THE LONG SILENCE

A procedural space-exploration game that runs in a browser tab. WebGL2, no assets — every star, world, ring system, nebula and derelict is generated from a seed and shaded by hand-written GLSL.

npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173
npm run build      # static bundle in dist/

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The game

Forty thousand years ago nine hundred inhabited worlds inside an eighty light-year volume fell silent in four days. No debris, no radiation signature, no sign of violence. The Choir left their cities lit, their orbits tidy, their archives open — and seven instruments standing in seven systems.

You fly the survey vessel Pale Seeker. Chart systems, scan what you find, and attune to the Resonators; each one yields a Canto and pushes the drive a little further. All seven opens the Aperture.

Controls

Fold speed scales with distance from the nearest mass, so an approach decelerates itself and drops you out just clear of the surface. Interstellar transit is initiated from the star map and costs drive charge by distance.

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How it renders

Scale and precision. One world unit is one kilometre. Systems span millions of units while the ship is 0.1 units long, so the world uses a floating origin — the ship sits at (0,0,0) and everything else is positioned relative to it each frame — plus a logarithmic depth buffer. Custom ShaderMaterials opt into log depth by hand (LOGD_* chunks in src/gfx/glsl/noise.js); miss that and two concentric spheres z-fight into triangular confetti.

Planets are baked, not evaluated. Twenty-odd octaves of simplex per pixel per frame is not survivable on a phone, so each solid world is rendered once into a cubemap holding linear albedo in RGB and terrain height in A. The runtime shader is three texture taps for normals plus lighting. Cubemaps rather than equirectangular maps: no pole pinch, no seam. The nearest world get