|>
       _|_            how this is built
  ____/___\____     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  \  o  o  o  /   .:-=+#  one ray per character
~~~\_________/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How this harbor is built

• Renderer. Every frame casts one ray per character cell from your eye. Buildings, the dock and the hull are convex solids made of planes; masts, barrels, trees and the lighthouse are true cones with smooth normals. The sea is a height field of travelling waves, ray marched per cell; the ship and the boats ride it.
• Light. It is night: lamps, lit windows, the lantern and the beacon light what is near them, fall off with distance and cast shadows from the solids around them; the lighthouse beam sweeps; the moon gives a dim fill. The sea shows Fresnel reflection, moon and lamp highlights and foam. Fog and contact shadows add depth.
• Characters. Brightness picks a glyph from the density ramp .`',:;~-=+*#%@▒▓█ and one of eight colour levels per material; an edge glyph (| - / \ _) is drawn wherever one surface meets a farther one.
• Frame loop. requestAnimationFrame moves you, the sea and the ship and redraws the grid on a canvas, one fill per run of one colour. The grid adapts to the frame time: slow devices drop the shadow rays, then get larger glyphs (fewer cells); fast ones get a finer grid. With reduced motion the scene stands still and redraws only when you move.
• Controls. WASD or arrows walk and turn, R and F look up and down, the mouse looks around, Enter opens what you point at. On a phone the pad walks and a drag looks. The label floats beside what you point at, with a leader line in text.
• Mini map. M picks a point on the text map in the corner, M again fills the screen with it; arrows choose, Enter jumps there. On a phone, tap a point.
• Content. harbor/build.py builds the points of interest from the README's Docs table and the changelog, so the page follows Crewship as it changes.
• Deploy. harbor/ is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no dependencies. A GitHub Actions workflow builds it and deploys it to Cloudflare Workers static assets on every push to main and on each release; nothing in harbor/ ever reaches a Crewship host or image.

The source on GitHub · Back to the harbor