Pixel Ops — 3D pixel-art engine sandbox

A browser sandbox for testing a "3D rendered as pixel art" RTS look, with two interchangeable renderers behind one simulation:

• raw WebGL2 back end with instanced batching (the default), no dependencies
• three.js back end (?r=three, legacy airfield sandbox only)

Low-poly units are rendered into a small buffer whose texel size is fixed in world units, then upscaled with nearest filtering, so zooming in makes the pixels chunkier while the camera rotates freely. No build step.

Screenshots

Run

npm start            # python3 -m http.server 8787
open http://localhost:8787               # WebGL2, the game renderer
open http://localhost:8787/?r=three      # legacy three.js back end (160 m airfield sandbox only)

By default the force builder opens over the 2 km Palm Valley map. Its map cards switch to Olive Gorge, Desert Crossing, Narva or Peninsula: the page reloads on the chosen map, keeps your loadout and remembers the map. Its Opponent row has the built-in CPU or a Llama commander. The Claude commanders are listed only while the engine panels are on, because they spend the API key the gateway holds. Then spend 1,500 points on squads (rifle, support, anti-tank, medic, marksman, engineer), vehicles (trucks, supply trucks, Humvees with Mk 19 grenade launchers, 8x8 APCs, M1 Abrams tanks, Chinook helicopters, AH-6M Little Bird gunships) and one doctrine (Mechanized, Air Assault, Light Infantry, Entrenched), or pick a preset. Your loadout is saved in the browser. The CPU reads it and counter-picks (never Air Assault, which pays for landing troops on undefended objectives and needs your hand), then a 25-minute Advance and Secure match starts: you command BLUFOR (tan) from the south-west corner against OPFOR (olive) in the north-east. Five locations (Outpost, Airfield, Village, Depot, Relay) are captured in order; holding the majority bleeds the enemy's tickets, losing a location costs 20, and capturing all five wins outright. Each side starts with 500 tickets; vehicle losses and infantry respawns drain them, and the first team at 0 loses. Infantry are worth keeping: two tickets a man, back in 45 seconds in squad waves. Men fire single aimed shots and short bursts, slower the further the target, and a hit is a casualty: killed, or down wounded where he fell, out of the fight, up again in 20 s if a squadmate stands by him out of fire (5 s for a medic), dead in two and a half minutes if nobody does. A move leaves the wounded behind. Squads have morale: casualties, fire kept on them and armour they cannot answer wear it down, and a squad goes shaken (aims worse), then pinned (flat, won't go toward the enemy), then broken (drops its orders, runs for cover and home, takes no order until it steadies); out of contact it recovers, faster near friends and at home. The CO's postures act on it: Press pushes pinned squads on at a cost, Hold the line and Pull back steady them. Men carry magazines (four for a rifle, four belts for a gun, three rockets) and change them with a pause; on the last one a man fires only at what is close, and dry he takes no target. Squads fill up in main base, beside a stopped supply truck for 4 supplies, or slowly at a FOB; the card says low ammo or out of ammo. Left-drag to select squads, right-click to move them, click an enemy to attack-move, click the minimap to jump the camera, and keep zooming out for the strategic view. A plain move walks through fire: infantry on the way only stop for an enemy inside 18 m. An attack-move to ground (Z then a click, Alt + right-click, or the Advance button then a tap) has them stop and fight whatever comes into their hold range on the way, then walk on when it is dead or gone; the unit card says Advancing. Hold fire (O or the button) is the ambush: the squad takes no target and fires no shot, so nothing gives it away, until an enemy comes within 20 m of one of its men or it is fired on, when the whole squad opens up (a toast says so); press again to fire at will. A man back from a respawn holds fire with his squad. The two orders are opposites: an attack-move lifts hold fire, and hold fire turns an attack-move under way into a plain move.

Riflemen carry two hand grenades each. A man within 35 m who is behind cover, dug in, in a thicket, against a building or standing with two others gets one lobbed at him, bursting over 4 m on his side of the wall, one throw a squad every four seconds and none with a friend close to him, so a squad that sits behind a wall at rifle range pays for it. Grenades come back with a respawn, in the main base, or beside a stopped supply truck for 2 supplies a squad.

Your CO (the lobby's "Your CO" row, or ?hybrid=1; ?hybrid=haiku|sonnet|opus for a Claude commander on your own side) is a hybrid commander for your side: it plans and runs your squads as the CPU's does, and takes your orders. An order names who (a squad, everyone, or the fresh squads at base), what (hold, screen, grab, join the attack; or an intent for the whole plan: take a place, press, hold the line, bleed them, pull back, go quiet) and where, with quietly for hold fire; the engine carries it out at once and the CO plans around it, acknowledging it over the radio. A hold at a place that is not yours means go and take it; a place that cannot be taken yet is refused with the reason. A squad you move by hand is "in your hand" until you Rejoin it or it idles 90 s. The Command Wheel dials them: the CO button left of the minimap (or Q) opens a ring of pills round a hub, who, then what, then where, tapped or dragged through; the sentence builds in the bar and the order goes the moment it is complete. Three chips above the bar suggest orders from the state. "Here" takes a tap on the ground and is your own hand. The box under the bar takes the order in words, typed or dictated with the Mic: the Worker's /orders route reads it with Cloudflare's Clef model, every squad, verb and place an option with a probability, and the wheel sends it, or shows its reading for a tap when it is unsure, a sentence names nobody, or it carries two orders. The CO answers over the radio in the feed: Roger to each order, a refusal with its reason, the place when it falls, and what a squad is doing instead when it hides or gathers; Plan? in the bar asks it what it is doing, and its own chips, marked CO, offer to release a squad whose order has it stuck or to rejoin one left idle in your hand. Vehicles are on the wheel too: an APC, truck, Humvee or helicopter can Move to a place or Here, Hold there, go Home (a supply truck goes to refill) or Rejoin; a vehicle you order is in your hand until Rejoin, and "move the supply truck to the Depot" reads the same way in words.

Desert Crossing (?map=desert1km) was built to be fair to both sides: the Village sits on the strip of land between two parallel rivers, each bridged where the road crosses it and fordable further out, and the village is laid out in mirrored pairs along the road, so both commanders cross water to reach the centre and meet the same cover when they get there.

?loadout=air|mechanized|light|defensive|armoured|balanced skips the builder, ?cpuloadout=<preset> fixes the CPU's pick, ?cpu=both lets the CPU play both sides, ?cpu=none disables it, ?mode=skirmish drops the objectives, and ?sandbox=1 restores the free-roam airfield with no combat.

Maps. The game plays Palm Valley by default, a 2 km map mirrored about a river: three lanes, each side's home row of three places capturable from the start, a place capturable from any held neighbour, four of seven for the majority. The town lane crosses by a footbridge only infantry can use, the road lane by the one vehicle bridge, the open lane by a ford units wade at half speed. Each side's row is a walled town (Kasbah, Souk), a fuel depot (Depot, Pumps) and a quarry beside a flooded pit (Quarry, Mine); hesco walls and sandbags guard both ends of the bridge. Each place lists sandbag positions covering its approaches, and the CPU digs in at the ones facing the enemy. ?map=desert1km plays Desert Crossing, the first 1 km map (five places in a line; it favours the north-east base).

?map=gorge plays Olive Gorge, 1.2 km, mirrored about a river like Palm Valley and built to be the map where the ticket pool decides (plan in docs/GAME_PLAN.md, "Olive Gorge plan"): 20 minutes, 300 tickets, eight squads on 1,200 points (a bigger saved force is trimmed to fit, rifle squads first, and the CPU's pick the same). A river in a gorge cuts a Mediterranean plateau in two, and an old hill town stands on both rims joined by one stone bridge, the Old Bridge, the centre place; the gorge opens into a shallow basin to the west where a ford crosses it (everyone wades), and a timber footbridge crosses it to the east by the water mill, infantry only, so the river is crossed three ways and a trap row at each end of the bridge and on the ford's banks closes it to armour. Each side's home row is a walled monastery on an olive-terraced knoll (Monastery, Convent: six terraces a truck can climb, dry-stone walls along every other step) and an olive mill among its groves (Olive Mill, Winery); each home place links to the Old Bridge, the monasteries to each other over the footbridge and the mills through the ford, three of five for the majority. Maquis thickets on the hillsides hide a squad as the Hollow's woods do.

?map=narva3km plays Narva, a 3 km map of the Estonia-Russia border city (plan in docs/GAME_PLAN.md). Its city kit and landmarks follow the user's voxel references: Soviet panel blocks of five and nine storeys, garage rows, pine and birch, station yards with wagons, a blue truss railway bridge, Balti's banded chimneys, Hermann Castle, Ivangorod Fortress, the Kreenholm mills, the Town Hall, both railway stations and the hydro station (dam, hall, switchyard). The Narva River runs south to north from the reservoir: armour crosses on the dam, the railway bridge and the Friendship Bridge, infantry also at Kreenholm's dry falls. BLUFOR holds the Narva bank (Hermann Castle, Narva Station, Balti Plant), OPFOR the Ivangorod bank (Ivangorod Fortress, Ivangorod Station, Narva HES), and the three river places (Friendship Bridge, Rail Bridge, Kreenholm) sit on the crossings; five of nine for the majority. North is up, as on a real map.

?map=peninsula plays Peninsula (blockout; plan at https://claude.ai/artifact/6ELRURFGdPwxMJDvSNVuKN), a 1.2 km Invasion map and the only mode it offers. A rocky peninsula runs north into the sea, cut off from the mainland by a canal across its neck with one bridge. The attacker comes from the sea: its main base is an assault ship off the west coast, an LHD with its island to starboard and its well dock open at the stern. Its helicopters fly from the flight deck. Its APCs and supply trucks are amphibious: they lie at moorings off the stern and swim ashore under your orders (3.6 m/s afloat, slower still for the carrier), landing wherever the shore is gentle enough to drive up, and the carrier swims home to fill up. A squad waiting in the well dock, or aboard a craft that hasn't cast off, can be put into an APC lying alongside: select it, press Load and click the APC (the CPU does the same, so its first AV swims in with a squad). Infantry and tanks wait in the well dock and go ashore in three landing craft that run fixed lanes to the beach you pick on the unit strip ("Land at ..."); they cast off one at a time, run abreast 18 m apart and beach side by side. North Cove takes infantry only, so vehicles go to the nearest beach that takes them. A CPU attacker picks the beach nearest the place it wants, avoiding beaches where it has seen defenders. Craft can be shot, and a sunk one takes its load with it; it is replaced a minute later. A beach whose place the attacker holds refills supply trucks. With none held, a truck waiting on the beach rides a craft back to the ship and comes out full. The defender's base is on the mainland, so everything it sends crosses the bridge.

?map=hollow plays The Hollow, 500 m, infantry only, Advance and Secure only, 280 tickets and a 12-minute clock. Two wooded ridges run north to south with a gully between them: a hamlet on the floor, a clearing on each crest, a ford and a mill on the floor near either end. The woods are thickets: they block sight like a wall and infantry push through them at half pace, so a squad at a wood's edge is on nobody's map until it fires or an enemy walks into it, and the draws cut into the flanks are dead ground between. Each side's clearing and floor place touch its base and the Hamlet links all four, so holding your two and the Hamlet bleeds the enemy, and taking all five means taking two places under their base. The map is point-symmetric through its centre: every wood and wall on one side is the other's turned round, and the walk from either base to the Hamlet is 308 m. Hold fire and attack-move are the orders here, and the CPU's holding squads hold fire too. No vehicles: the force builder hides them and turns anti-tank and engineer squads into rifles, every doctrine fields nine squads, and the CPU brings Light Infantry. Since grenades the pool is 280: in 27 seeded CPU mirror matches 16 ran to the clock with a median margin of 56, the rest ended by tickets after minute 10, and the bases split 9 to 18, a lean still being watched.

?map=hilltop plays Hilltop Farm, 500 m, infantry only, the Hold mode only: base defence. A farm on a flat knoll at the centre, fields falling away on every side, a lane in from the north and a track from the east, both hedged, two copses the attackers come through, a pond to the south. The player's HQ (a FOB) and a supply dump stand in the farmyard; the force is six squads, two of them engineer-led (the Garrison preset, offered on arrival), and three minutes of build phase come before the first wave. The build bar at the top left places sandbags, guns and tank traps: pick a tile, a footprint follows the mouse (or sits where you last tapped) green where it may go and red with the reason, R and Shift+R turn it, a click or Place drops it, and the nearest free engineer walks over and builds it from the supply dump beside the HQ (300 to start, 40 more for each wave held, never refilled, shown in the reinforcements panel and on the dump's card; there is no truck to drive away or lose). Queued builds show as chips that cancel them. Two works are the base's own: a wall run (16 supplies, 14 s), 6 m of gabions 1.8 m high laid across the facing, which blocks sight and movement for both sides until mortar bombs or cannon fire bring it down (150 hit points: an APC at 60 m needs about half a minute, bullets only chip it), leaving a heap of rubble and an open way; runs may touch end to end, so leave a gap as the gate. And a platform (30 supplies, 20 s), a 6 by 4 m scaffold deck 3 m up with a bag parapet along the front and a ladder at the back: right-click or tap it with soldiers selected and four climb up (a second each way) and stand on its slots, seeing and shooting over the walls and hedges, less sheltered than men behind bags on the ground. The attackers answer walls: when their lead squad cannot reach the HQ on foot, or only by a long way round, their APCs (and any mortar they man) are given the run nearest the way in as a target and shoot at it until it is down. An engineer standing at a run or a platform takes it down.

Cliffs ring the coast except at three landings:

• West Beach: sand, open to vehicles.
• North Cove: under the cliffs, infantry only.
• The harbour quay on the east coast.

The three landing places (Village, Lighthouse, Harbour) are the attacker's home places, so it can take any of them first. Radar Hill is in the middle, and the Bridgehead guards the bridge. Whichever side you pick, the beach side attacks: defending, or a balance run's ?swap=1, plays the map from the mainland.

Squad formations. A squad walks and stands in a wedge: its leader at the point and the others back along two arms, neighbours 2.4 m apart (inside first aid's reach, so a man down in his place still has a mate beside him). On the move each wing man walks beside the squad's route wherever the walking grid has room for him. Where it has not, on a footbridge or in a lane between houses, he falls in on the route itself, and the squad goes through in single file two metres a man and opens out again beyond. A wing man ahead of his place slows and the leader eases off for one left behind, so the wedge holds round corners. Where the squad stops the wedge faces the enemy it knows of, or the way it came when it knows of none, and the men look that way. A squad at rest that sees an enemy coming from a flank turns its wedge to face him before the shooting starts; a squad holding fire, in sandbags or standing by a wounded man stays as it is. A man back from a respawn walks to a free place in the wedge. Squads sent together stop 9 m apart, a wedge being 6 m across.

Fog of war. Your side sees what its units see: soldiers 120 m, APCs 160 m, tanks 210 m, trucks 100 m, a landed helicopter 120 m and one in the air 250 m (over buildings), FOBs and sandbag positions 100 m. Hills and buildings block sight, so the ground behind them stays dark. Enemies out of sight are not drawn, on the map or the minimap, and carry no name tag; where one was last seen a red outline fades out over 30 s. A unit that fires shows to the side it shoots at for 5 s, and whatever it shoots at is seen too. Enemy FOBs, sandbag positions and rally points stay on the map once seen; objectives and capture progress always show, and the enemy's radio, FOB and dig-in news stays out of your feed. Fog shading in the right panel (or ?fogshade=0) drops the darkening and keeps only the hidden enemies. With the CPU on both sides the fog is off; ?fog=1 shows team 0's view anyway, and ?fog=0 turns fog of war off for everyone. The CPU plays by the same rules: it plans with what its side sees and where it last saw the rest, takes a place you hold that it has not looked at for half a minute to be defended by about a squad, and knows a place of its own is under attack when its capture bar shows it (contested or draining).

Any static server works (ES modules can't load over file://). three.js comes from jsDelivr via an import map; the WebGL2 back end loads nothing external. The stats panel has a link that switches renderer while keeping the view.

Logistics and air. Supply trucks carry 100 supplies and refill inside your main base. One with too little for any job (under 12), standing idle outside base and feeding no build, drives home on its own, fills up and comes back to where it stood; V (or the Refill tile) sends the selected trucks on that trip at any time, and a move order on the way calls it off. The CPU sends its own home the same way and uses them again once full; they drive with the canvas sides rolled up over the load, where a plain truck keeps them down. Select an engineer squad standing within 20 m of a supply truck and press B (or the Build FOB button) to raise a forward operating base in 20 s (10 s under Entrenched); each FOB kit in your loadout allows one FOB. A FOB is a spawn point: fallen infantry come back at whichever spawn is nearest their squad, or nearest where they fell once the whole squad is down (main base, a FOB, the squad's rally point, beside an idle helicopter under Air Assault or a parked troop truck under Light Infantry, never one with an enemy within 30 m); the reinforcements panel can force main base, a helicopter or a truck.

FOB emplacements. Within 50 m of one of your FOBs, an engineer beside a supply truck builds a gun where he stands, facing the enemy's base (or where the mode says the threat comes from: on Hilltop Farm the nearer of the two spawns, and sandbag positions and tank-trap rows face the same way): a heavy machine gun (G, 20 supplies, 12 s; 120 m, long bursts that pin infantry), an anti-tank launcher (J, 30 supplies, 15 s; a guided missile out to 200 m, three hits kill an APC) or a mortar (K, 40 supplies, 18 s; it shells any enemy your side can see 40 to 400 m away, no line of sight needed, each shell bursting over 7 m; it fires at its tube's 52 degrees with the charge set for the range, 4 s in the air at 60 m and 10 s at 400 m). The gun swings on its mount to whatever its gunner is firing at and back to the front when he has nothing. Three to a FOB, 8 m apart, clear of the FOB and the road. Each is a gun in a ring of bags with one gunner's slot: select a squad and right-click (or tap) it to man it (one man takes the gun, the rest wait behind it), U to leave; unmanned it does nothing. It can be destroyed (250 hp, about three rockets) and costs 10 tickets when lost; once spotted it stays on the enemy's map. The CPU builds them at the FOB nearest its front (a machine gun first, then the launcher if it has seen your armour, else the mortar) and crews them with one garrison squad, a man to a gun.

Tank traps. An engineer beside a supply truck presses X (or Tank traps) to lay a row of steel hedgehogs, 15 m, across the road he stands on (centred on it; off a road, across the way to the enemy's base), 20 supplies and 10 s. They stop every vehicle, both sides', and infantry walk between them: close a bridge or a ford and armour goes the long way round (route-finding tries the next crossing). Any engineer standing at a row clears it with X in 8 s. Up to six rows a side. The CPU lays them at the crossings its map lists (chokes) on its side, where enemy armour still alive has come within 200 m in the last two minutes, and not on its own way forward (an LLM commander can also order them), and clears the enemy's near the place it pushes for and its own when they are in its way.

Rally points. Select a squad and press T (or the Rally button) to drop its rally point where its leader stands, after Squad's rallies scaled to this map: it needs a squadmate within 8 m, can't go down with an enemy within 30 m (trying restarts the cooldown) or within 120 m of the enemy main, and a squad can place one every 60 s, moving the old one. Squadmates whose nearest spawn is the rally, or the whole squad once it is wiped out, come back there on the rally's 30 s wave if they have been down at least 10 s, still 1 ticket each. Any enemy within 18 m burns it. Enemy armour within 100 m of a rally doesn't burn it but stops it being used: until the armour leaves, its men come back at the next spawn (a FOB or main) instead, and no rally can be dropped there. The CPU drops rallies once its squads reach the area they were sent to, and moves one that enemy armour sits on, so expect to hunt them. Destroying a FOB radio costs its owner 40 tickets, so the CPU raids yours and defends its own.

Transport. Helicopters and trucks carry eight soldiers (two squads), an APC four (one squad); a supply truck carries cargo, not troops. With infantry selected, press L (or the Load button) and click or tap a friendly helicopter, truck or APC, or right-click it (on a touch screen, hold on it; a plain tap on a vehicle selects it). Infantry and a vehicle selected together board at once on L. After Load the vehicle becomes the selection, ready to drive. The soldiers walk to it (a ground vehicle's tail) and get in once it has stopped or landed, and anyone past the seats stays behind. Only the men within 60 m of the squad member nearest the vehicle go: a squad standing together all walk over, while a man back from a respawn at the base gets into a vehicle there alone and his squadmates at the front keep their orders (Load used to march the whole squad back). They stay aboard however often the vehicle stops, until U (or the Unload button) lets them out, stopping a ground vehicle where it is. A helicopter you send somewhere does not land: it circles there (30 m out, 8 m/s), its door gun working on everything in reach, until U (Land and unload, or Land when empty) puts it down and lets the passengers out. It sets down only on dry ground or a deck with nothing within 3 m (no building, wall, tree or trap, never the water): where it is if it may, else at the nearest such spot within 60 m, flying on to it; with none it hovers, the roster says "No room to land", and the next order moves it on. Helicopters cruise at 14 to 22 m, over the panel blocks, the ship's island and the lighthouse. The AH-6M Little Bird is a gunship with no seats: a seven-shot rocket pod to port that bursts over 5 m and a .50 gatling to starboard, circling like the Chinook but faster (20 m/s), and it never lands after take-off; send it home and it hovers over your base, where the pod is refilled in half a minute and the hull patched up. The CPU flies it in sorties against knots of infantry and brings it home when the pod is empty or it is hurt. The Gunships preset fields two under Air Assault, and the CPU answers a Little Bird with Defensive's two anti-tank squads. The Humvee is the ground gunship: truck speed, 200 hp (two rockets), three seats, and an Mk 19 that lobs bursts of four grenades to 130 m, each bursting over 4.5 m, to wound and pin infantry from outside their reach. Its belt of 48 counts down a round at a time; parked at the main base it refills in half a minute, and a supply truck stopped beside it swaps the belt for 10 supplies once it is half spent. Light Infantry fields one in place of its truck (parked, it is the doctrine's forward spawn too), the Motorised preset two, and the CPU answers two with Defensive. The CPU's own rides still drop their squad where the vehicle stops or lands. A truck or APC destroyed with troops aboard throws them out hurt; a helicopter shot down in the air takes them with it. The CPU uses a troop truck to ferry two squads from around base toward the attack, or toward the place it holds when it has none, stopping 120 m short. Its Humvee stands 120 m off the nearest knot of enemy infantry at the front, backs away from anything inside 95 m and from armour, parks short of a quiet front (a Light Infantry spawn), and drives home to rearm when its belt is nearly out. Under Light Infantry the truck then stays parked at the drop as the doctrine's forward spawn, driving home when enemies come within 40 m or armour within 120 m and moving up when the front shifts more than 250 m, and an APC leaving base takes a squad with it; its helicopters fly anyone stranded at main base (waiting up to 15 s for a fuller load) to 70 m short, and under Air Assault one helicopter parks 130 m short of the objective, clear of enemies and armour, as a forward spawn, taking off when it is hit or threatened. A CPU helicopter with nothing to carry flies fire support: it hovers 40 m from the biggest knot of enemy infantry near the fight, broadside so a door gun (an M240: 80 m, 14-round bursts) bears, never within reach of an APC's autocannon and with at most one launcher within 150 m (anti-tank squads come for helicopters from that far), and goes home when it drops below 70%. A helicopter landed in its own main base is repaired by the ground crew (full in a minute), and an unguided rocket at a helicopter in the air hits a third as often as at a ground vehicle, or twice that when braced for it: the CPU sends an anti-tank squad at any enemy helicopter within 150 m of its squads (or 180 m of an anti-air post an LLM commander set, the job, whose squad answers only helicopters over its own place); the squad closes to 75 m and stands to fire, braced, and gives up once no other squad is under the helicopter (the hunter alone does not keep the hunt going). Hovering 60 m from such a squad, a helicopter went down in 20 to 54 s in five tries (two in five before, the others getting away at 225 to 288 hp). Its supply trucks pull back to base when enemy armour comes within 120 m. An engineer beside a supply truck can also throw up a (, 12 supplies, about 12 seconds, up to eight per side): a U of bags open to the rear with four firing slots, two against the front wall and one against each side. With infantry selected, right-click (or tap) a friendly position to it: up to four soldiers walk in through the back and take a slot each (the rest stay put), hold it, and face out over the bags. Manned, a soldier is about a third as likely to be hit from the front and sides (against a half behind any low cover) and takes half the suppression; through the open rear he has no protection. Any other order, or (the Leave position button), takes them out. A position never goes on a road, a bridge deck or the railway, so a crossing cannot be shut by one, and any engineer standing at a position clears it with in 8 s, the enemy's included (a CPU position on Narva's Rail Bridge once closed the deck to vehicles for the rest of the match). The CPU digs in the same way at the location it holds, up to three positions there (in front of the middle and on both flanks, off the road), preferably in a lull and after its FOB while it has a kit; it mans them, keeps the manning squads in place and still counts them toward its attack share. The CPU commander builds a FOB one hop behind its front and lifts squads toward distant objectives. Once a minute it has a small model (Cloudflare's Clef, through the Worker's ) read how the enemy has fought over the last 80 s, turtle, rusher, flanker, piecemeal or balanced, and answers with a persona: patient against a rusher, pressure against a turtle; a Claude commander sees the read in its digest. Between a remote commander's plans the same model watches the plan (the Worker's , every 8 s while something changes): is it working, which of our places is most threatened, should the attack be called off or one begin; two reads in a row against the plan ask the commander for a new one within seconds instead of the usual 20 to 60, at most once a minute, and the digest carries the read. It is cautious: squads close to about 35 m of a defended objective (12 m when the defenders stand in thickets, which hide a man beyond 15 m) and shoot from there, fall back when an enemy gets inside 22 m unless they hold the zone or clearly outnumber it, and its APCs keep a 70 m standoff (tanks 90 m), reversing away when something gets inside 50 m. Armour sent at a place it cannot drive to (an island or a footbridge), or whose standoff point falls in a river, supports from a spot it can reach on its own bank within its gun's reach, in sight of the place where there is one; an APC's drop-off point gets the same check. Squads an enemy APC or tank can see get behind the nearest building or hill out of its sight and stay there while it is about; anti-tank squads stalk it to rocket range instead, unless more than a squad of infantry or another APC or tank stands round it. An enemy APC near one of its squads draws the nearest anti-tank squad within 300 m, escorted armour excepted. Squads walking to hold, reserve, screen or grab a place go round known enemy positions when the way there passes within reach of their guns: by one of the CPU's own places or a neutral one, if that walk is no more than two and a half times as long.

M1 Abrams. The tank (380 points, 15% off under Mechanized; the Armoured preset brings one) carries a 120 mm gun that reaches 200 m, one round every five seconds: 220 damage to a vehicle, a dead soldier on a hit and suppression around every landing, behind 1,200 hit points. Explosive hits count by facing: 60% on the front plate, 125% on the sides and double from behind, so rockets kill it in five hits from the rear, eight from the side and seventeen from the front. A co-axial machine gun fires six-round bursts at infantry the turret is on (out to 90 m), and soldiers inside 60 m take priority over vehicles, since they carry the rockets. It costs 30 tickets when it dies and comes back after 150 seconds (105 under Mechanized). BLUFOR's is in tri-colour desert camo, OPFOR's in olive.

Utility commander. The CPU is commanded by a utility AI (src/game/ai/utility.js; ?ai=rules brings back the older built-in planner, which it beats 15-1 head to head): every plan tick it measures shared considerations (force ratio at each location, enemy armour that can see a point, ticket pressure from the last three minutes and the majority, time pressure, readiness, travel from the nearest spawn), scores the options of each decision from them and picks the best. It decides the attack target or none, the locations to hold, the attack share, posture, what the engineers build, helicopter lifts, whether to wait before attacking, and a job for every squad (assault, hold, reserve, screen, raid, escort), and says what it is doing on the radio. A bonus for the current choice that decays over a minute stops it dithering, and difficulty adds noise to the scores. ?persona=aggressive or patient changes its weights; ?ai=utility,rules sets each side separately for CPU-versus-CPU tests. It works in Advance and Secure and Invasion; other modes keep the built-in planner. With ?commander=1 (or the force builder's Opponent row) a fresh LLM plan takes precedence and the utility AI fills the gaps.

Game modes (picked in the force builder, or ?mode= with ?side=attack|defend):

• Advance & Secure: capture the five locations in order; majority bleed; take all to win.
• Random Advance & Secure: the match draws a chain of three to five places through the map's lattice, from one of your home places to one of the enemy's, with as many places on each side's half, and plays Advance & Secure along it; the other places are ground to cross, and under fog of war you see the route only as far as the first place you do not hold. The route differs by seed (?chain=A,B,C forces one); Palm Valley has 7 chains, Narva 9, Olive Gorge and the Hollow 4.
• Invasion: defenders start with every location and 400 tickets against the attackers' 650; attackers must take them all before the clock (20 minutes; Peninsula sets 24 with clock on the map), each capture costs the defenders 30 tickets.
• Destruction: three weapon caches hidden near the defenders' locations, one active at a time and revealed when attackers come close or after 90 s; destroying all three before the 20-minute clock wins, each costs the defenders 80 tickets.
• Territory Control: a hex grid over the map; capture only hexes touching your own; more hexes bleeds the enemy; 80% of the land wins outright.
• Skirmish: tickets only.
• Hold (Hilltop Farm only): base defence. The player owns the one place, the HQ, and has three minutes to build before eight waves of attackers come in at the map's edges every 90 s, each a little stronger (an APC from the fourth); dead attackers do not come back. The CPU wins by taking the HQ zone (an ordinary capture); the player wins at the 15-minute clock or by breaking every wave. Besides sandbags, guns and traps the player builds wall runs that shellfire breaches and platforms that four men see and shoot over the walls from. The lobby's CPU setting picks the wave table: easy gives four minutes to build, waves every 100 s, armour from the fifth and no mortars; normal three minutes, 90 s, an APC from the fourth and a mortar team from the fifth; hard two and a half minutes, 80 s, bigger waves, armour from the third and mortar teams from the fourth, two from the seventh. A mortar team is a tube set up in the fields 175 m out (in sight of a position at the farm's edge) with a squad beside it that crews it; it shells whatever the attackers see, and the walls when they are shut out. Each wave held brings 60, 40 or 30 supplies by setting, and the clock runs so the last wave lands with ninety seconds to take the HQ (17:10, 15:00, 13:20). A wave comes in on one side at a time, the sides taking turns, and the last three on both at once. Attackers walled out of the HQ stand 80 m off the run their guns are breaching and go in when it falls. The farm's ticket pool is 200 and every man lost costs one, so losses are the second way to lose: in headless runs a bare garrison under the built-in commander holds on easy with 250 to spare, scrapes through on normal with 1 to 45 left and loses by tickets on hard before the last wave, while the standard works (eight wall runs with a gate on each face, two platforms, two sandbag positions, a heavy machine gun and a mortar) hold normal with 76 to 109 left and hard about half the time. tools/hold-balance.mjs plays the mode headless at each setting with the base bare or with those works. The lobby's Opponent row gives the waves a commander: the built-in one, or Llama or Claude through the game's server, which reads the base's layout (every wall run with its facing, the platforms and who is up them, the guns) and the wave schedule from the digest and picks the side, the posture and the moment; your own CO, if you take one, reads the same. The debrief adds the waves held, the attackers killed, the works built, the walls breached and the supplies left; the field manual has a Base defence page and the hints follow the mode (the build phase, the first wave, no wall yet, a breach, an enemy mortar, low supplies); the radio calls a wave in and a breach, and the engineers can be heard hammering at a wall or a platform and a run coming down.

Capture rings. Every location wears a ring on the ground at its capture radius: the holder's colour (blue or red), solid while held and dashed in the taking side's colour while it is being captured, faint grey when nobody holds it, drawn over anything in the way so a courtyard's ring shows through its walls; the Capture rings setting turns them off.

Controls

Field manual and hints. H (the Field manual button, or ? on a touch screen) opens the field manual: how to win, the controls, squads and kits, what FOBs and rally points are for and when to use which, sandbags, transport, vehicles and fog of war, with the numbers read from the game's rules. The game pauses while it is open, and it opens by itself on the objective page at your first match. Short hints appear the first time something becomes useful (engineers beside a supply truck, a squad far from home, an empty sandbag position, enemy armour in sight, a place of yours being taken); each shows once per browser, and the Hints setting turns them off. On a touch screen both name the buttons instead of the keys (src/core/guide.js).

Input	Action
Left click / drag	Select unit or squad / box-select
Right click	Move order (each squad goes in its wedge, squads and vehicles sent together stop side by side); on a friendly carrier, board it; on a friendly sandbag position, man it
L	Load: the selected soldiers board the vehicle clicked next (or the one selected with them); L again or Esc cancels
Z	Attack-move: the selection goes to the ground clicked next, infantry stopping to fight whatever comes into range on the way; Z again or Esc cancels. Alt + right-click does it in one. It lifts hold fire
O	Hold fire / fire at will: the selected soldiers' squads stay quiet and hidden, no target and no shot, until an enemy is within 20 m or they are fired on; it drops an attack-move under way
U	Unload a selected carrier, or take selected soldiers out of their sandbag position
H	Open or close the field manual (pauses the game); its Objective page explains the mode being played and your side
F3	Show or hide the engine panels (stats, spawning, render and world settings), hidden on a map until asked for; the Engine button does the same
X	With an engineer selected: lay a row of tank traps (beside a supply truck), or clear the row he stands at
G / J / K	With an engineer selected near one of your FOBs: build a heavy machine gun / anti-tank launcher / mortar emplacement (beside a supply truck)
Right drag, Q / E	Rotate camera (yaw + pitch)
Wheel	Zoom (changes pixel scale, keeps the point under the cursor fixed)
WASD / arrows / screen edge / middle drag	Pan
F	Follow the selected unit
Space	Pause simulation
R / Reset view	Default camera
M	Mute / unmute

Unit strip and command bar

The unit strip along the bottom has a card for every squad, vehicle and build of yours: a portrait, the label, what it is doing ("Depot · 89 m", "Taking Quarry 54%", "Supplying SQ-07", "Back in 0:17 · RP-04") and a bar per man (yellow when wounded, grey when dead) or a health bar (supply trucks add their supplies, carriers their free seats). A card goes red along the top for a few seconds after its unit is hit or while its men are pinned down; a squad wiped out keeps its card, greyed, with a ring counting down to its respawn (its rally's wave, or its own timer); a destroyed vehicle counts down to its return at main; a build going up has a dashed card of its own. Tap or click a card to select the unit, again to take the camera there, hold to follow it (shift-click adds to the selection; after Load, a vehicle's card boards it). Tabs filter All, Squads, Vehicles and Built; + makes a group of the selection (its number shows on the cards, tap its tab to select it, hold the tab to remove it). The Under fire and Idle chips step the camera through those units, and the strip carries the respawn choice (near the squad, main base, or the doctrine's helicopter or truck). Units out of view get a pointer on the screen edge with their distance; pointers that would overlap merge ("SQ-01 +2"), and a tap takes the camera there. The strip folds to its tabs with the arrow at its right end (it starts folded on a screen under 560 px tall). Portraits are PNGs in icons/units/, rendered from the game's own models by node tools/make-portraits.mjs (with the game served on :8787).

The command bar above the strip shows the selection and its actions in groups: Orders (Follow, Rally, Load, Unload or Land or Leave, Deselect) and, with an engineer selected, Build (Sandbags, FOB, Traps or Clear, HMG, AT gun, Mortar), each with its supply cost; the group's header shows the supply truck in range and the FOB kits left. A tile that can't be used now says why in a word (NO TRUCK, NEEDS FOB, TOO CLOSE...); tapping it gives the whole reason.

Build countdown. While an engineer builds, his name tag turns into a ring with the structure's icon, filling as the work goes, and "SQ-07 · SANDBAGS 0:06", with a dashed outline on the ground where it will stand. The build's tile counts down, the other build tiles read BUSY and a Cancel tile appears (C). Pressing another build says what he is on and when it is ready, with a Cancel button, instead of refusing.

Touch (iPad)

Touch and pen pointers go to a gesture layer; a mouse or trackpad keeps the table above.

Gesture	Action
Tap a unit	Select it (its whole squad)
Tap the ground (with a selection)	Move the selection there (a helicopter circles there until Unload or Land); tap an enemy to attack-move, a friendly sandbag position to man it; Advance, then tap the ground, for an attack-move there
Double-tap a unit	Select every friendly unit of that type on screen
Hold on the ground	The same order as a tap (the ring fills in 0.45 s)
Hold with nothing selected, then drag	Box select
One-finger drag	Pan, with a fling on release
Pinch	Zoom about the midpoint
Twist	Rotate about the midpoint
Three-finger drag up/down	Tilt
Tap during a fling	Stops the glide, and is never an order
Settings: Tap orders	Off, a tap or a hold on the map gives no order; a tap still selects a unit of yours, Load, Advance and the wheel's "Here" still take their tap, and a hold with nothing selected still box-selects. Remembered in the browser; ?taps=0 for a link
Toolbar (top left)	Box arms a one-shot box select, Pause, Base jumps to your main, ? the field manual, sound, ⚙ shows the engine panels. Follow and Deselect are in the command bar
Unit strip	Tap a card to select, tap again to go there, hold to follow; + groups the selection

Tablets and phones (a coarse primary pointer with multi-touch) get the mobile profile: device pixel ratio 1, a 2048 shadow map, no backdrop blur on the panels, no edge panning, keyboard hints and engine panels hidden, larger tap targets, and the force builder as a scrolling sheet. ?mobile=1 or ?mobile=0 forces the profile either way. The page ships a web app manifest and icons, so "Add to Home Screen" installs it full-screen in landscape; there is no service worker, so it still needs the server.

Sound, difficulty and debrief

Sound is synthesized in WebAudio with no assets: filtered-noise shots per weapon, explosions, impacts, looping rotor and engine voices for the nearest six vehicles, and cues for selection, orders, captures, FOBs and the match result. Everything positional is attenuated and panned around the camera target. The context starts on the first click or touch; the Render panel has a mute box and volume slider, the touch toolbar a note button, and M mutes. Recorded clips in sounds/ (listed in sounds/manifest.json) replace the synthesis where they exist, and a sound may have several takes, one picked at random. Gunshots, the tank gun, rockets, explosions, shell blasts and impacts are cut from CC0 recordings (the Free Firearm Sound Library and Freesound; sources in sounds/CREDITS.md): BLUFOR riflemen fire M4s, OPFOR AKs. The UI cues are ElevenLabs clips; to regenerate them, put an ElevenLabs key in .env as ELEVEN_LABS_API=... (ignored by git) and run node tools/make-sounds.mjs, or name the clips to redo: node tools/make-sounds.mjs win lose. Delete the manifest to hear the synthesized set.

Radio. Your side has radio chatter (ElevenLabs voices, a radio filter and a push-to-talk click): squads call contact, taking fire, man down or medic, enemy armour, target down, reloading, moving, rally down and digging in; HQ reports objectives secured or lost, the FOB up, under attack or lost, rallies overrun, armour sighted, tickets running low, reinforcements and the result. One line plays at a time and each has a cooldown, about four a minute in a busy fight. Vehicles and helicopters loop recorded engines and rotors, bullets whizz past near misses, AT gunners reload, engineers dig, and a desert wind and distant battle ambience plays under the match, the battle swelling with the shooting.

The force builder picks the CPU difficulty. Easy CPU shoots and hits softer, respawns slower and never builds FOBs; Hard shoots and hits harder, respawns faster, gets an extra FOB kit, re-plans every few seconds and commits more of its force to the attack. ?difficulty=easy|normal|hard overrides it.

The match ends on a debrief: a ticket graph for both teams over the match and a table of kills, losses by class, captures, locations lost, FOBs and caches, with "Play again" and "Change loadout". The kill feed shows the killer's weapon and the victim's class, and reports captures, FOBs and cache events; vehicle kills are highlighted. Destroyed vehicles burn for 45 seconds with flames, embers and soot before smouldering out; explosions throw debris on ballistic arcs and a dust ring. Every shot starts at the muzzle with a flash scaled to the weapon (rifle, machine gun, marksman, autocannon, rocket, door gun), and flashes and explosions cast a brief orange light on the units and ground around them; glowing particles are drawn additively, smoke covers. Rounds are in flight: the hit is decided on the trigger but the damage lands when the round arrives, bullets draw tracer streaks, cannon shells fly a gravity arc with a glowing head, rockets trail smoke, and misses come down on the ground around the target. Infantry fire bursts out to 60-110 m with low per-round accuracy that falls with range, walking and firing until about 30 m, then stopping; the autocannon reaches 150 m. Line of sight (hills and tall obstacles) is required to engage, and a soldier standing right behind a low wall, sandbags or a rock is half as likely to be hit from across it, so walls are worth holding. Infantry stand to move, take a knee to shoot, and go flat under heavy fire: rounds landing or bursting nearby build suppression (machine guns and cannon far more than rifles), a suppressed soldier aims worse and fires slower, and a kneeling or prone one is a smaller target (80% and 60% of the hit chance) and only crawls until the fire lifts. Soldiers carry the carbine across the chest and shoulder it while they have a target, standing, kneeling or prone, with both hands kept on the weapon. Machine gunners carry a belt-fed gun whose bipod comes down when they go prone; anti-tank soldiers keep the launcher slung across the pack until they have a target, then put it on the shoulder and sling the carbine.

URL parameters set the initial state so the two back ends can be compared on identical frames: ?r=gl&seed=7&x=52&z=50&zoom=6&yaw=0.6&pitch=0.95&hour=21&pixel=0&tpu=12 (&warp=300 pre-steps a match 300 s, &follow=LB-01 starts the camera on that unit, &hud=0 hides everything but the view, &infantry=1 plays any map infantry only and &tickets=200 sets the pool, as a map may with infantryOnly and tickets)

?stage=soldier|truck|apc|tank|heli spawns just that unit at the camera target, sends it forward and follows it, for close-up inspection of models and animation: ?r=gl&stage=soldier&zoom=10&yaw=1.2&pitch=0.8&hour=10

?warp=12 pre-steps the simulation 12 seconds before the first frame, so a screenshot can catch a helicopter already airborne or a squad mid-run.

Layout

index.html          page, HUD markup, picks the back end from ?r=
src/core/           renderer-agnostic engine
  math.js           Vec3, column-major Mat4, colour-space helpers, seedable rng
  layout.js         world size, props as data (hangar, containers, palms, bushes, grass tufts), obstacles, sun/moon lighting, WorldState
  terrain.js        heightfield from ridge/hill features with noise-jagged crests and notch passes, carved rivers with fords, level pads, coasts (land polygons whose edges are cliffs, beaches, coves or quays); height, normal, slope, water and line-of-sight queries
  models.js         unit models (soldier, truck, APC, tank, Chinook, Little Bird, amphibians) built through a per-back-end factory
  vox.js            MagicaVoxel .vox reader and writer (models, palette, named scene graph), greedy mesher, palette texture
  landmarks.js      Peninsula's landmarks (lighthouse, radar station, harbour shed, fishing boat, assault ship) in the units' DSL, for export to .vox
  voxexport.js      voxelises a code-built unit or landmark into a .vox of named parts plus a .json of pivots, team colours, variants and glows (run by tools/export-vox.mjs)
  geometry.js       box, cylinder, wedge, frustum, frond, ring, plane and grass-tuft generators with world-unit UVs
  textures.js       procedural tarmac (slabs, taxi lines, asphalt road, grass strip), camo and grass-tuft canvases
  camera.js         orthographic RTS camera (orbit, zoom-as-pixel-scale, texel snapping, follow)
  units.js          steering, obstacle sliding, separation, squads (one route a squad, the leader on it and the wing men beside it in a wedge where there is room, in single file where there is not), helicopter state machine; A* searches on a per-frame budget (?paths=N), the rest taken up a frame or two later; a soldier outside the renderer's cull box keeps his pose
  dust.js           particle simulation: dust, smoke, fire, tracers, muzzle flashes and brief flash lights for the renderer
  projectiles.js    rounds in flight: straight bullets, cannon shells on a gravity arc, rockets; tracer streaks for the renderer
  input.js, hud.js  RTS input / selection and the HUD (command bar, build markers); picking delegated to the back end
  roster.js         the unit strip: a card per squad, vehicle and build, tabs, groups, Under fire / Idle, edge pointers
  icons.js          glyphs, progress rings and the build names the strip and command bar share
  app.js            URL params, match or sandbox population, frame loop (with ?warp pre-stepping)
src/game/           milestone 1 game layer (renderer-agnostic)
  rules.js          tickets, costs, respawn timers, fixed M1 force
  weapons.js        weapon tables: range, bursts, accuracy, round speed, arcing shells
  teams.js          team state and base spawn points
  nav.js            A* grid (1 to 2 m cells by map) with foot / vehicle layers, a 1.15-weighted heuristic and string pulling; connected regions labelled up front and, after each build, again in the background a slice a frame
  spatial.js        hash grid for targeting and separation, its buckets kept across the per-frame rebuilds
  combat.js         targeting (searches beyond 40 m over the enemy's own per-tick list), line of sight (gridded obstacle test, allocation-free), burst fire, rounds in flight and the damage they land
  respawn.js        ticket charges and respawns at main base
  landing.js        landing craft for a side based on a ship (Peninsula): the well dock, lanes to the beaches, beach choice, held beaches as supply dumps
  ai/strategist.js  CPU commander: objectives, logistics (FOBs), air lifts, FOB raids
  objectives.js     capture zones, lattice order, ownership events
  modes/            game modes behind one interface: aas, invasion, destruction, territory, skirmish, hold (objectives, tickets, win checks, HUD bar, minimap, CPU goals; hold: the base defence waves)
  loadout.js        force builder data: items, doctrines, presets, validation, CPU counter-pick, saved loadouts
  support.js        medic revives, engineer repairs, supply truck refills
  fob.js            forward operating bases: build rules, construction, spawn points
  ui/lobby.js       the pre-match force builder screen
  maps/             map definitions (valley2km.js, desert1km.js, narva3km.js, peninsula.js), the shared prop kit and ground texture generators (natural ground: fine low-contrast detail, 128 px over 12.8 m, one texel to a pixel of the game's buffer; everything bigger comes from the shader)
  match.js          AAS / Skirmish match flow, 10 Hz game tick, bleed, win checks
icons/units/        unit-strip portraits (tools/make-portraits.mjs renders them from the game's models)
models/vox/         unit models and Peninsula's landmarks as MagicaVoxel files with a .json each (soldier, tank, apc, humvee, truck, supplyTruck, craft, heli, bird, amphib, amphibSupply; lighthouse, radar, shed, boat, ship); exported by tools/export-vox.mjs, editable in MagicaVoxel, loaded by src/gl/voxmodels.js
src/three/          three.js back end: models, world, PixelRenderer (low-res target + outline), dust, markers
src/gl/             WebGL2 back end
  scene.js          Node / Mesh scene graph with the same position/rotation/visible surface
  shaders.js        GLSL ES 3.00: lit instanced, shadow depth, pick id, composite, dust (the ground blends rock onto slopes steeper than about 31 degrees, sampled from three sides; draws natural ground's patches, highlights, hollows and streaks from world-space noise at unrelated scales and turns, so nothing repeats, with zones of dry and lush grass over tens of metres)
  renderer.js       dynamic + chunked static instance batches, chunk culling, view-fitted shadow pass, splat ground, composite, pick buffer
  strips.js         road / line strip and decal geometry
  voxmodels.js      unit builders from models/vox/*.vox: one geometry per rig part, a 256 x 1 palette texture per team, parts by name; landmark files as static props (voxProp)
  models.js, world.js, markers.js, main.js

How the WebGL2 renderer works

• Every mesh is an instance of a shared geometry. Each frame the scene graph is walked once, world matrices are computed, and instance records (matrix, colour, emissive, pick id) are appended to a batch keyed by geometry + texture + flags. One drawElementsInstanced per batch. Every box and every straight cylinder, in unit models and map props alike, is a scaled unit one whose UVs the vertex shader scales back to world units from the instance's size, so a material is one batch rather than one per size: the units on screen cost about 20 batches a pass, a map chunk a dozen or two. Units and lamp heads outside the view by more than the light frustum's reach are not instanced at all. Structures (FOBs, sandbag positions, emplacements, tank traps, rally points) are baked when built: their world matrices and instance records are written once, merged into their own batches only when the set on show changes, with the selection ring and an emplacement's gun still live. A pass draws its batches sorted by state, so a uniform or texture is set only when it changes; tufts cast no shadow. The HUD writes to the DOM only when a value changed (labels, the match panel, the objectives bar, the edge pointers); the minimap's map, fog, ghosts and units are painted to a layer at 10 Hz under a camera footprint drawn every frame; the fog of war eases at 20 Hz and uploads only when a cell changed; the roster cards and the minimap are built when the match starts, not in its first frame. When frames stay slow (a median over 20 ms for six seconds) the shadow map drops a step, 4096 to 2048 to 1024, and comes back after twenty seconds under 12 ms; ?adapt=0 keeps it fixed, and the settings panel's buffer line shows the size. ?coarse=1 draws 256 m static chunks for the shadow pass and the zoomed-out main pass (a third fewer draw calls; neutral on an Intel GPU, for a tablet to judge).
• Unit models come from MagicaVoxel files (models/vox/<type>.vox with a .json beside it; ?vox=0 falls back to the code-built ones). src/core/vox.js reads the file, and each named shape in its scene graph (hull, turret, wheels_<i>, hull.glow for the tail lights; the soldier's torso, head, legL, kneeL, armL, elbowL, rifle, mg, bipod, launcher and their right-hand twins) is greedy-meshed into one geometry at 0.1 m a voxel (0.05 m for the soldier): a quad's UV is the index of its colour in a 256 × 1 palette texture, so a model is one texture and a part one batch, and OPFOR is the same geometry with a second palette texture whose team slots are recoloured from the .json. The .json also holds each part's pivot (a turret turns about its ring, not its box's centre), which part a part hangs from (the helicopter's rotor heads under the body that banks), which wheels steer, the rotor sets ( turns, hides at speed behind a blur disc the loader still builds in code), the glow colour of emissive parts, the selection ring's radius, and palette variants (the soldier's second skin tone, picked per soldier as the code model picked it). made the first files by voxelising the code models in the page (, sampling each box's camo at its UVs and splitting glowing materials off into their own shape); from here the files can be edited in MagicaVoxel, keeping the shape names, and re-exported from code when a code model changes. Voxels boxed in on all sides are dropped before writing, which cuts a solid hull to a shell (the tank is 69 KB, the soldier 14 KB).

Tuning knobs (right panel)

Pixelate on/off (compare with native resolution at identical framing), outline, shadows, fog shading, texels per unit (4–24), time speed, hour of day, autonomous orders, spawn buttons.

LLM commander on Cloudflare

A plain-language overview is in docs/LLM_COMMANDER.md.

The CPU sides can take their plan from a model instead of the built-in planner. Every 20 seconds of match time each CPU side posts a one-page JSON digest of the state (src/game/ai/digest.js: tickets, locations and who contests them, its squads and vehicles with orders, enemy clusters as far as its side can see them (fog of war: groups seen earlier carry lastSeen, for 30 s; each location's recent keeps the most enemies seen at it at one look for two minutes, shown when fewer are in sight there now), FOBs, sandbags, recent events, and three memory blocks the game maintains so the prompt never grows: trends (tickets now and 1, 2, 3 minutes ago, deaths and vehicle losses per minute, locations that changed hands in the last five minutes), the last three plans with what followed each (ticket swing, captures, losses, casualties), and the model's own notes from last time) to /commander and gets back a plan in a fixed schema (src/game/ai/plan.js: the next location to attack, locations to hold, attack share, posture, what to build (a FOB, sandbags, tank traps or nothing, carried out exactly; for a FOB also fobAt, the place it goes behind: a place not yet held makes the engineer wait for it, digging sandbags meanwhile, and without it the FOB goes behind the place the attack sets off from; the digest's fobs.next says where the next FOB would go, how far that is from the place attacked and what blocks it), whether vehicles may carry squads from base (helicopters fly them, APCs and troop trucks drive them), a line of radio chatter that appears in the feed, notes to itself for the next call, how many seconds until it wants to be consulted again, and optionally a condition to wait for before attacking: squads gathered at a staging location, few enemies near the objective, an APC alive, or a number of seconds; the game checks it every few seconds, gathers the squads meanwhile, and gives up waiting after two minutes. A location changing hands or one of its APCs dying triggers a review at once; and jobs for particular squads by id: assault, hold or reserve at a location, screen 50 m out from it towards the enemy, raid the nearest enemy FOB, escort the supply truck, or grab a place the digest marks grabbable (one it can take with no enemy it knows of in or near it; a grab anywhere else leaves that squad to the attack share), with squads left out following the attack share; and jobs for APCs and tanks by id: attack, or hold at one of its locations, with armour left out going with the attack). The attack share is exact under a model (0 sends none of the squads without a job; the built-in planners keep a fifth at least), an engineer squad with neither a job from the model nor a logistics job waits at the first hold, and a job the game will not carry out as given (a grab at a place that is not grabbable, a hold at a place not ours, a raid with no enemy FOB known) comes back in the next digest as refused, with the reason and what the squad does instead. The strategist follows the plan while it is under 90 seconds old and its own goals otherwise, and every call is asynchronous, so a slow or failing endpoint never stalls the match. A side under a model says so under its name in the match panel. Two failed calls in a row turn that label to "no answer" and put a line in the feed with the reason the Worker gave, the built-in commander plans until an answer arrives, and the debrief counts the plans that did. The posture scales the caution distances (cautious keeps 1.3× the distance, aggressive 0.6×).

worker/index.js is a Cloudflare Worker that serves the game as static assets (.assetsignore keeps secrets, tools and docs out) and answers /commander from a Workers AI model, @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast by default (vars.MODEL in wrangler.jsonc). Calls go through the pixel-ops AI Gateway (vars.GATEWAY), which logs every digest and plan with the side and minute as metadata, tracks tokens and cost, and rate-limits the endpoint; clear the variable to call Workers AI directly. Measured, it answers in 2 to 9 seconds for about 1,800 prompt tokens and 40 neurons a call, so a full match costs each side roughly 3,000 neurons.

Claude answers on the same route with ?model=haiku, sonnet or opus (Claude Haiku 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5). Those calls go through the gateway's Anthropic endpoint with the official @anthropic-ai/sdk, on the Anthropic key stored in the gateway (BYOK, alias default): the Worker sends only the gateway token (CF_AIG_TOKEN, a Worker secret) and the gateway adds the key. The models think before answering; :low, :medium, :high, :xhigh or :max after the key sets the effort (?model=opus:high), otherwise each model's default applies. The plan schema goes as a structured output (its numeric and length limits move into the descriptions, and validatePlan enforces them). Measured on a Palm Valley digest of 4,850 input tokens: Haiku in 3 to 5 s with 370 output tokens (about $0.0007 a call), Sonnet in 7 s with 880 (540 of them thinking, about $0.019), Opus in 12 s with 880 (about $0.037). At a call every 20 to 25 s a 20-minute match costs a side about 3 cents on Haiku, $1 on Sonnet and $2 on Opus. The game waits 60 s for an answer. The system prompt is written for the match from the digest's map (its ticket pool and clock, and on an infantry-only map no vehicle, FOB or helicopter rules and logistics none) and carries a prompt-caching marker: the fixed part of every call (the system prompt and the format prompt structured outputs add, 4,460 tokens) is stored for 5 minutes, every read restarting the clock, and read back at a twentieth of the input price, so only the digest (about 1,600 tokens) is billed in full. Measured on Opus: about $0.029 a call, down from $0.046. The pixel-ops gateway also caches whole responses: a byte-identical request (in play only a repeated digest, e.g. while paused) gets the stored plan back in under 100 ms.

npm install                      # wrangler
# .env holds CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY (an account API token with Workers AI), CLOUDFLARE_API_ACCOUNT
# and CF_AIG_TOKEN (the gateway's token, for Claude; wrangler dev reads it from .env, and
# `npx wrangler secret put CF_AIG_TOKEN` stores it for the deployed Worker)
set -a; . ./.env; set +a; export CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN="$CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY" CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID="$CLOUDFLARE_API_ACCOUNT"
npm run dev:cf                   # the game and /commander on http://localhost:8789, AI binding remote

Add &model=gpt-oss-120b, qwen3-30b, mistral-small, haiku, sonnet or opus to try another model from the Worker's allow-list for that match (llama is the default). Then open http://localhost:8789/?commander=1, or keep playing from the Python server and point it at the Worker with ?commander=http://localhost:8789/commander (the endpoint allows cross-origin calls). npm run commander-stub starts tools/commander-stub.mjs, a local stand-in that answers with a heuristic plan, for working on the digest without a model: ?commander=http://localhost:8788/commander. npm run deploy publishes the Worker to your account. Matches with a remote commander no longer replay from a seed, so the balance runs keep using the built-in planner.

Headless checks

tools/pick-test.mjs launches headless Chrome (software GL), loads a URL, and asserts that app.pick() returns the unit under each visible unit, then box-selects and orders everything on screen. Run it against either back end:

node tools/pick-test.mjs 'http://localhost:8787/?r=gl&seed=11&zoom=2' 9351
node tools/pick-test.mjs 'http://localhost:8787/?seed=11&zoom=2' 9352

tools/match-test.mjs runs a CPU-vs-CPU match for a while and reports tickets, objectives, FOBs, lifts and the kill feed. tools/sim-test.mjs <url> <test.js> steps a match with the animation loop frozen and runs the file's body as (a, m, step), where step(n) advances the simulation n ticks of 50 ms, printing what the body returns and any page errors; it works against localhost or the live site (for example, four minutes of Peninsula to watch the amphibians swim ashore). tools/touch-test.mjs drives the touch layer with synthetic touches on an iPad-sized viewport (tap, tap-to-move, hold, Clear, drag, pinch, twist, tilt, box select, double-tap) and checks the mobile profile and manifest:

node tools/match-test.mjs 'http://localhost:8787/?cpu=both&seed=11&warp=240&mode=invasion' 9333
node tools/match-test.mjs 'http://localhost:8787/?cpu=both&loadout=balanced&cpuloadout=balanced&seed=3&warp=1500&swap=1' 9334   # full mirrored match, sides swapped (map-balance check)
node tools/touch-test.mjs 'http://localhost:8787/?mobile=1&cpu=none&loadout=balanced&seed=5' 9341 /tmp/touch-profile shot.png

README frames. tools/shoot.mjs <jobs.json> photographs a moment in a match: with the animation loop frozen it pre-steps the match by ?warp=, steps tick by tick until a predicate over app finds the moment (a rocket leaving the Little Bird's pod, a place under capture, a wave of craft clear of the well dock), places the camera, renders one frame and saves the canvas as PNG; the file's header has the job format and examples. The frames in docs/screenshots are those PNGs as lossless WebP (cwebp -lossless -z 9).

Balance runs. tools/balance.mjs plays CPU-vs-CPU matchups to the end, several at once, stepping the simulation in the page as fast as it goes (a 25-minute match takes about a minute), and prints every result with win tables per pairing, per preset and per base. Each pairing is played both ways round by default, so each preset gets both bases. Random numbers are seeded from the match seed and sound is off, so a seed replays the same match: run the same seeds before and after a change to compare. The runs play the default map, Palm Valley; --extra map=desert1km runs Desert Crossing, whose 16 default matches serve as the regression set.

node tools/balance.mjs                                            # the core set: 4 pairings x 2 seeds x both bases
node tools/balance.mjs --pairs balanced:armoured,air:light --seeds 1,2,3,4 --parallel 4
node tools/balance.mjs --pairs light:mechanized --extra 'persona=aggressive' --json out.json

For a still frame, headless Chrome's --screenshot with --virtual-time-budget works too; the seed parameter makes both back ends build the same scene.