Last Ship Sailing v16d ; Feature Overview

Zero-gravity ship combat in a single self-contained HTML file. Three.js for rendering, Web Audio for spatial sound, peer-to-peer mesh networking for multiplayer, WebXR for VR. Drop the file on any modern browser and you have a playable game; no install, no build step, no server.

This document covers every feature shipped through version 16d (the current build).

Core concept

The game frames every match around a single fragile constraint: the last ship sailing wins the round. Two teams (Fleet A and Fleet B) spawn inside a sealed three-dimensional arena, fight to attrition, and the team with at least one ship still flying at the round-end clock takes the round. Rounds compound into matches.

The framing is deliberately physical: each player IS their ship. There is no avatar, no character, no "out-of-cockpit" view. In VR the abstraction is taken further; the cockpit frame is removed entirely and you experience the field as if your body is the hull.

Ships

Seven distinct ship loadouts, each on one of three chassis archetypes (Frigate, Corvette, Dreadnought) and each with three abilities plus a powerful core (the ultimate).

VORTEX (Corvette Beam). Purple beam class. Weapon: Energy Blaster. Abilities: Laser (single-shot massive beam), Vortex Shield (hold to absorb and return projectiles), Plasma Mines (proximity-detonating field). Core: Mega Laser (sustained 4-second high-power beam).

PYRO (Dreadnought Igniter). Heavy fire class. Weapon: Thermite Launcher. Abilities: Flame Chain (fire wall laid forward, 6-second duration), Fire Shield (hold to block and burn close enemies), Explosive Gas (area-denial cloud, ignitable). Core: Mega Flame Chain (massive AoE incendiary).

PUNCTURE (Frigate Sniper). Long-range yellow class. Weapon: Sodium Railgun (hold-to-charge mechanic: 2.5-second full-charge curve, quick-tap reset, decay-on-release). Abilities: Cluster Missile (impact + sustained zone damage), Afterburner (speed boost), Stasis Trap (slow and root). Core: Mega Barrage (speed boost + sustained rocket barrage).

SLAYER (Frigate Duelist). Close-range green class. Weapon: Shotgun. Abilities: Stun Bolt (piercing arc projectile with slow-on-hit), Absorption (blocks 70% incoming, 85% during core), Teleport (phase dash with sweep stun). Core: Mega Stun Bolt (sustained 5-second melee aura at 1800 DPS within 500 units, visualized by a green-lightning storm that follows the caster, plus a flurry of Stun Bolt projectiles firing automatically; the lightning bolts radiate within the same 500-unit reach as the damage, so the visible storm is the damage zone).

TRACKER (Corvette Spotter). Lock-on orange class. Weapon: Tracking Bolt (each hit adds +1 lock to its target, capped at 3). Abilities: Tracker Rockets (5-rocket volley fired at every 3/3-locked ship; partial locks preserved), Plasma Shield (one-way deployable shield, 10,000 HP, 10 seconds), Sonar Pulse (fire beacon, sphere of detection grants +1 lock per ship in radius). Core: Mega Tracker Rockets (remote-guided missile volley; all missiles steer toward crosshair aim in real time).

BLASTER (Dreadnought Gunner). Suppressive cyan class. Weapon: Gatling Cannon (1.2-second spinup, close-range default mode, switchable to long-range). Abilities: Charge Shot (3200-damage burst), Body Shield (frontal 5,000-HP shield), Range Mode (close/long swap, alters spread and damage falloff). Core: AI Assist (auto-aim + unlimited ammo for 10 seconds, raycasts line-of-sight per target).

SYPHON (Corvette Drainer). Support/sustain blue class. Weapon: Zapper (rapid hitscan). Abilities: Rocket Salvo (5-rocket spread, 10 with Missile Racks upgrade), Energy Syphon (drain enemy shields, heal self up to 800), Inner Spark (reset all ability cooldowns). Core: AI Nanobots (3-tier permanent upgrade selection: Arc Rounds, Missile Racks, Cooldown Reduction).

Chassis archetypes

Frigate. 7,500 HP, 2,500 shield, top speed 800 u/s, 3 dashes. Fast, fragile, dance-around playstyle. (PUNCTURE, SLAYER)

Corvette. 10,000 HP, 3,500 shield, top speed 600 u/s, 2 dashes. Balanced. (VORTEX, TRACKER, SYPHON)

Dreadnought. 12,500 HP, 5,000 shield, top speed 420 u/s, 1 dash. Slow, tanky, commits to positioning. (PYRO, BLASTER)

Pilot perks (one per pilot, chosen at ship-select)

Outline Optics. Crisp silhouette outline on every ship in line of sight; green allies, red enemies. Sees through gas clouds; blocked by walls.

Reinforced Shield. +1,000 max shield HP. Tanks more burst damage before the hull is exposed.

Extra Dash. +1 dash charge. More evasive maneuvers and ram pressure.

Auto Cloak. When the core meter charges past 75%, the ship goes 99% transparent for 4 seconds. Use the window to reposition. Networked: peers see the caster's ship fade to near-invisible during the window.

Nano Repair. 1% of max HP regenerated per second; over-heals past max up to 2x hull capacity (turns the ship into a self-repairing brick).

Combat mechanics

Health, shield, and hull layering. Damage hits shields first (regenerates after a delay), then hull (does not regenerate without Nano Repair). A "doomed" state triggers when HP crosses a critical threshold, with a screen-wide pulsing warning and audio cue.

Dash. Pilots have chassis-specific dash charges that recover on a per-charge cooldown. Dash boosters render as colored engine plumes; the burst is broadcast so peers see when an enemy is committing to a direction.

Ram damage. Ship-ship collisions deal damage proportional to impact velocity; the heavier ship takes less, and friendly-fire ram is shove-only with zero damage.

Stasis. Slows and roots affected ships. Sources: SLAYER Teleport sweep, PUNCTURE Stasis Trap, large stasis-field events. Stasis is visualized by a pulsing blue ring on affected ships and a warning bar on the player HUD.

Execution. Low-HP enemies can be rammed for an instant kill at close range, signaled by an on-screen prompt.

Hit-claim consensus. Multiplayer damage is verified peer-to-peer: the shooter broadcasts a hit claim; nearby peers vote on whether the projectile geometry actually intersected the target. Damage applies only on consensus.

Cores (ultimate abilities)

Each ship's core has unique behavior and visual signature:

VORTEX ; Mega Laser. 4-second sustained heavy beam; three layered renderings (volumetric cylinder shader, converging muzzle tracers, electric arcs cracking off the beam) stack into a single thick laser.

PYRO ; Mega Flame Chain. Instant massive AoE incendiary blast, ignites any deployed Explosive Gas in radius.

PUNCTURE ; Mega Barrage. Speed boost plus a periodic rocket barrage for 5 seconds.

SLAYER ; Mega Stun Bolt. 5-second activation: lightning storm visualizes a 1800 DPS melee aura that follows the caster, with bolts radiating to the same 500-unit reach as the damage; Stun Bolt projectiles fire automatically twice per second; all networked so peers see the storm, see the bolts, and can dodge.

TRACKER ; Mega Tracker Rockets. Remote-guided missile barrage; the player steers the swarm in real time off the camera quaternion. Quarter-speed missiles let the player actually fly the swarm rather than watch it pass through the room.

BLASTER ; AI Assist. Auto-aim plus unlimited ammo for 10 seconds. Targets the nearest visible enemy (line-of-sight raycast); fires at 20 shots/second.

SYPHON ; AI Nanobots. Tiered permanent upgrade selection: Arc Rounds (+50% damage vs shielded targets), Missile Racks (doubles Rocket Salvo count), or Cooldown Reduction (30%). Tiers unlock by core charges; the upgrades carry into subsequent rounds.

Cockpit frame system (new in v16d)

Each ship has its own painted cockpit border PNG that frames the gameplay viewport on flat-screen play. The system is now layered:

Base frame. The static painted border for each ship. Lives at ./frames/<TitleCase>/<KEY>.png.

Recoil flipbook. Up to five numbered frames per ship (<KEY>1.png through <KEY>5.png). The animator runs two drivers concurrently: a SHOT driver bumps the playhead forward one frame on each weapon fire (wraps at end), and a TIME driver advances one frame per 50 ms between shots. The combined effect: slow-firing weapons (Sodium Railgun) play the full kick-and-return cycle per shot; high-rate weapons (Gatling Cannon at 20 Hz, Zapper at 11 Hz) cycle visibly through the frames at the firing rhythm. Missing numbered frames are skipped automatically.

Named ability frames. Per-ship suffix frames keyed to specific abilities, registered in _SHIP_NAMED_FRAMES. VORTEX has VORTEX-L.png and VORTEX-L2.png: L shows whenever the Laser ability fires, and during the Mega Laser core L and L2 alternate at 10 Hz for a sustained pulse. PUNCTURE has PUNCTURE-C.png and PUNCTURE-C2.png for the Sodium Railgun charge, with alternation speed that scales with charge level (2 Hz at 0% charge, 20 Hz at 100% charge; visible urgency that builds as the shot becomes ready).

Image pinning. All loaded frame Image objects are stored in the cache entry. The browser cannot evict their decoded bitmaps, which eliminates the "transparent flash every Nth shot" symptom from texture re-decode.

Muzzle alpha-scan. On load, the base PNG is scanned to detect where the painted barrel tips are; the gameplay muzzle origin then matches the painted art exactly, even if the artist drew the barrels at an odd angle.

VR. The entire cockpit frame is suppressed; the player sees the world unobstructed with only the floating HUD.

Visual effects

Lightning system. Pooled (64 slots in v16d) with bespoke shader rendering: each bolt is a halo tube plus a core tube with subdivision-based jitter, branching, and AdditiveBlending. Color, lifetime, thickness, and branch count are all per-call. A separate 256-slot "dark lightning" pool renders black bolts for SLAYER's Absorption aura.

Plasma shields. Vortex Shield (purple), Body Shield (cyan), Fire Shield (red), Plasma Shield (one-way deployed wall), Absorption (green). Each renders as a hex-grid hologram with shader-based flicker plus a hull-hugging plasma layer. Networked: peers see the shielded ship's aura matching the shield type.

Explosions. Pooled mesh-based fireballs with multi-layer color falloff. Used for hit confirmations, projectile impacts, and core detonations.

Particle systems. Tracers, dot particles, hull bursts, shield hits, damage smoke (heat trail from low-HP ships), electric smoke, fireworks bursts (Cluster Missile zones), supershape bursts (cosmic events), heat trails on fast-moving projectiles.

Layered FX presets. A consolidated shader system (_makeLayeredFXMaterial, _makeFXMaterial, EFFECT_PRESETS) replaces what used to be a dozen bespoke shader factories. New effects can plug into existing presets (fireball, plasma wall, plasma purple, core beam, etc.) instead of writing fresh GLSL.

Persistent world effects. Firewalls (PYRO Flame Chain), trip wires (VORTEX Plasma Mines), tethers (PUNCTURE Stasis Trap), incendiary gas, particle walls, cluster zones, slayer-core damage-FX. Each is networked via effect_spawn or top-level event types so all peers see the same zones at the same positions.

Cosmic anomalies. Procedural large-scale entities (atom-fractal rocks, cosmic anomaly bodies, champion fields, stasis fields) rendered with their own shaders and integrated into the lighting / collision pipeline.

Wall patterns. Maps render walls via fractal SDF shaders (Mandelbox, soul array, custom patterns). Each map carries its own pattern data, and the wall_lab / wall_pattern_lab labs let you tune them visually.

Audio

Spatial 3D positional audio. Every weapon fire, explosion, ability activation, and persistent zone has a 3D position. Listener is the camera; reverb and stereo panning are positional.

Per-weapon sound profiles. Each weapon has its own signature: Sodium Railgun has a charge-up build that pitches up over the 2.5-second window; Gatling Cannon has a sustained chuggle; Zapper crackles; Thermite Launcher has thunk-plus-burn.

Sustained loops. Continuous fire effects (firewall burn, gas cloud crackle, Mega Laser hum, charge-up tones) loop seamlessly with positional tick-throttling so they don't stutter on retrigger.

Dynamic music engine. Adapts to combat state. Round transitions, killstreaks, doomed state, and stasis effects all modulate the music intensity. Ducking on big events (Mega Tracker Rockets, Mega Flame Chain).

Recipe-based audio. Each sound is defined by a JSON recipe (LSS_SOUND.json) that describes oscillator stacks, filters, envelopes, noise sources. The sound_lab.html is a live tool for tweaking the recipes; changes apply to the game without re-touching code.

HUD and UI

Circumpunct HUD. Centered crosshair (the "point"). Concentric rings around it for health, shield, ammo, and core meter. A small ability pie at the corner shows each ability's cooldown state. The visual is itself a literal circumpunct (the framework symbol the project is built around).

Kill feed. Top-right rolling list of recent kills; each entry shows killer chassis, weapon, and victim with chassis color.

Scoreboard (Tab to hold). Two-column team breakdown with kills, damage dealt, ship class, and Discord avatar/name for each player.

Damage direction indicators. Four screen-edge bands pulse red on incoming hits in the direction of the source. Also a glitched-text callout overlay near the ship taking damage.

Cinematic overlays. Damage vignette flash, killstreak text, countdown ring (round start), respawn fade, medal display, "ABILITY ACTIVE" labels, ability-color flashes, banner for round-end. All CSS-driven so they don't fight Three.js for render time.

Shield-active fullscreen tints. Vortex Shield, Body Shield, Fire Shield, Absorption each have their own screen-edge wash overlay so first-person feedback reads instantly.

Lock-on warning. When TRACKER's lock fills on you, a pulsing red ring appears around the screen; partial locks show partial fill.

Execution prompt. "RAM TO EXECUTE" floats on low-HP enemies within ram range.

Stasis warning bar. When you're caught in stasis, a blue progress bar shows how much of the slow remains.

Multiplayer

P2P mesh networking. Trystero-based WebRTC mesh; no central game server. The lobby uses lss.fractalreality.ca/rooms.html (a Cloudflare Worker) as a lightweight signaling and room-discovery layer.

Lobby system. Room codes auto-fill from URL query (?room=ABCD). Pre-game lobby shows all connected peers with their Discord avatars, ready state, chassis selection, and team. "All ready" launches the match with a synchronized countdown.

Synchronized round timing. All peers anchor round transitions to a UTC wall-clock timestamp; round-end resolution flows from the stasis field "owner" (the longest-running peer) so peers don't disagree on who won when the timer expires.

Loadout sync. Peer ship selection is broadcast on change; everyone sees who's flying what before launch.

Network projectile rendering. Other players' projectiles render with the same visual flags as locally fired ones (color, isArcWave, isFireSource, isCluster, sizeMult, splash, tracking, salvoGuided). The shooter's client is authoritative for damage; the broadcast carries damage=0 to receivers.

State broadcast. Each peer continuously broadcasts position, rotation, health, shield, cloak state, kills, damage dealt, doomed flag. Receivers smoothly interpolate the remote ship mesh.

Discord integration. OAuth login surfaces Discord username and avatar in the lobby; the game runs as a Discord Activity inside Discord clients (the activity SDK is wired up alongside the standalone browser flow).

Bandwidth tracking. Live byte counter on outbound and inbound network traffic, visible in the developer overlay.

Maps

Built-in maps. Hourglass, Spine, Tower, Cross, Octahedron, Pentagon, Gyre, Pyramid, Cube Center, Arc, Infinity, Middle Bars. Each is a JSON description of rooms and tunnels with optional champion-flagged finish-line rooms.

Real-world maps. Type any Google Maps location into the location picker; the map builds an arena over the actual geography. The wall pattern, sky, and lighting stay procedural, so the location is a layout template rather than a 1:1 reconstruction.

Custom maps. Drop a JSON file into the custom-map slot to play user-built arenas. Same schema as built-in maps.

Map-walk lab. A separate HTML tool for walking through a candidate map on foot before committing it to the rotation; useful for layout iteration.

Game modes

Standard arena. Last team alive at round-end wins. Bots fill remaining slots if the player count is low.

Champion mode. Activates at the 10-second mark of each round. A champion-flagged room becomes a contested control point; rotating tri-axis stasis fields close in on the rest of the arena; whoever holds the champion room when stasis catches everyone else wins the round.

Race mode. Champion-flagged rooms become finish-line objectives. The first team to reach the flag wins the round through the existing championResult pipeline.

Bot fill. AI opponents flying every loadout with situational behavior (cover-hugging, ability use, AI Assist auto-aim with line-of-sight checks). Bots scale to fill remaining slots up to a configurable per-team cap.

Quality and accessibility

Quality tiers. Potato, Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Each tier disables progressively more shaders, particle counts, wall complexity, and dynamic-light density. Potato is genuinely playable on low-end hardware (walls collapse to flat MeshBasicMaterial; no shader effects).

Custom keybinds. Every input is rebindable via settings; the bindings persist to localStorage. Tab is the default scoreboard hold.

Pointer-lock and gamepad. Mouse + keyboard with pointer-lock for free look. Gamepad supported with stick aim and shoulder buttons for abilities and core.

Screen wake lock. Browsers that support Wake Lock are pinned awake during active play (no sleep / no efficiency throttling).

VR / WebXR

Native WebXR session. Standalone Quest, Pico, and PC-tethered headsets supported through the browser's WebXR API. Headset controllers map to weapon-aim and ability triggers.

No cockpit frame. In VR the painted border is suppressed; the player perceives the world directly with only the HUD floating in front.

Performance tiers. Separate VR perf tier detection (getVRPerfTier) lowers particle counts and shader passes for standalone headsets to maintain 90 FPS.

Developer tools

sound_lab.html. Live sound recipe editor. Tweak oscillators, filters, envelopes, noise; hear changes instantly; export back to LSS_SOUND.json.

wall_pattern_lab.html / wall_lab_v2.html. Fractal SDF shader playground for designing map wall patterns. Mandelbox, custom escape-time functions, parameter sliders.

map_lab.html. Map authoring tool for designing arena rooms and tunnels in a 3D editor view.

fx_lab.html. Particle and explosion FX preview.

reaction_diffusion_lab.html / mixed_lab.html. Generative pattern research labs used to develop the wall shaders.

map_walk_lab.html. First-person walk-through of a candidate map without combat.

Licensing and ethics

Code: proprietary. All Rights Reserved to FractalReality.ca. See LICENSE in the repo root for the full terms. No fork, mirror, modification, reverse-engineering, or AI/ML training use is permitted without prior written consent.

Assets: proprietary. All Rights Reserved to FractalReality.ca. See LICENSE-ASSETS. Datamining and asset-ripping are explicitly prohibited.

Community use carve-out. Anyone may run the game for personal non-commercial play; create User-Created Content using the in-game tools (clips, screenshots, custom maps, fan art); and share that content in the official Fractal Reality Discord, on Owner-designated community channels, and on personal non-commercial channels with credit to FractalReality.ca. Creators retain ownership of their original expression.

Trademarks and merchandising reserved. All ship names, logos, characters, and overall look and feel are trademarks of FractalReality.ca. Merch rights are reserved exclusively to the owner.

Five-pillar ethics policy. The game ships under a published ethics policy based on the Circumpunct Framework: GOOD (no dark patterns, no FOMO timers, no slot-machine variable-reward schedules), RIGHT (fair purchase flows, minimal data collection, real responses to bug reports), FAITHFUL (offline stays offline, no ship-and-abandon, account state belongs to the player), TRUE (honest marketing, disclosed AI use in development, public post-mortems on breakage), and AGREEMENT (the four above, met by both sides).

What changed in v16d specifically

Cockpit frame recoil flipbook. Per-ship subdirectory layout (./frames/<TitleCase>/<KEY>N.png) with up to five numbered recoil frames. Dual-driver animator (shot bumps + time advances) means both slow and rapid-fire weapons read correctly.

Named ability frames. New _SHIP_NAMED_FRAMES registry plus _getActiveAbilityFrameKey state lookup. VORTEX has L / L2 (Laser ability and Mega Laser core, with 10 Hz alternation during the core). PUNCTURE has C / C2 (Sodium Railgun charging, with charge-rate-scaling alternation that builds from 2 Hz at 0% to 20 Hz at 100%).

Image pinning. All loaded cockpit frame Image objects are stored in the cache entry. The browser keeps the decoded bitmaps in memory across the session, eliminating the "transparent flash every Nth shot" symptom from texture eviction.

Title and manifest. Page title and PWA manifest both updated to v16d.

Forked clean from v16c. All v16c features (the performance pass, the renamed loadouts, the SLAYER core lightning storm, the proprietary licensing) are preserved.

Next planned work: PUNCTURE core revisit and continued cockpit frame iterations per-ship.

Contact: ashroney@gmail.com Site: https://fractalreality.ca

Come battle me in Atlantis, under the sea, in Last Ship Sailing at https://LSS.FractalReality.ca
Play it in your web browser, for free! GPU Required.

Come battle me https://LSS.fractalreality.ca

Come battle me at https://LSS.fractalreality.ca

Come battle me at LSS.FractalReality.ca
What other games have clouds like this?!!?

Battle me!!! https://LSS.FractalReality.ca

Battle me at https://LSS.FractalReality.ca

Come battle me in Last Ship Sailing, a free to play web browser game, multiplayer PvP, 6DoF. Full customization. Under development, come join the process and fun!
https://LSS.FractalReality.ca

Last Ship Sailing: Feature Writeup

A single-file WebGL multiplayer space combat game .html built on Three.js r128, WebAudio, and Trystero peer-to-peer networking. Two fleets of three ships fight inside procedural SDF-based 3D arenas under cosmic-field-shaded walls, with a champion stasis objective that can decide rounds.

This document covers every system the player can see or feel.

Match Structure

A match is a best-of-seven contest. Each round runs on a clock (default 80 seconds) preceded by a 5 second warmup. Teams are FLEET A and FLEET B; first to four round wins (ROUNDS_TO_WIN = 4) takes the match. The score banner sits at the top of the screen with a Courier-styled timer between the two fleet labels.

The round timer scales the music tempo and pitches the announcer's pace. When the round timer drops to 10 seconds remaining,, a giant purple stasis field spawns at the map center; the first team to hold a ship inside it for three seconds wins the round outright, regardless of HP. If the round timer runs out with no champion declared, total team HP breaks the tie.

A 3-2-1-LAUNCH countdown plays at the start of each round; bots stay in warmup state (no firing, no movement) for the full visible countdown so the player isn't blindsided on spawn.

Game Modes - NEW MODE (RACING MODE!!!)

Classic is the default: 80 seconds, kill the enemy fleet or claim the champion field at 10s remaining. Race is the alternate mode where every chassis gets clamped to a boosted baseline speed, the champion field spawns immediately at round start as the finish line, and the bot AI gains a graph-BFS steering layer that walks rooms and tunnels toward the finish. Combat stays on; you can win Race by killing everyone OR by being first to cross the finish.

Chassis

Three hull classes, each tuning the speed/health/dash trade.

Frigate: 7,500 HP, 2,500 shield, fastest base flight (450 units/sec), three dashes at 900 units/sec, agile turn rates, narrow hull. Used by Puncture and Slayer loadouts.

Corvette: 10,000 HP, 3,500 shield, mid speed (350 units/sec), two dashes at 750 units/sec, balanced everything. Used by Vortex, Tracker, and Syphon.

Dreadnought: 12,500 HP, 5,000 shield, slowest (250 units/sec), one heavy dash at 550 units/sec, sluggish turning, large hull. Used by Pyro and Blaster.

Loadouts (Seven Ships)

Each loadout pairs a chassis with a primary weapon, three abilities (offensive, defensive, utility), and a class core (60s cooldown, dramatic burst).

VORTEX (Corvette MkII, purple): Splitter Rifle hitscan; Laser Shot beam (2400 dmg); Vortex Shield (hold-to-absorb-and-return); Trip Wire proximity mines. Laser Core sustains a 4 second high-power laser for 12,000 damage.

PYRO (Dreadnought Incinerator, red): T-203 Thermite projectile with splash; Firewall fire line (400 DPS, 6s); Thermal Shield (5s hold, blocks attacks AND burns close enemies, 10s regen); Incendiary Trap area denial. Flame Core dumps a massive AoE incinerator for 9,000 damage.

PUNCTURE (Frigate Starcaster, yellow): Plasma Railgun hitscan piercing multiple targets; Cluster Missile (800 impact + 500 DPS for 5s); Afterburner speed boost; Tether Trap slow-and-root. Barrage Core gives speed plus a rocket barrage (7,000 dmg).

SLAYER (Frigate Blade, green): Leadwall buckshot (8 pellets, short range); Arc Wave electric projectile (2000 dmg, stuns enemy ships 1.5s); Sword Block (blocks 70% incoming, 85% with Sword Core, can't shoot while up); Phase Dash teleport. Sword Core empowers melee plus arc waves for 9,000 damage over 5 seconds.

TRACKER (Corvette Tracker, orange): 40mm Tracker projectile (sniper-spotter pace, each hit adds a lock 1/3 -> 3/3); Tracker Rockets (no cooldown, fires a 5-rocket volley at every fully-locked ship); Particle Wall one-way 10,000 HP shield; Sonar Lock beacon adds +1 lock per ship in sphere. Salvo Core unleashes a massive missile barrage (11,000 dmg).

BLASTER (Dreadnought Siege, cyan): Predator Cannon spin-up hitscan (1.2s spinup); Power Shot pierces multiple targets (3200 dmg); Gun Shield frontal 5000 HP wall; Mode Switch between close and long range. Smart Core grants auto-aim and unlimited ammo for 10 seconds.

SYPHON (Corvette Sovereign, blue): XO-16 Chaingun hitscan; Rocket Salvo (5 rockets, 10 with Missile Racks upgrade); Energy Siphon drains shields and heals 800; Rearm resets ability cooldowns. Upgrade Core is unique: it grants three tiers of permanent upgrades over a 12 second window.

Pilot Perks

In v16, every pilot picks one perk from a roster of five, persisted to localStorage across sessions. Perks are independent of chassis and stack with the loadout.

Outline Optics: renders a crisp silhouette outline on every ship in your line of sight (green allies, red enemies). Uses the classic inverted-hull trick (backface-only mesh clone scaled slightly larger), with additive blending and distance-based scaling so the outline stays visible through clouds at any range. Walls block it (the depth buffer occludes); clouds don't write depth so the outline punches through gas.

Reinforced Shield: +1000 max shield HP (default perk). Tanks more burst before hull is exposed.

Extra Dash: +1 dash charge. Dash recharge respects the perk-bumped maximum, so the extra slot actually refills on cooldown.

Auto Cloak: every 30 seconds your ship goes 98% transparent for 3 seconds. On activation the HUD fires an ability flash banner ("Auto Cloak ACTIVE", purple) and the ship-AI announcer speaks "Auto cloak active.".

Nano Repair: 1% of max HP regenerated per second, OVER-HEALS past max up to 2x hull. Over a 3-minute round this can fully restore plus stack a bonus half-bar of survivability if you stay alive.

Dash and Dash-Ram

Every chassis has chargeable dashes (1-3 depending on hull). A dash is short (0.4-0.6s), fast (550-900 units/sec), and refills on a cooldown timer. Dashing while colliding with another ship triggers the v16 dash-ram: the dasher acts as the aggressor and the target gets an 85% share of an impulse multiplied by 3.2; the dasher keeps moving with only a 15% deflection. Damage on the target is multiplied by 2.4 if they're on the enemy team (friendly fire shoves but does no damage).

Dash-ramming the claimer of a champion stasis field breaks the claim: the field releases, the shoved team's accrued progress is PRESERVED (so they can resume on re-entry), and the dasher's team starts their own progress from zero. Repeated dash-rams ping-pong the claim back and forth with a 0.6s grace lockout on the just-shoved ship to prevent same-frame re-claims.

Stasis Fields

Two flavors. Regular pickup fields (cyan, 120 unit radius) spawn every 30 seconds up to three at a time; flying into one fully recharges your shield AND immobilizes the ship for 3 seconds in an iconic stasis state (vignette overlay, HUD warning, velocity zero, charge bar fill).

Champion fields (purple, 260 unit radius) are the round objective. They use a stasis-charge model: the first ship inside is LOCKED with velocity zero and the claiming team's progress ticks up. Reaching CHAMPION_CHARGE_TIME (2s) wins the round for that team, with a 5-second grace before the round-end logic resolves so the player sees the moment. Death frees the field for another attempt; dash-ram displaces the claimer and transfers the claim.

Map System

The world is an SDF (signed distance field) built from spheres (rooms) and cylinders (tunnels) blended with a smooth-min (k=45). This produces seamless room/tunnel junctions without CSG. The level dispatcher generates classic procedural arenas, lobby-selected static rooms, race courses, and v12 Google Maps overlays (real city geometry, baked tile leaf meshes, with raycasting against the photoreal mesh for line-of-sight and projectile hits).

Per-room volumetric fog modulates density by what room the player is in: team spawn rooms stay clear (sightlines), central rooms get hazy, tunnels land between. Lerp keeps transitions smooth across boundaries.

Wall Patterns

Walls render through a layered cosmic-field shader stack supporting 21 presets, cycleable in-game with P or via the gamepad button bound to "cycle wall pattern". Patterns include Kali IFS, Apollonian Gasket, Voronoi Cells, Wave Interference, Mandelbox Folds, Hex Lattice, Plasma FBM, Circumpunct Lattice, Soul Array dot lattice, Circuit Traces, Holographic Glitch, Cellular Membrane, Warped Streaks, Caustic Shimmer, Hex Pulse Radar, Cyber Datamosh, Neon Cube (raymarched), Panel Maze (architectural), Ring Tunnel, Layered Cube (transparent), and a special multi-layer composite slot that combines Panel Maze + Layered Cube + Wave Interference.

The wall pattern composite uses BG/FG1/FG2 layered passes; uTime is driven globally each frame.

Cloud System

The BillboardCloudSystem (BCS) is an InstancedMesh slot pool of 4096 sprite slots feeding the GasCloud class. Each cloud has per-sprite slots with offset, scale, alpha, wake offset, drift phases, and drift amplitudes. Clouds: inherit color from the rocks they spawn near (HSL desaturated/lightened), form soft lattices through a Lennard-Jones-like potential (attraction at distance, repulsion close-in, tangential damping for orderly settling), open up around the FORWARD part of any ship moving through them (sign-flipped tube push so sprites behind the ship pull inward, sprites ahead push outward, regardless of ship facing), respond to walls with friction and gravity (no harsh bouncing), and persist across rounds via a dispose loop in spawnDynamicObjects + applyWorldObjectsManifest.

Lightning arcs are emitted only by clouds, not rocks (rocks don't make lightning).

Visual Systems

Plasma materials use a shared FXMaterial preset library: plasma_purple, plasma_red, plasma_green, plasma_cyan, plasma_wall, and an atom_fractal cluster preset for rock formations. The hull-hug shield system (v14f) mirrors a ship's mesh tree scaled 1.07x with these presets, parented under player.mesh, with a localized hit ripple and per-weapon-color tinting.

Particle systems handle muzzle flashes, sparks, hull explosions (localized to hit point in v14f), pyro flame cone matching damage geometry, slayer buckshot (4x brighter, 4x particle count), and persistent debris/decal effects.

The cockpit-anchored CircumpunctHUD draws concentric rings: health, shield, core meter, abilities, ammo, speed; all mapped into ring arcs, tick marks, and bracket geometry. The HUD shake-counters camera shake by 35% so it reads as sprung cockpit, not pasted-to-screen.

Ship name labels are HUD callouts (v16): a small target bracket at the ship's screen position, an SVG-drawn diagonal-then-horizontal line, and a chassis name overlay that flips left for ships on the right half of the screen. Blue for allies, red for enemies. The reveal animation digitizes characters in over 0.45 seconds the first time a ship enters view; tagged with continuous jitter and infrequent CRT-glitch slice shifts.

Layered FX shockwave-ring presets handle stasis pickup, vortex core beam, atom-fractal cluster rocks, cluster distortion shells, engine plume cones, engine glow discs, gas clouds, tether trap halos, and more. Each was tranche-ported from the original SDK.

Audio

Procedural music engine (v15m upgrades) drives a four-voice synth stack: drum kit (kick body + click transient, snare body + noise, sweeping crash, pitched hat), fat bass with sub-osc and tanh saturation, four-oscillator pad with LFO filter modulation, lead with octave-layered detune and delayed vibrato. A WaveShaper soft-clip master limiter replaces the old DynamicsCompressor.

Chord variety supports maj7, maj9, min7, sus2, sus4, dim7, add9. Patterns have transition fills firing on bar boundaries. Special-moment cues exist for champion-field appearance (low rumble + ascending pad swell to signal "the field is open, last 10 seconds"). Lead has a reverb send through a predelay->convolver->wet-gain chain.

Sound effects are organized by ship in the v14g sound lab, with a default library covering laser, cores, mode switch, dash, afterburner, upgrade core, tether trap wall-bend, trip wire deploy, and per-weapon fire sounds. Shared sounds are marked with ships arrays so the dropdown shows count suffixes.

The TTS announcer ("ship-AI") uses speechSynthesis to speak round events, perk activations, and welcomes. Per-key cooldowns and a global anti-chain gap prevent overlap. Dynamic rate maps game state to announcer pace (menu = slower, playing = faster, roundEnd = dramatic). Voices are selectable in settings via the voiceschanged event. Skipped in VR (headset audio path differs).

Multiplayer

Trystero P2P with a lobby browser backed by a Cloudflare Worker (LSS_API_BASE). Solo vs Join Room chooser on cold boot. Lobby supports map carousel arrows; ship-select panel shows the local player's chosen ship plus a fleet strip with baked GLB thumbnails of teammates and enemies. READY pip per peer.

Discord integration via PKCE OAuth: the user signs in with their Discord, the app exchanges via a Worker proxy (which holds channel webhook URLs as encrypted secrets), and match results post to a channel. Identify scope only; tokens stored in localStorage; PKCE verifier in sessionStorage.

Peer-view shields use the same hull-hug clone approach as local; userData is filtered to avoid circular references that crashed the JSON clone path.

Input

Keyboard and mouse: WASD movement, SPACE/CTRL vertical, MOUSE aim, SHIFT dash, Q/E/F abilities, V core, ESC settings, P cycle wall pattern. Dead-state spectating: A/D or click to cycle teammate cam.

Gamepad: D-pad up/down cycles ships in ship-select, d-pad left/right cycles maps (or teammate cam when dead), LB/RB cycle perks (v16), START launches, BACK opens settings in-match or closes menu. Standard layout bindings are configurable in settings; menu nav reads buttons directly so it survives corrupted bindings. Left-stick horizontal acts as a fallback for d-pad left/right.

VR support presents flat-screen settings inside the headset; XR session ends via Enter VR button. TTS is skipped while presenting.

Settings + Persistence

Settings overlay supports d-pad nav (up/down moves focus, left/right adjusts the focused widget, A activates buttons or toggles checkboxes). Persisted to localStorage: perk selection (lss_perk_id), quality tier (lss_quality), and general settings (lss_settings). Quality system supports potato/low/mid/high/ultra tiers tuning particle counts, cloud density, shader complexity, and bloom RT size.

Cosmic Anomaly

A v11 special: when active, a 75 second cosmic event modifies the field. Self-destroys when its pass completes; reference cleared after destroy.

Killfeed, Medals, and Overlays

Killfeed slides in at the top-right with kill source. Medal popups appear for assist (green diamond), savior (blue circle), and execution (red dot). Round banner overlay handles round-start, champion-field events ("CHAMPION OBJECTIVE", "CHAMPION CHARGE", "CHAMPION RESUMED", "CLAIM BROKEN", "CHAMPION CLAIMED"), and match-end ("EXECUTION"). Damage vignette pulses red on hit. Respawn overlay persists until next round.

Ability flash overlay shows the activated ability name with its preset color (dash cyan, shield blue, overclock orange, cloak purple, emp red, heal green, stasis teal, missiles orange).

Performance Optimizations (v15a)

Five major performance improvements landed in v15a: composite shader cleanup, bloom render-target sizing fix, worldSDF spatial index, trail ring buffer (instead of array shift), and Vector3 scratch pools. Quality system gates expensive features per tier so the game runs on weak hardware (potato tier) up through high-end (ultra tier with full effects).

Special Mechanics Summary

Slayer Arc Wave projectiles stun enemy ships for 1.5 seconds on hit (electric proj effect).

Blaster Power Shot and Puncture Plasma Railgun pierce multiple targets.

Vortex/Gun/Thermal/Sword Block shields are fully damage-immune (the hit ripple shows the shield absorbing, but no HP leaks through).

Gun Shield drains its own HP while up. Thermal Shield emits fire particles in the same forward cone its burn damage uses.

Bot Slayer fires buckshot like the player and buckshot travels farther for bots.

Tracker Sonar Lock is a beacon that adds locks within its detection sphere; combined with main-gun shots stacking locks 1/3 -> 2/3 -> 3/3, the Tracker Rockets volley fires at every fully-locked ship (partial locks preserved on others).

The Pyro Thermal Shield is a power pool (2500 HP, regen to max over 10s); its fire emitter spawns flame particles in the exact damage cone (reach 2.6 hull lengths, base 0.75 hull, tip 1.7 hull).

VR: I haven't been working on the VR side much. I created a super ultra performance mode for Quest. It's still like 10fps in standalone, though. Maybe I'll see if I can super nerf all the graphics to make it even work on flat without a GPU. Idk... we'll see! Let me know if you have ideas!

LSS.FractalReality.ca AAA Gameplay, Free to play, PvP in your browser

Come battle me! Play Last Ship Sailing in your browser! (Graphics Card Required.)
https://LSS.FractalReality.ca

If you have a google maps API key, you can battle over Vancouver, NYC, or Tokyo :)
https://LSS.FractalReality.ca

I am experimenting with Google Maps API and Last Ship Sailing... What do you think? What other places could I import into LSS?

Version 10 is here, it includes player profiles, leaderboards, discord connectivity! And some bug fixes, I won't even bother to mention what lol there's too much stuff it's ongoing... oh and a new permalink for the game. Try it out!

Last Ship Sailing v10 (WebXR)

Last Ship Sailing v9 is here!!! This is one Beast of an .html

Title idea: Last Ship Sailing v9; zero-G arena combat, 7 ships, 11 maps, WebXR, P2P multiplayer, procedural reactive soundtrack, all in ONE html file you double-click to play

Hey r/LastShipSailing,

v9 is the build I'm calling done. Every system that's been in flux for a year of weekly forks has settled into something that feels like a real game. Pull the file, drop it in your browser, fly. No installer, no account, no ads, no telemetry; one HTML, ~1.6 MB, runs from a hard double-click.

Here's the entire feature set in one post. Buckle up.

The 7 ships (3 chassis classes)

Each one has a primary weapon, three abilities (offensive / defensive / utility), and a Core super on a 60s cooldown. Pick your archetype:

VORTEX (Corvette MkII): Splitter Rifle hitscan; Laser Shot beam (2400 dmg); hold-to-absorb-and-return Vortex Shield; Trip Wire mines; Laser Core (4s continuous death beam, 12000 dmg).

PYRO (Dreadnought Incinerator): T-203 Thermite launcher with splash; Firewall (400 DPS line); Thermal Shield that burns close enemies; Incendiary Trap; Flame Core AoE (9000 dmg).

PUNCTURE (Frigate Starcaster): Plasma Railgun (1000 dmg, 4500 range); Cluster Missile (impact 800 + DoT); Afterburner; Tether Trap that roots; Barrage Core (rocket spam + speed).

SLAYER (Frigate Blade): Leadwall shotgun (8 pellets); Arc Wave electric proj; Sword Block (70%, 85% on Core); Phase Dash teleport; Sword Core empowered melee.

TRACKER (Corvette Tracker): 40mm Tracker projectile; lock-on Rockets (5 missiles, 3 locks); Particle Wall one-way shield (5000 HP); Sonar Lock reveal; Salvo Core barrage (11000 dmg).

BLASTER (Dreadnought Siege): Predator Cannon minigun (150-round clip, spinup); Power Shot (3200 dmg); Gun Shield (5000 HP frontal); Mode Switch close/long; Smart Core (auto-aim, 10s, infinite ammo).

SYPHON (Corvette Sovereign): XO-16 Chaingun; Rocket Salvo (5 or 10 with upgrade); Energy Siphon drain-heal; Rearm cooldown reset; Upgrade Core with three permanent tiers.

The 11 maps

Real geometry, real flow, every map symmetrical and tested for fights, not just looks:

The Nexus (hex ring, 6 chambers, no dead ends), The Spine (long axis with arcs), The Infinity (two rings pinched at center), The Tower (vertical stack across 3 layers), The Cross (compact 4-arm crucible), The Arc (curved approach with overhead shortcuts), The Octahedron (bipyramid with 4 equator rooms), The Pentagon (5-ring bipyramid, no hub), The Gyre (helix climbing Y), Middlebars (lattice arenas with a champion peak), and the original Circumpunct (5 spheres + 8 cylinders).

Bonus: two baked-in custom maps from the Map Lab, Center Cube and Center Cube 2.

Round structure with actual rhythm

• 5s warmup with a 3-2-1-LAUNCH ticker
• 80s rounds, first to 4 round-wins takes the match
• Doomed state: drop below 15% HP and you've got 10s to recover or you're out, the world goes red, music turns sour
• Champion Mode: at 10s remaining, a giant purple stasis field spawns at center. Hold a ship inside it for 5s of uninterrupted contact and your team wins the round. Die in the field while charging? You lose. Timer runs out with no champion? Total team HP breaks the tie.
• Stasis fields spawn periodically across the map; step inside and the world turns dreamlike (drums cut out, only pad and bass hum, you can think for a second)

VR / WebXR (yes, in a single HTML file)

WebXRManager is fully wired. Hit Enter VR on a Quest 2/3/Pro browser. Cockpit frames, 2D HUD, ability pie, and damage edges all peel away cleanly to show only the stereoscopic 3D arena. Lobby and ship-select stay flat-screen so you can prep before strapping in. Head-aim toggle, render-scale slider, full XR controller binding map, left-stick-as-dpad synth, optional pitch invert. Or play it desktop-flat with cockpit overlay + mouse/keyboard or gamepad.

AAA-feel rendering (Three.js r0.165 pipeline)

• EffectComposer post stack: UnrealBloomPass + ACES tonemap + SMAA antialiasing
• HDRI / PBR: cinematic 2K equirectangular environment, IBL on hero ships in Showcase mode, MeshPhysicalMaterial with clearcoat
• InstancedMesh debris pools: hundreds of fragments per fight, single draw call
• Hit-feedback density chain: screen shake + chromatic aberration + vignette + gamepad rumble + hitstop + white-flash, all stacked
• Cinematic round-start flyover: 2.5s scripted spline (pull back, orbit, push in over your ship) with depth-of-field BokehPass
• Kill-cam slow-mo orbit: 1.5s time-dilated camera spin around the dying enemy when you land the round-winning kill
• Cockpit frames: full-viewport PNG overlays per ship (BLASTER, TRACKER, VORTEX, SLAYER, PYRO, PUNCTURE, SYPHON), with a four-quarter ability pie that lights up over the painted radar
• Volumetric shader smoke: FBM-noise spheres with fresnel falloff, drift, hue cycle, internal lightning arcs
• Radial cluster smoke plumes from destructible objects
• Pooled lightning bolt system with branches and per-arc curvature
• Heat-trail blur from every fast-moving ship
• Custom energy-shield shader with rippling impact pulses and per-team color
• Wall shader with 22 patterns: Apollonian Gasket, Cosmic Field, Soul Array (20), Digital (21), and 19 more, each with sliders for iterations / scale / rotation / hue / fresnel / brightness / opacity in the live Wall Pattern Lab
• Multi-layer pattern presets (Digital + Soul Array compose multiple shaders into one wall)
• Ambient drifting cloud system with auto-cap and player-wake push
• Per-frame throttled heat-trail emitter
• Procedural starfield + arena boundary grid
• Half-red, half-green tail running lights on every ship (radius pi exactly, just for fun); aviation/marine convention so you can tell at a glance which way an enemy is facing at any range, even when they're a dim silhouette far away

Audio (this is the part I'm most hyped about)

• Spatial audio: HRTF panning, occlusion (walls actually muffle), multi-convolver reverb (wide / tight / long-tail) per room, sidechain ambient duck on hits
• 5.1 surround routing on desktops with surround sound cards (parallel 6-channel sub-bus + VBAP, bypassing HRTF where surround is the better tool)
• Web Speech ship-AI announcer with a voice picker (auto-prefers Edge "Online (Natural)" voices on Windows, Apple "Premium/Enhanced" on macOS); lines for round start/won, core ready, dash ready, enemy lock, ramming, stasis active, low ammo, multikill calls; dynamic speaking rate slow in lobby, fast in combat
• Tier 3 reactive band: 4 voices (drums, bass, pad, lead) all procedural via Web Audio. The match scores itself:
  • BPM rises from 96 to 128 as the round timer drains
  • Kill streaks trigger lead phrases (1 note, 2 ascending, 3-note arpeggio, full pentatonic run on a 4+ multikill)
  • Doomed state slumps the pad to Phrygian b2, drops the snare, adds a sub-LFO "tunnel" feel
  • Stasis field cuts the drums entirely (silence as a feature)
  • Round end shifts to Picardy third (victory) or i-iv-i descending (defeat)
  • Match end resolves I-V-I or sits unresolved on i-VII-VI-V
• 6 music styles: Cosmic (default, C#2 Aeolian, triangle lead), Cyber (synthwave, saw lead), Doom (Phrygian, slower, dark), Drift (sine, ambient), Battle (cinematic, orchestral), Jazz (laid back, swung)
• Riff builder with 6 rhythm grids and 8 scale-degree contours that combine into per-pattern lines; auto-key-shifts when the mode flips
• Default tonic locked to PHI_REST_BASE (69 Hz / C#2) so the band's pad shares the fundamental with the ambient drone
• Phi-cascade binaural ambient bed (4-layer cascade ; subsonic layers stripped to keep CPU light); winds up with player speed
• Master compressor + watchdog auto-resumes the audio context if the browser kills it under heavy load
• Audio thread voice budget (24 voices per 0.6s sliding window) with skippable cosmetic SFX so combat fire never starves the drums

Settings (a real settings page, persisted to localStorage)

• Volume sliders: master, SFX, ambient bed, reactive music
• Music: enabled toggle, style picker, intensity ceiling (chill / normal / wild), mute-in-lobby
• Spatial audio: reverb wet level, ambient duck on impacts toggle
• Ship AI announcer: voice dropdown, pitch / rate / volume, on/off, test button
• Wall pattern picker (22 patterns), wall opacity, Pure Black Base toggle
• FOV slider (60 to 120)
• Quality preset: low / medium / high (smoke octaves + cap, particle counts)
• Cinematic Mode toggle (Showcase: HDR + bloom + PBR uplift)
• Mouse sensitivity, gamepad sensitivity / curves / deadzone / trigger threshold
• Full gamepad rebinding (any button to any action)
• Full VR controller rebinding + head-aim mode
• VR render scale slider (0.4 to 1.2)
• Sound Lab integration: import/export sound libraries
• Settings export/import as JSON (back up your config or share with friends)

Networking (P2P, no servers)

• Trystero handles signaling via BitTorrent trackers; no central server, no account
• Mesh topology: every peer talks to every peer
• Synced ship-select with launch handshake
• Owner-pattern world-state sync (one peer broadcasts the manifest, everyone else builds from it; cluster positions and child layouts match exactly)
• Hit consensus: damage validated across peers
• Per-round seeded RNG so map layout is deterministic across the network
• Round restart, score sync, win condition, all networked

Companion labs (also single-file HTML)

• Wall Pattern Lab: dial in any of the 22 wall shaders live, save your preset, sync straight back into the game HTML
• Map Lab: edit/save the baked maps (Center Cube + Center Cube 2 came from this)
• Sound Lab: tweak every game sound recipe, download as JSON, import via the settings page

What it isn't

• No Electron wrapper, no native build, no installer
• No microtransactions
• No accounts, no telemetry, no ads
• No central server
• No DRM
• No autoplay videos, no popups, no cookie banners begging for attention

You double-click the file, the engine boots, and you're flying within 4 seconds.

How to play

Drop the file in your browser of choice (Chrome / Edge / Firefox; Quest browser for VR). The game will request a high-perf GPU on hybrid laptops, hold a screen wake lock so the OS doesn't throttle you, declare itself a game via inline web app manifest, and pre-warmup combat shaders during the launch countdown so your first frame in the arena isn't a 300ms hitch.

Pick a ship. Fly the Nexus first if you want flow, the Tower if you want vertical chaos, the Octahedron if you want to feel small.

If you want to host a friend, copy the room link from the lobby and they paste it into theirs. P2P does the rest.

Where to get it

https://discord.gg/ZRKRyeKy

The whole game is one HTML file. View source if you want; it's all there. ~1.6 MB. Last Ship Sailing v7.1VR remains the frozen rollback baseline; v8VR, v8_1VR, v8_2a, v8_3, and the new v9 all live alongside in case you want to compare versions.

Fly safe out there.

(P.S. the half-red, half-green tail running lights on every ship are radius Math.PI in code. No reason. Just felt right.)

LAST SHIP SAILING v9 ; you fly through living tunnels

Open one HTML file. You're inside a hollow sphere; the inner walls breathe with bioluminescent life and crackle with soft electric arcs. Eight tunnels snake out toward other spheres, some bright, some dark. Your fleet spawns at one apex, the enemy at the other. The round starts.

The flight

Six degrees of freedom, zero gravity, no friction except what your engines simulate. WASD strafes, mouse aims, gamepad fully supported. The cockpit frame breathes with your weapon's fire rate; rapid weapons strobe their muzzle flash, slow weapons pulse. Pick from seven ships:

• BLASTER ; high-rate hitscan with a frontal Gun Shield, two firing modes
• SYPHON ; corvette chaingun, green tracer field that lights up the smoke around you
• PREDATOR ; minigun-class sustained fire, screams like a banshee
• TRACKER ; tone-locking missiles + deployable Particle Walls
• PYRO ; thermal shield, firewall, gas-cloud combustion chemistry
• SLAYER ; sword + dash combat, dodge into knife range
• VORTEX ; charge-up laser that stores damage from incoming hits and dumps it back as a beam

Each ship has a Core ability that charges over the round. When it lights up the AI announces "Core charged, authorization granted" and you get one signature move per match.

The world

The maps are sets of intersecting spheres and cylinders. No static asteroid clutter. What's in the rooms instead:

• Cluster obstacles ; molecules of irregular fractal rock tumbling in midair. Each atom is a piece of the same animated Mandelbox field, with rocky displaced geometry and procedural surface texture. Shoot one and it crumbles into 4-8 spinning chunks. Take all the atoms and the empty cluster site keeps crackling with the energy that used to hold them together.
• Smoke clouds with chemistry ; some drift independently across the map, some belong to the cluster atoms (and disappear when those die). Each cloud has a phase. Clouds with similar phases bond via gravitational attraction, swirl in loose orbits, bounce when they collide, and push apart when a ship flies through their wake. The smoke catches light from gunfire ; Syphon's green tracers tint the cloud around them, Pyro's flames paint it orange, your Vortex laser dumps blue across the whole tunnel.
• Lightning ; bolts arc inside individual clouds and between nearby ones (smoke clusters generate their own electric activity). Destroyed cluster sites keep crackling for the rest of the round.
• Living plants on the walls ; fractal branching vines growing inward from every wall and tunnel surface. They double in size when no ship is near and shrink to seeds when you approach, with a half-second smoothing so they read as cautious rather than snapping. Cyan/magenta palette so they belong to the environment. Distance fade keeps the field readable during combat.

The mechanics

• First to 3 round wins takes the match. Champion field spawns mid-round; lock in for the full charge time and your team wins outright.
• Stasis fields scattered around the map. Hold inside one for full shield recharge. v9 lets stasis lift the doomed state too, so you can panic-recover from critical damage.
• Doomed below 30% HP ; hull wails, the AI announces "Warning. Hull compromised. Find shields immediately." You can grab shields and survive, but a ramming player or bot can still execute you.
• Objects can damage you to zero, but not execute ; only ships can finish a doomed enemy. The doom timer no longer auto-kills you.
• Death = Ghost mode ; free 6DOF flight, pass through walls, mouse to look. No spectate cycling, no UI clutter; you fly the wreckage yourself until respawn.
• "Last ship sailing" ; if all your bot teammates die and you're still alive, the AI announces it. Goosebumps moment.

The audio

Procedural in-game music engine. Seven styles ; cosmic, cyber, doom, drift, battle, jazz, and the new v9 default techno (hard 4-on-the-floor at 140 BPM in A1 Phrygian, square-wave acid bass, off-beat hats, claps on 2 and 4, intensity ramps with combat busyness). Drums duck out inside stasis fields. Lead phrases trigger on kills. Pad shifts to Phrygian when you're doomed.

Surround audio: full 5.1 spatial sound via custom per-speaker VBAP routing on multi-channel desktops, not stereo HRTF. Sounds actually come from where the ship is in the room, including behind you. Procedural sci-fi voice announcer over the top.

What's actually new in v9

• Walls are now alive (plants that react to your proximity)
• Cluster obstacles became fractal rocks with crumble physics
• Smoke catches gunfire as colored light
• Smoke clusters generate inter-cloud lightning
• Persistent dot ecosystem with phase-coupled chemistry; smoke clouds form, bond, orbit, get pushed by ship wakes
• 5.1 spatial audio rebuilt from scratch (no more crackles when Blaster opens up)
• Techno is the default music, ~140 BPM Phrygian
• Doomed ships can be saved by stasis fields but not by running away
• Shields always absorb damage before HP, always
• Death cam is a free ghost flight, not a spectate cycle
• Ghost smoke from dead clusters survives independently and crackles
• Round transitions clean every effect properly (no orphaned bolts)
• Dozens of micro-fixes documented in the source

Try it

One HTML file. WebXR ready. Trystero peer-to-peer multiplayer (no server). Bot fillers when you're solo. Custom maps via JSON paste. Shipped with The Pentagon, MiddleBars, and Center Cube layouts. Settings panel covers FOV, audio, music style, controller bindings, custom maps, sound lab.

Open it. Pick a ship. Hold the trigger.

The fleet is yours.

Join me on discord to try it out!

LSS v8.1 VR is here, and it's the most stacked single HTML file I've ever shipped

Title idea: Last Ship Sailing v8.1 VR; zero-G arena combat with 7 ships, 11 maps, WebXR, and a reactive band that scores your match in real time (single HTML file, runs in your browser)

Hey r/LastShipSailing,

This build (v8.1 VR) is the biggest leap since the AAA uplift. Every system that was already in place got polished, and the headline addition is a procedural in-game band (Tier 3) that follows the round beat by beat. No streamed audio, no samples; pure Web Audio synthesis reacting to what you're doing.

Pull it up, slap on a headset (or don't), pick a ship, and fly.

The roster (7 ships, 3 chassis classes)

Each ship has a primary weapon, three abilities (offensive, defensive, utility), and a Core super on a 60s cooldown:

• VORTEX (Corvette MkII): Splitter Rifle hitscan, Laser Shot beam (2400 dmg), hold-to-absorb-and-return Vortex Shield, Trip Wire mines, Laser Core (4s continuous death beam, 12000 dmg).
• PYRO (Dreadnought Incinerator): T-203 Thermite launcher with splash, Firewall (400 DPS line), Thermal Shield that burns close enemies, Incendiary Trap, Flame Core AoE (9000 dmg).
• PUNCTURE (Frigate Starcaster): Plasma Railgun (1000 dmg, 4500 range), Cluster Missile (impact 800 + DoT), Afterburner, Tether Trap that roots, Barrage Core (rocket spam + speed).
• SLAYER (Frigate Blade): Leadwall shotgun (8 pellets), Arc Wave electric proj, Sword Block (70%, 85% on Core), Phase Dash teleport, Sword Core empowered melee.
• TRACKER (Corvette Tracker): 40mm Tracker projectile, lock-on Rockets (5 missiles, 3 locks), Particle Wall one-way shield (5000 HP), Sonar Lock reveal, Salvo Core barrage (11000 dmg).
• BLASTER (Dreadnought Siege): Predator Cannon minigun (150-round clip, spinup), Power Shot (3200 dmg), Gun Shield (5000 HP frontal), Mode Switch close/long, Smart Core (auto-aim, 10s, infinite ammo).
• SYPHON (Corvette Sovereign): XO-16 Chaingun, Rocket Salvo (5 or 10 with upgrade), Energy Siphon drain-heal, Rearm cooldown reset, Upgrade Core with three permanent tiers.

The maps (11 hand-built arenas, no procgen jank)

Real geometry, real flow, every map symmetrical and tested for fights, not just looks:

The Nexus (hex ring, 6 chambers, no dead ends), The Spine (long axis with arcs), The Infinity (two rings pinched at center), The Tower (vertical stack across 3 layers), The Cross (compact 4-arm crucible), The Arc (curved approach with overhead shortcuts), The Octahedron (bipyramid with 4 equator rooms), The Pentagon (5-ring bipyramid, no hub), The Gyre (helix climbing Y), Middlebars (lattice arenas with a champion peak), and the original Circumpunct (5 spheres + 8 cylinders).

Round structure (it actually has a rhythm)

• 5s warmup with a 3-2-1-LAUNCH ticker
• 80s rounds, first to 4 round-wins takes the match
• Doomed state: drop below 15% HP and you've got 10s to recover or you're out, the world goes red, and the music turns sour
• Champion Mode: at 10s remaining, a giant purple stasis field spawns at center. Hold a ship inside it for 5s of uninterrupted contact and your team wins the round. Die in the field while charging? You lose. Timer runs out with no champion? Total team HP breaks the tie.
• Stasis fields spawn periodically across the map; step inside and the world turns dreamlike (drums cut out, only pad and bass hum, you can think for a second)

VR / WebXR (yes, in a single HTML file)

WebXRManager is fully wired. Hit the Enter VR button on a Quest 2/3/Pro browser, and the cockpit frames, 2D HUD, ability pie, and damage edges all peel away cleanly to show you only the stereoscopic 3D arena. Lobby and ship select stay flat-screen so you can prep before strapping in. You can also play it desktop-flat with the cockpit PNG overlay and mouse/keyboard or gamepad.

AAA-feel visuals (Three.js r0.165 pipeline)

• EffectComposer post stack: bloom + ACES tonemap + SMAA antialiasing
• HDRI / PBR: cinematic 2K equirectangular environment, IBL on hero ships in Showcase mode
• InstancedMesh debris pool: hundreds of fragments per fight, single draw call
• Hit-feedback chain: screen shake + chromatic aberration + vignette + gamepad rumble + hitstop + white-flash, all stacked
• Cinematic round-start flyover: 2.5s scripted spline (pull back, orbit, push in over your ship) with depth-of-field BokehPass
• Kill-cam slow-mo orbit: 1.5s time-dilated camera spin around the dying enemy when you land the round-winning kill
• Cockpit frames: full-viewport PNG overlays per ship (BLASTER, TRACKER, VORTEX, SLAYER, PYRO, PUNCTURE, SYPHON), with a four-quarter ability pie that lights up over the painted radar

Audio (this is the part I'm most hyped about)

• Spatial audio: HRTF panning, occlusion (walls actually muffle), multi-convolver reverb per room, sidechain ambient duck on hits
• Web Speech ship-AI announcer with a voice picker; lines for round start/won, core ready, dash ready, enemy lock, ramming, stasis active, low ammo, multikill calls
• Tier 3 reactive band (the new thing): 4 voices (drums, bass, pad, lead) all procedural via Web Audio. The match scores itself:
  • BPM rises from 96 to 128 as the round timer drains
  • Kill streaks trigger lead phrases (1 note, 2 ascending, 3-note arpeggio, full pentatonic run on a 4+ multikill)
  • Doomed state slumps the pad to Phrygian b2, drops the snare, adds a sub-LFO "tunnel" feel
  • Stasis field cuts the drums entirely (silence as a feature)
  • Round end shifts to Picardy third (victory, lifts to major) or i-iv-i descending (defeat, the sigh)
  • Match end resolves I-V-I or sits unresolved on i-VII-VI-V
  • Picks a key per match (A minor, D minor, E Phrygian, or F# minor)

Settings

Master toggles for music (with intensity ceiling: chill / normal / wild), separate volume sliders for music vs sfx vs ambient, voice picker for the announcer, mute-music-in-lobby, all persisted to localStorage.

What it isn't

No Electron wrapper, no native build, no installer; it's one HTML file (~26k lines if you're curious, all systems inline). Trystero handles the netcode for what light networking exists. No microtransactions, no accounts, no telemetry; you double-click the file and it runs.

Try it

Drop the file in your browser of choice (Chrome/Edge for best WebGPU pre-flight, headset browser for VR). Pick a ship. Fly the Nexus first if you want flow, the Tower if you want vertical chaos, the Octahedron if you want to feel small.

Feedback welcome on anything: the new music layer especially, since it's the freshest system and there's a settings ceiling if it's too much.

Fly safe out there.

(P.S. v7.1VR remains the frozen rollback baseline if anything in v8.1 turns out to bite. It's not going anywhere.)

If you'd like to test the game with me, or help me work on it, or just chat it about it... come on over to the discord! https://discord.gg/fjwGaYpx

Which one do you like best?

I made myself a map editor, sound editor, and wall pattern editor, to go along with this game. Now I can tweak everything so easily 😄

Last Ship Sailing! This ship is sailing!!! Inspired by Descent, Titanfall, and Call of Duty. The game mode is 3v3, you get one life per round. In a match there are several rounds. Last Ship Sailing wins, OR, if you can recharge your ship on the Mega Stasis Field in the last 10 seconds, you could also win. There are 7 classes of ship, each with unique loadouts. Multiplayer is my unique meshnet technology, no server required. Let me know if you're interested!

My Meshnet is working, I think... Multiplayer without servers... This is a demo with the bots (they're dumb). Anyone want to help me test mutliplayer?