I am completely confused about the orbital mechanics in this game. They seem completely broken; at any rate they do not work remotely like any other simulation I've played with (e.g. Gravitation or Kerbal Space Program). The bodies other than the first body appear to actively deflect the spacecraft away!

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andai 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You have elucidated a real gap in the marketplace: physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.

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oezi 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

19:50 Put codex and claude (thinking high) to work in parallel to see who could come up with the better physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.

20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.

20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).

https://coezbek.github.io/orbital-tap/

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RobotToaster 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately it doesn't let you skip planets.

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oezi 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I tried it, but it doesn't make for good gameplay, it just gets too easy. Could maybe subtract points, but that also feels strange. I updated gravity to do things, but orbiting isn't permitted.

	▲	em-bee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		i love the gravity. but sometimes the orbital speed is to fast to be able to make the next jump. that's frustrating. a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.

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throwthrowuknow 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like this version of the game more, keep at it!

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progval 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's still pretty far physically accurate because there is infinite acceleration the moment a ship reaches the target orbit.

	▲	pigpop 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.
	▲	oezi 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		True. Hard to square it being a game, fast-spaced and accurate.

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love2read 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This version is better than OP’s

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FranchuFranchu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a 2014 game that is just that. Lim Rocket: slingshot around planets while also avoiding crashing.

https://dan-ball.jp/en/m/pc_lim/

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TeMPOraL 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a gap, but not due to lack of trying.

I made https://github.com/TeMPOraL/cloze-call a little over 16 years ago, and this itself was inspired by something then at least that much old.

Screenshot: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/old-blog/download/projects/ClozeCal...

Wonder if I can turn this into browser-playable version with just LLMs.

EDIT: Put Claude Code on the task (reason for choice: Claude Desktop lets me just throw it at a folder with unzipped bundle of sources and assets I found laying around my blog archive).

EDIT2: Holy shit it worked. Will upload it somewhere soon.

EDIT3: Here it is, in its full 800x600, 30 FPS cap glory: https://temporal.github.io/ClozeCall-Web/

The process I used was, have CC run over the original sources and create this document:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/ClozeCall-Web/blob/main/design.m...

Then after verifying it matches what I remembered and clarifying some decisions (section 4 and 5), just told it to make a static client-side no-build-step no-webshit-frameworks game deployable to github.io, and it did it in a single shot (+ a second small request to add a fix to transparency of some assets). Personally, I'm impressed at how well it went, what a nice highlight of the weekend for me.

	▲	TeMPOraL an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Past my edit window, so - a modernized port true to the spirit, but with some QoL updates, more performant and works half-decently on mobile: https://temporal.github.io/ClozeCall-Web/index-ng.html

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wafflemaker 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really. Flight of Nova fills that gap, and I think I know how I'm going to spend this afternoon now.

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wolframhempel 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it has any expectation of being an astrophysics simulation. I mean, if the "spaceship" misses, it falls towards the "floor"...

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Applejinx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup. I figured it out and went from zero to five immediately when I figured out it wasn't in the least orbital, but rather it was Undertale: you had to click when it was exactly tangent to the target, and then hitting anywhere within the target area was a win.

That's also when I lost all interest, which isn't quite fair in that it's still a slingshot game, just not in the least orbital. It's just a slingshot. No stars required.