Comment by cpcallen
5 hours ago
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!
You have elucidated a real gap in the marketplace: physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.
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/
Unfortunately it doesn't let you skip planets.
It's still pretty far physically accurate because there is infinite acceleration the moment a ship reaches the target orbit.
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I like this version of the game more, keep at it!
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.
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/
Not really. Flight of Nova fills that gap, and I think I know how I'm going to spend this afternoon now.
I don't think it has any expectation of being an astrophysics simulation. I mean, if the "spaceship" misses, it falls towards the "floor"...
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.