations from a single seed (116 atoms). - CASCADE: eight arenas of escalating density with finite ignition waves. Clear the field to advance; sustained neglect melts it down. - Membrane, sour/soapy zones, and the seven wordless tutorial rooms. Non-obvious constraints, documented at each constant: - BARRIER_FORCE must exceed MAX_CHARGE_FORCE, or atoms bond themselves and the wrestle (the whole game) gets skipped. - Bond lock distance scales with atom radius. A flat value meant two carbons could never bond at all, since collision held them further apart than the lock — invisible because hydrogen worked fine. - RAD_SPLIT_R must exceed the field's natural packing distance (set by the barrier), or outbreaks can only crawl and never bloom. Testing: 39 headless sim tests run the real physics in Node — no browser, no canvas. The sim draws all randomness from a seeded RNG so runs are reproducible. Perf is 0.32ms/sim-step at 116 atoms. Dev server strips a /v<timestamp>/ path prefix that index.html adds to its entry import, because browsers cache the *parsed* ES module by URL and no-cache headers alone don't touch it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com> |