Talk:2712: Gravity

Whatever image is supposed to be in the center isn't showing up for me! D: Tried on both Safari and Chrome but it gives me the little broken picture icon. Hopefully it's fixed soon! (The comic's been up for about 10 minutes going by when the bot updated this page.) 172.70.126.117 22:28, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

The center image is trying to load this link, but there's nothing there: https://xkcd.com/tile/ship1/ship_gliding_2x.png. I hope that gets fixed soon. The "ship" seems to rotate a bit unpredictably over time. At first I thought it was responding to my mouse movements, but I don't think so anymore. Orion205 (talk) 22:34, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, the center image is controlled by the javascript, of course: https://xkcd.com/2712/comic.js. So this is some sort of interactive comic? Orion205 (talk) 22:36, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Okay, left/right arrow keys seem to control the rotation. I'll check back in later in hopes of seeing the ship so I have some idea what the point of it all is. Orion205 (talk) 22:39, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

And now it's working. You fly a little spaceship around the little planet. Luckily you have shields if you slam into the ground too hard. Orion205 (talk) 22:43, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Catch the cannonball for a spaceship upgrade. Also, not so easy to find a stable orbit around this little planet. Orion205 (talk) 22:49, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

You can transform the ship into a different (seems faster to me) one by running into the last cannon ball. 108.162.241.249

Rough summary: The comic is an interactive space flight game, starting landed on an origin planet. The planet is static, and the player starts in a ship controlled by WASD or Directional keys. The ship can go up and down, and rotate left and right. Game simulates orbits and gravity, making navigation tricky. Around the player ship there are dots which indicate nearby planets - there are numurous planets, each with what seem to be drawings related to the What If book. Within the browser, planets are loaded in PNG format by chunk, names formatted as "planet_0_0" with numbers incrementing as grid co-ordinates. Planets and objects found: "origin" "europa", "road", "b612". NOTE: Several hazards exist, such as a field of black holes - if flown into, the ship can become stuck if let to be pulled close to the surface, locking in place. 172.70.110.230 23:13, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Within browser dev console exists the objects "Ship" and "Comic", the latter containing a list of all objects and coordinates, as well as various setting for the game physics and settings. Comic contains the sub-object "Voyager", which contains the details and settings for the player ship, including location, speed, etc. 172.70.110.230 23:13, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

There are 5 ship types in the game code, each with their own consumable transformative found in the world. The ship alternatives are (ship1, ship2, ship-tintin, ship-figure, ship-soccerball). These can be changed with console command [Comic.ship = "ship1"]. Note: At current, "ship-soccerball" returns an error and does not load correctly. 172.70.110.230 23:13, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

The "ship.shields" is a boolean value that defaults to true, and when set to false, makes the game behave in a lunar lander mode (bad landing black screens the whole page). The "ship.engine" types I see in the code are "warp" (very fast speeds) and "infinite improbability drive" (teleports to 'improbable' places). Default engine is "standard", but it seems any value that is not the former two has the same effect. --172.70.254.165 23:32, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

In addition to Europa, the space road, and B-612, there is the "Edge of the Universe" (complete with Milliways restaurant nearby), a... tree (which is extremely hard to land on), a planet populated by the characters from Dinosaur Comics (and the main cast of Jurassic Park), the USS Enterprice (NCC 1701-C), and likely quite a bit more. Orbital mechanics make it tough to land on the smaller targets. 172.71.254.46 23:07, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Plus what appears to be Earth, complete with the LHC. There's a 2nd "cannonball" there for an additional ship upgrade, but at the time I found it, that graphic was unavailable. 172.70.126.232 23:15, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

I went out a long ways away, and eventually found The Great Attractor. It attracts really hard. I couldn't leave the surface. (I wasn't able to leave the center of Europa either, though, so, not saying much.) There are also some terrifying black holes (a binary system?), though something's weird about their gravity; you kinda bounce off of them a quarter screen away or so? 108.162.216.77 23:10, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

I *think* thats a wormhole, you go in one and then out the other. I got stuck right between them. Speaking of getting stuck, there is a bug where if you hit a planet with enough gravity fast enough, the ship is inside the planet. Holding W makes you go backwards (or at least towards the center maybe?) and you can get all the way to the other end of the planet where you slow down a lot, but can eventually leave. 172.70.82.166 23:19, 16 December 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's one planet that's supposed to be the "remnant of the sun", is that what you mean with The Great Attractor? (It has a bridge on it with a coin(?) blocking part of the way, and a space ship actively crashing into its surface, drawn as several frames.) You can leave that by skidding over the surface like a skipping stone to gather momentum - it's tricky, due to various obstacles, but possible! (It's possible you need two ship power-ups?! If they're indeed power-ups and not just aesthetic changes, I didn't pay attention.)

Screenshot of the Enterprise and Dinosaur Comics planet. Sorry for the broken image in the middle, I picked up two powerups and my current ship image is broken. -(pinkgothic) 172.68.110.143 23:22, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Dog Park planet 172.71.254.114 23:28, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Using a tablet (no keyboard, but seems to respond to touch), controls are confusing. Presuming that touching bottom left activates left-rotate and touching bottom right does right-rotate (can't see the presumably white-lije controls over the white planet) but I can't get thrust anything but 'reverse' into the planet centre. No obvious top-edge hotspots, either. Maybe I need to do a "You will not go to space today" and then reverse upward... BRB, after a bit more testing, though... 172.69.79.185 23:39, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Ok, the next go went 'better'. The browser keeps wanting to load "simplified content", but if I ignore that I can get full-screen, at one point I changed rocket-type (no idea how, can't do it again) and I easily get off the planet (hard to thrust just enough to get to the Hooke comment/cannon), with plenty of targets coming in range (but cannot slow down enough to not have it glitch and rebuild a totally new set of targets that I never can reach). Will try desktop version when I'm next on a suitable one... Looks to be a lot of interesting content. 162.158.74.30 23:53, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Using the developer console, the ship can be teleported to different coordinates via console command [Comic.voyager.pos.x = 0, Comic.voyager.pos.y = -1461], provided here with start location coordinates. This can be used for manual navigation to known coordinates. List of locations per game code added below, append landing X,Y to each as determined. 172.70.110.230 23:42, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

b612: [x,y] dogplanet: [x,y] earth: [x,y] enterprise: [x,y] europa: [x,y] goodhart: [x,y] greatattractor: [x,y] japanmoon: [x,y] maw1: [x,y] maw2: [x,y] maw3: [x,y] maw4: [x,y] maw5: [x,y] maw6: [x,y] maw7: [x,y] maw8: [x,y] maw9: [x,y] maw10: [x,y] maw11: [x,y] maw13: [x,y] maw14: [x,y] nojapan: [x,y] origin: [0, -1461] peeler: [x,y] pigeons: [x,y] present: [x,y] remnant: [x,y] roads: [x,y] soupiter: [x,y] steerswoman: [x,y] sun: [x,y]

In your developer console, enter window.ship.engines = 'infinite improbability drive' and pressing up will randomly teleport you to interesting places. window.ship.engines = 'warp' will let you escape normally inescapable objects.

Proposal

It seems the most explanatory thing we can do is replace the blank starfield with the starting image screenshot, and label its four corners with their x and y coordiates, and than make a table of all the objects with their coordinates, a screenshot, and a description of their behaviors. 172.70.206.204 23:55, 16 December 2022 (UTC)