Web Minecraft

A building and exploration game that runs in the browser, with no build step. Vanilla JavaScript and Three.js power terrain, physics, creatures and rendering. Libraries and vehicle models supplied for this family game are vendored; optional network services provide multiplayer and cloud saves.

Manhattan on Earth: teleport to New York from the world map (the old /?lieu=manhattan link still works). One map, one shared-world code: detailed landmarks, Times Square, yellow taxis and rigged human characters with textured faces and clothing. Pedestrians keep their positions when you turn around and fade with distance. See characters and vehicles for assets and rendering budgets. Existing Earth buildings keep their terrain support; v239 Manhattan journals are imported without scaling their blocks. See the urban guide for migration, rendering budgets, licensing and limitations.

Features

• Infinite procedural terrain — rolling hills, mountains, beaches, oceans and snowy peaks, generated from deterministic fractal value noise and streamed in 16×160×16 chunks as you walk. The sky reaches 160 blocks so landmarks can be built at something close to their real proportions; the ground is capped independently at 80 so raising the ceiling never shifts a saved world.
• Trees with trunks and canopies that correctly span chunk borders — and, within the HD range, drawn as real trees (tapering trunk, branches, leaf cards, one silhouette per species and climate) over the same blocks.
• Break & place blocks — 31 block types: terrain blocks, sandstone, gravel, mossy cobble, three wood tones, ice, gold, diamond, obsidian, bookshelf, six wool colors, and four half-slabs (with true half-height physics — perfect for stairs and terraces). A customizable 9-slot hotbar plus an inventory (E or 🎒) to pick any block; middle click grabs the targeted block.
• First-person controls — pointer-lock mouse look, WASD, sprint, jumping, gravity, swimming with buoyancy, and a fly mode for building.
• Voxel physics — AABB collision against the world, tunnel-proof substepping, and DDA raycasting for block targeting.
• Procedural textures — the block atlas is painted onto a canvas at startup. Manhattan on Earth adds procedural physical materials and geometric facade details; existing vehicle assets keep their licenses.
• Paris in relief (HD layer) — the voxel world is the skeleton; on top of it, a second mesher pass emits real facade geometry for Paris (recessed windows, railings, running balconies, cornices, awnings, dormers) and 128-px procedural materials for its streets, with one draw call per chunk. Far away, the flat tile remains as the level of detail. The device tier sets the range (?hd= forces it). Each quarter has its own register (plaster and shutters in the Marais, ashlar and running balconies in the west), trees are meshed up close, and sidewalks carry bollards, café terraces and street-name plates — all read from the blocks, never written into them. Eight landmarks have an authored model in the same layer — the Eiffel Tower's open lattice (you walk under it), the Arc de Triomphe's two vaulted passages, the Louvre pyramid's glass lattice, Notre-Dame's rose window and flying buttresses, Sacré-Cœur, the Panthéon, the golden dome of Les Invalides and the Opéra Garnier. Place a block inside one and it turns back into editable cubes.
• Day/night cycle with sky, fog and light level transitions.
• Synthesized sound — nothing is downloaded: engines (a filtered noise bed plus harmonics that track the throttle), jet spool-up, block and chime sounds are all built with the Web Audio API, and the car radio plays five original stations of three songs each, written in scale degrees with a jingle before every song and a programme that follows the real clock (src/radio.js). The horn is two held sawtooth tones through a resonant filter; a street car stuck behind you honks back. One audio context for the whole game; the 🔊 setting suspends it outright.
• Mobile support — one hand to move, one to act: a virtual joystick on the left, a contextual action pill and at most three round buttons on the right, and a single ☰ menu (bag, photos, friends, learn, settings, home) that pauses the game. Building is a mode you switch on, with Place and Break buttons.
• Friendly NPCs — Marlon, a child with a rigged, textured model who follows you around and chats in French, and Professeur Cornichon, who hosts the quiz.
• Educational mode (always on — it cannot be disabled) — Professeur Cornichon's quiz starts every play session, and pops up again after each 4 minutes of play: US first-grade math, English, and French questions (fill-in-the-blank, spelling, word problems, translations…). 5 correct answers earn 4 minutes of play, with star progress, confetti celebrations, and questions that avoid repeating. Refreshing the page doesn't skip the quiz — it just brings it right back. The 🎓 button shows today's play time, every correct answer, and past days — all saved in the browser (localStorage).
• Adaptive difficulty — every skill (additions, spelling, conjugaison…) tracks its own success history: 80%+ right levels it up, 40%- levels it down. Math starts at level 2 (two-digit numbers) and climbs to hundreds; English and French unlock harder word banks. Current levels show in the 🎓 panel.
• Random-clicking protection — instant clicks are ignored, and a pattern of fast wrong answers triggers a warning, then a 10-second freeze that adds an extra required correct answer.
• Daily hard stop — after 45 minutes of cumulative play in a day, the game locks. Unlocking another 45-minute block takes either the parental code or a 20-correct-answer marathon quiz. Repeatable; survives refreshes since play time is persisted.
• A map you can search — type a few letters (tokyo, eiffel, washing) and every one of the 278 registered places, plus Paris's squares, Manhattan's neighbourhoods and Washington's monuments, comes up with its distance in blocks; tap one and you are there. Accent- and case-insensitive, and the map fills whatever shape the screen gives it — wide on a phone held sideways, tall when held upright.
• Real places, at real proportions — six cities, each drawn from its own plan rather than from a random-building generator: Haussmann Paris at 48 blocks/km, a disc of 370 blocks — every place at its true distance from Notre-Dame, the Étoile's twelve avenues, the Champs-Élysées lined with real chestnut trees, streets sized by the kit's road-section rule (two lanes, four on the great boulevards) between six-storey stone facades (three blocks a storey, so a person is half a storey tall, as in life), and a different street width per quarter (a Marais alley is not a Monceau avenue) — the island of Manhattan on the 1811 commissioners' grid, San Francisco's two clashing street grids across thirteen named hills, Nice, Lille, and Washington's monumental core at 48 blocks/km — L'Enfant's grid split by diagonal state avenues meeting at circles, the Mall lined with its twelve museums in true order, no skyscrapers because the 1910 Height Act says so. Its 32 landmarks have real interiors: the Spirit of St. Louis hangs over your head in Air & Space, the elephant stands under the Natural History rotunda, the Capitol has both chambers, the Oval Office is oval — and the rowhouses have staircases and second floors.
• A metro you actually ride — four colour-coded lines with 20 real stations, visible rails and sleepers in the tunnels, coffered concrete vaults, mezzanines with fare gates. Trains stop at every station, and the Yellow Line does what the real one does: it surfaces in East Potomac Park and crosses the Potomac on its own bridge, in the open air, before diving back down at the Pentagon. Every station — Washington's twenty and the sixteen of Paris line 1 — can be walked from the street to the platform and back, standing up: stairs, a ticket hall with turnstiles, a corridor, and the station's name on the platform (blue enamel plaques under the white tiled vault in Paris, brown pylons in Washington).
• Fully offline — the game is an installable PWA: open it once online, add it to the home screen (iPhone/iPad: Share → Add to Home Screen), and it runs entirely offline afterwards. When releasing changes, bump CACHE_VERSION in sw.js so installed clients update.
• Persistence — your block edits and creature collection are saved to localStorage and restored on reload (terrain is deterministic, so only the diff is stored).

Run it

The game is a static site, but it uses ES modules, so it must be served over HTTP (opening index.html directly from disk won't work):

# from the repo root — pick whichever you have:
python3 -m http.server 8000
# or
npx serve .

Then open http://localhost:8000.

It also works out of the box on GitHub Pages: enable Pages for this repo (Settings → Pages → deploy from the main branch, root folder) and play at https://<user>.github.io/minecraft/.

Tests

The shared-world code is exercised by real browsers playing together, against a local signalling server — no build step, no external service:

cd tests
npm install
npm test

A full run takes about 1 h 50 (measured on v540), on purpose. Seventeen suites run one after the other — never in parallel, since two browsers fighting over four cores produce failures that don't exist in the game — and the waits have to outlast the game's own thresholds (twenty seconds of silence before a link is cut) or they would prove nothing. Each verdict is written to disk as it lands, so a crashed or recycled container costs one suite rather than the whole run; npm test -- --depuis-zero forces a full replay. npm test -- --tranche=k/n plays only one of n balanced slices, so n machines run the whole thing in parallel (two slices: about 55 minutes each).

See tests/README.md for what each scenario reproduces — every one of them is a failure that actually happened to the children playing — and CLAUDE.md for the invariants a change must not break.

Controls

Input	Action
W A S D	Move
Mouse	Look around
Left click (hold to repeat)	Break block
Right click	Place block
Middle click	Pick targeted block
Space	Jump / swim up
Shift	Sprint
1–9 or mouse wheel	Select hotbar slot
F	Toggle fly mode (Space up, C down)
H (in a car)	Horn
R (in a car)	Next radio station, then silence
Space (in a car)	Handbrake
Esc	Pause

On touch devices: left thumb summons a joystick, right thumb looks around, and the round buttons handle jumping, flying and building. Tapping the screen only mines or builds in Build mode (its button, then Place or Break); the ☰ menu in the top-right corner pauses and gathers everything else.

In a car the joystick is both accelerator and steering wheel — push forward to speed up, pull back to brake and then reverse — and the walking buttons step aside; the right column holds the handbrake, the horn and the radio button. Grass, gravel, sand and snow grip less than tarmac (and rain wets the road), the car rumbles and the camera shakes off-road, brake lights come on when you brake and reverse lights when you back up — on street cars too. A plane additionally gets a throttle dial and a speed readout on the right, because a throttle that holds when you let go is what makes an aircraft an aircraft.

Code layout

index.html        page shell, HUD, styles
CLAUDE.md         invariants, release procedure, and the traps that cost time
src/main.js       scene setup, chunk streaming, input, HUD, game loop
src/world.js      noise, terrain/tree generation, chunk storage, edits + saving
src/mesher.js     chunk geometry builder (visible faces only, water surface)
src/solcontinu.js continuous natural ground: one triangulation for rendering, contact and NPCs (v297)
src/player.js     movement, collision, swimming, flying, voxel raycast
src/blocks.js     block ids and metadata
src/textures.js   procedural texture atlas
src/facadeshd.js  Paris HD layer: facade relief and street surfaces, as buffers
src/paris-monuments-hd.js  its eight authored landmarks, clipped per chunk
src/matierehd.js  its single PBR material, 1024-px atlas and environment
src/bandeau.js    the game's passing message — since v497 only for what the child must do (quiz, refusals, multiplayer)

  the shared world
src/net.js        sessions, peers, presentation, edit log, reconnection
src/relaisnuage.js  cloud relay: a PeerJS-shaped pipe through the database
src/cloud.js      Supabase calls: world saves, profiles, relay, presence
src/sync.js       whole-profile portability, keyed by first name
src/visio.js      camera tiles and sound, split so autoplay can't mute both

  who lives there
src/animals.js    passive animals, spawning, the mount you can climb
src/montures.js   the eight rideable beasts and the height of their backs
src/embarquement.js getting in and out of a car: walk to the door, open, sit, close
src/portieres.js  car doors cut from the bodywork of each fleet model, once per model
src/cap.js        the pilot's heading dial: bearing, the city ahead, its distance
src/marlon.js     friendly NPCs (Marlon the companion, Professeur Cornichon)
src/vie.js        city life; src/vehicules.js  métro trains (which stop at
                  stations) and F1 cars
src/stations.js   the name of every metro station, written on its platform
src/police.js src/patrouille.js  the police: a bêtise at the wheel brings a
                  police car (and a moto at two stars) along your own trail; stop,
                  and the officer tells you what happened — never violent
src/moto.js       the rideable police moto, which leans into turns

  the places
src/paris.js src/manhattan.js src/sanfrancisco.js src/nice.js src/lille.js
src/washington.js  the capital: L'Enfant's plan, the Mall, and the Metro
src/dcmonuments.js its 32 landmarks — real interiors, you walk in — and 3 bridges
src/chine.js src/pole.js src/espace.js src/gaulois.js src/villandry.js
src/aeroport.js src/circuit.js src/ville.js src/parc.js src/voies.js
src/metromonde.js the metros of generated cities (Rome's line A): stations, stairs, tunnels
src/routes.js     the interurban roads (A1 Paris–Lille, E429 Lille–Bruxelles, E19 Bruxelles–Amsterdam, A20 Montréal–Québec, BR-116 São Paulo–Rio, A-4 Madrid–Séville, A109 Nairobi–Mombasa, A3 Cologne–Francfort, E1 Kyoto–Nagoya, Autosole Bologne–Florence, A4 Milan–Turin, Yamuna Delhi–Agra, A1 Sud Rome–Naples, M1 Vienne–Budapest, A1 Nord Milan–Bologne, A24 Berlin–Hambourg, I-45 Dallas–Houston, A7 Lyon–Marseille, AP-2 Madrid–Barcelone, 401 Toronto–Montréal, Hansalinie Cologne–Hambourg, I-95 New York–Boston, I-95 Sud New York–Washington, Tōmei Tokyo–Nagoya, M40 Londres–Birmingham, A6 Paris–Lyon, A8 Marseille–Nice: profile, section, bridges, traffic)

  learning and parents
src/education.js  quiz bank, adaptive difficulty, stats, persistence
src/identity.js   face signatures (never photos) and the hashed parent code
src/admin.js      the parent space
src/journal.js    the device's logbook: crash detection, safety tier, cloud reports

vendor/           three.js r160 + GLTFLoader (MIT — see THREE_LICENSE),
                  voiture.glb — the drivable car's 3D model (VOITURE_LICENSE)
                  voitures/police-car.glb, moto-police.glb, humains/policier.glb —
                  CC-BY-4.0, credits in their LICENSE.md
                  avions/ — the A320, A321 and F-35 models (avions/LICENSE.md;
                  the A320 is CC-BY-NC-SA: non-commercial, share-alike)
scripts/          convertir-avions.py fits a Sketchfab plane to the game's contract