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Comment by someweirdperson | Hacker News Reader

First couple of free play (random I guess) levels were easy, then I ended up with one where there was insufficient fuel to complete it. It might be solvable by going balistic through some section, but I lost patiens, then couldn't find the random id for a retry later.

Highscores for the daily (and yesterdaily to check where you ended up) would be nice.

On mobile it shows controls in lower left/right corners, which is a little inconvenient. Luckily, touching anywhere on the left/right side of the screen works.

Possibility to zoom out would be nice, to avoid the possibility to fly into a dead end.

Also, I'm somewhat confused. This is HN and noone has yet posted some js that calculates/plays automatically? Iirc that was the case for the NASA docking simulator. Or did I dream this up?

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Thanks for the feedback! The level generation probably still needs tuning to avoid those kinds of levels. Daily leaderboard is a great idea!

Reading the other comments I tried the tutorial (who plays tutorials?!). They did feel faster (and thus relatively more difficult) than the random levels. Is inertia and gravity the same on all levels?

And tutorials 8 and 9... they are intended for someone to implement automation, aren't they?

Inertia and gravity are the same on all the levels. I don't know why it would feel different... Yes, levels 8 and 9 are meant to be more challenging. you might encounter obstacles like that in the random levels. Each level of the tutorial is meant to give you practice tackling different kinds of obstacles. I would love to see what automatic inputs can do for some of these levels :)

If its not the physics then its the simulation. Free play is a lot slower than the tutorials, time feels like it is running at 50% speed. Android tablet, firefox.

oh I see, yes it could be performance-related. I will need to decouple the game update loop from the rendering loop. Will do soon.

Thank you for applying patches from the user feedback loop (phun)

I was able to manually succeed on level 8, but I have no idea how it's possible to accomplish level 9. I can't figure any way to get enough inertia or upward thrust to escape the narrow spot once I'm most of the way through it.

EDIT: and... literally on my next attempt, I made it through the narrows. It's possible.

EDIT #2: and... made it. >:D

How do you implement a leaderboard that can’t be spoofed with REST POST calls from curl or postman?(Genuine question for my own JavaScript game) doesn’t need to be perfect just a barrier that makes it painful to spoof easily

Include the complete inputs for the solution, and verify on upload.

Then don't accept dupes and make the leaders winning flights watchable.

This requires deterministic physics.

Save the random seed

Yes this is what I'm thinking. The replay links already include the full input. I would then just have to verify it and show the link for each entry. For example this is my flight just now for today's daily with a time of 12.97s: https://rocket-drone.lol/?level=5550594399&replay=IIgmIUWAJB...

Ooooh, replays already exist. I didn't notice the button.

https://rocket-drone.lol/?level=9&replay=IIiKIUWARAOBhYBzAQg...

nice one!

sub-10s. feels like cheating with slowed reality of course.

https://rocket-drone.lol/?level=5550594399&replay=IIhSIUWBhB...

a little downward boost at the beginning, trading away some health for time, love it!

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