The impact coefficients in applyWear were written against an imagined
scale. Measured on the running game, a head-on into a building at
85 km/h comes back as a single contact event of ~2.5e6 N — 25 units of
"impact" against the old 1e5 reference. Through the old coefficients
that was 123% of the chassis and 37% of its ceiling, gone, in one hit,
in a game whose missions pay about 0.3 parts each. One crash ended the
campaign, and the campaign had no way to end.
Anchor the reference to the measured figure instead, and cap what any
single step can take: a crash is a pile of contacts across several
steps plus whatever the car scrapes on the way to a standstill, and
that sum has no natural bound.
The same 14-second flat-out run into a building now costs chassis
100 -> 65% and its ceiling 100 -> 89%. Expensive, survivable, and
still the worst thing that can happen to the car.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four allied bases, placed by greedy farthest-point so no choke point can strand
the player, with the first at the spawn junction so the loop is available at
once. Missions hand in at any base, not the issuing one.
The board offers known and new targets side by side and describes each route in
words. Crucially it never reads heat directly — it reads sim/intel.ts, a record
of what the player has actually observed and when. Notes age while roads keep
escalating unwatched, so a known route is knowable, stale, and never a promise.
Recon missions survey everything within 130m, which is how a new target becomes
a known one without driving every road there.
New targets pay 1.8x. That multiplier is the phase's tuning dial: too low and
nobody takes the unknown, too high and nobody takes the known.
Payment is parts, which repair the car. To keep "decline, not reset" intact,
each subsystem gains a ceiling that falls permanently with damage — repairs
restore up to what the car is still capable of, never to what it was. Without an
economy the board's rewards had no stakes; with one, the risky job is what keeps
the car running a while longer.
Adds Dijkstra over the road graph, taking a cost function so a "safest route"
preview is a small change later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Roads are a jittered 7x7 grid with ~a quarter of the edges thinned out, kept
connected. The loops are the point: "take a different road" is not a decision
without alternative routes.
Every metre driven adds heat to that segment; all roads shed it slowly. Crossing
a threshold escalates Clear -> Patrol -> Barricade -> Turret, each of which puts
real obstructions on the tarmac. Hysteresis stops a road on a boundary from
rebuilding its barricade every few seconds.
Level changes are deferred while the car is on the segment. Building a barricade
around the player would spawn a static collider inside the chassis, and the
player is meant to discover escalation by returning to a road, not by watching
it assemble behind them.
Checkpoint positions are seeded from the segment id, so a stretch of road always
fortifies in the same place — recognising it is part of learning the map.
Scenery now avoids the tarmac and the car spawns at a junction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Vite + TypeScript + three.js + Rapier raycast vehicle, fixed 60 Hz step.
Flat plate, seeded obstacle scatter, chase camera, debug HUD. Car condition
(engine/tires/chassis) degrades permanently and is derived into handling
numbers, so decline is felt through the wheel rather than read off a meter.
src/sim/ is kept free of three.js and Rapier imports — the later heat, region
and front-line systems all live there, and staying engine-free is what makes
them unit-testable without a browser.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
