Four bases, told apart by the scheme their pad is drawn in, so "the cyan
one" is a thing a person can say and a thing the machine already knows.
Yellow is missing on purpose: it is the lander, and a base the same colour
as the thing landing on it would be a poor joke.
Land empty at a base and it loads cargo for the base ACROSS THE MOON, two
along - so the pairs are cyan with red and green with blue, and the
wrapping surface is a route rather than scenery. Land carrying at the
right one and it takes the cargo and pays eighty units of fuel. Land at
the wrong one and nothing happens, which is why the destination will want
to be on the screen.
A LANDING NO LONGER ENDS THE RUN. The lander rests where it is, exactly on
the surface with both speeds zeroed, until the throttle opens again -
which is the only way to stop being landed. Gravity does not pull on
something already sitting down, and a base does not hand out cargo sixty
times a second to a lander parked on it.
The pad array holds the base's number plus one rather than a flag. Nought
still means no pad, so it is still one lookup, and a flag would have to be
followed by "and which of the four" - the same walk done twice for an
answer already in hand.
Pads are eight columns rather than four. Four was 32 pixels in a moon 1024
round, which is a target somebody flying by feel misses over and over.
WHAT IS NOT COVERED, and why: the delivery and wrong-base paths need a
lander flown from one base to another, and hand-authoring a recorded pad
input that hits an eight column pad across a 128 column moon is a piloting
exercise rather than a correctness one. Several attempts got within two
columns. Loading, crashing, landing off a pad and running dry are all
covered; delivery is built and flown by hand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
A random walk does not leave flat ground and a lander wants some. Four
pads are cut into the moon after it is generated, each four columns
levelled to whatever height its first column happened to have - so they
sit in the landscape rather than on a shelf above it. The moon decides
where they are; this only decides that they are flat.
Searching for flat spots was the alternative and it can fail, which means
a fallback that carves anyway - the carving, plus a search nobody needed.
They are marked by an ATTRIBUTE and not a tile of their own, which costs
no art at all: a nibble is added to every index in a tile, so one solid
block is grey moon or a cyan pad depending on the byte beside it.
Which columns are pads is an array, because asking has to be one lookup.
Four comparisons per column per row is 12,800 of them for one screen, and
the landing verdict asks the same question again.
THE LANDER STARTS ABOVE ONE, because that is where a porter's day begins.
Starting in the middle of nowhere meant a straight descent landed in the
middle of nowhere, which is a fine thing to be able to do and a poor thing
to have to.
That change cost the crash test its teeth, and the way it did is worth
keeping. It held nothing at all and let the lander fall - and a short drop
onto the high ground of the base you started above is survivable, which is
correct, and left the test saying nothing. It holds Right now: lateral
speed has no limit and nothing slows it, so a slide always ends badly
however the rest is tuned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
A controller does not always arrive on pad nought. The front end hands out
the numbers the host gave it, so a game that reads only the first one
works on the machine it was written on and silently does nothing on the
next - which is the shape of "the pad is detected, Pad shows it, and the
game ignores it".
Four reads and three ORs. One person flies this and which socket they
plugged into is not a thing they should have to know. Presence is any of
the four bits rather than the low one, for the same reason.
The manifest's pad column takes several fixtures now, comma separated, and
they fill the pads in turn. So cosmosLanderPadOne holds nothing on pad
nought and flies the whole landing on pad one - a test that fails on the
version of this program that shipped an hour ago.
Also confirmed while looking: raylib 6 does refresh which gamepads are
ready every frame in PollInputEvents, so a hot-plugged pad should be seen.
Whatever is stopping that is above us and worth a separate look.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5