Mathsteroids

Mathsteroids is a game based on asteroids that can be played on a selection of interesting mathematical surfaces. Press A and D to steer the ship left and right, W to move forwards and K to fire. Destroy the asteroids to win points.

You can play Mathsteroids at mscroggs.co.uk/mathsteroids.

Building

Mathsteroids can be run directly in a web environment with PHP by navigating to index.php. Alternatively, a pure HTML version can be generated by running:

make html

The HTML that this generates will include links to some of the javascript files. To instead generate a HTML file that inlines all of the javascript, run:

make html-single-page

Surfaces

The following surfaces are currently available:

• Sphere
  • Mercator projection
  • Isometric
  • Stereographic projection
  • Gall–Peters projection
  • Craig retroazimuthal projection
  • Distance preserving azimuthal projection
  • Robinson projection
  • sinusoidal projection
  • Mollweide projection
  • Goode homolosine projection
  • van der Grinten projection
  • dymaxion map
  • tetrahedron net
  • cube net
  • octahedron net
  • dodecahedron net
  • icosahedron net
• Flat
  • cylinder
  • Mobius strip
  • torus
  • Klein bottle
  • real projective plane
  • unbounded
  • loop (elliptical pool)
• Torus
  • Top view
  • Projected flat
• Hyperbolic
  • bounded
    • Poincare disk model
    • Beltrami-Klein model
    • Poincare half-plane model
    • hyperboloid
    • Gand model
    • band model
  • unbounded
    • Poincare disk model
    • Beltrami-Klein model

config.json

Mathsteroids can be configured by setting values in a file called config.json (see config.json.template). The following entries can be set in the configuration JSON:

Entry	Allowed values	Default	Description
"high-scores"	true, false	false	Toggles high score tables
"controller"	"none", "playstation", "mega-drive", "emf"	"none"	Allows input from a controller to be used
"game-mode"	"lives", "time"	"lives"	Set the game mode. If "lives", player start with 3 lives and games end when lives run out. If "time", games will last 30 seconds, with negative points given for losing a "life"
"pre-html"	Any string	""	HTML to place above the game
"centered"	true, false	false	Toggles centering of content
"show-webad"	true, false	false	Toggles advert below game saying you can play it online
"show-instructions"	true, false	true	Toggles instructions that can be displayed below the game
"show-control-buttons"	true, false	true	Toggles control buttons shown below the game
"debug"	true, false	false	Toggles the visibility of debug information
"sound"	true, false	false	Toggles sound
"sound-dir"	Any string	"sounds/default"	Sets the directory where the sound files are located

Example configurations

The version of Mathsteroids available at mscroggs.co.uk/mathsteroids uses the following config:

{
    "high-scores": false,
    "controller": "none",
    "game-mode": "lives",
    "pre-html": "",
    "centered": false,
    "show-webad": false,
    "show-instructions": true,
    "show-control-buttons": true,
    "sound": true,
    "sound-dir": "/mathsteroids-sounds",
    "debug": false
}

When giving a talk, I use the following config:

{
    "high-scores": false,
    "controller": "mega-drive",
    "game-mode": "time",
    "pre-html": "<br /><br />",
    "centered": true,
    "show-webad": true,
    "show-instructions": false,
    "show-control-buttons": false,
    "debug": false,
    "sound": true
}

To run Mathsteroids on an arcade machine at Electromagnetic Field 2024, I used the following config:

{
    "controller": "emf",
    "high-scores": false,
    "pre-html": "<br /><br />",
    "centered": true,
    "show-webad": false,
    "show-control-buttons": false,
    "show-instructions": false,
    "debug": false,
    "sound": false
}