Orrery 0.7.0

0.7.0

Your ship now runs on fuel. Every drive tier burns through a tank, landing refuels you in seconds, and running dry means gliding down through air or calling a tow. The browser version also gets a new loading screen, and the axial tilts shown for Venus and Uranus are now correct.

Changes

Fuel and towing

• The ship now has a fuel tank that drains in proportion to throttle, including reverse. A full tank lasts about 17 minutes at full throttle on thrusters and about 2 minutes at warp 3.
• Coasting, gliding and sitting on a surface burn nothing, and a landed ship refills from empty in 5 seconds.
• An empty tank cuts the drive and autopilot, but you can still glide down through an atmosphere.
• When the tank is empty, press R or the new Tow button in the browser to return to the body you last landed on, or the nearest body if you have not landed, with a full tank. A tow abandons any mission in progress.
• New --fuel and --altitude options start the ship with a chosen amount of fuel or a chosen height above the target's surface.

Flight display

• The flight HUD now shows fuel, changes colour as it runs low and warns when the tank is empty.
• On narrow screens such as phones, the speed and throttle line uses a compact layout.
• The off-screen target marker no longer drops into the flight HUD.
• The help screen now lists the - key for starting a mission.

Accuracy

• Axial tilt is now measured from the spin pole, so Venus and Uranus read about 177° and 98° (#41).

Browser version

• The page now loads behind a new loading screen with progress for the engine and JPL data (#36, #38).
• If the live view can't run, for example without WebGL 2, the page shows a recorded clip or still and explains why. Very slow devices are offered the clip without losing the live view (#36, #38).
• Opening the page with ?bench runs a scripted frame-rate test and shows results you can copy.

Version

0.6.0 → 0.7.0 — MINOR. Mechanical floor from the save format, the released save fixtures, the command-line flags, the save code and new files: MINOR.
Judgment: Fuel, the tow, gliding on an empty tank and the --altitude and --fuel flags are new gameplay, so minor applies, and nothing a 0.6.0 player has is lost: records.txt keeps its location and format because the save-code change only adds a comment and a version constant, and the new fixtures pin the existing format. Fuel can now end a flight, and a tow ends the running mission, but existing controls keep their meaning and existing best times still load, so this does not reach major. The patches for web/strata-kit/update.sh and web/strata_page.cmake were truncated and the Strata v0.7.0 engine diff is not shown, so their effects are unknown; the first two look like web build tooling, and keeping the floor rests on that assumption. The fuel, HUD layout and ?bench changes match no listed PR, so those bullets carry no PR number rather than a guessed one.

• minor: command-line flag added: --altitude
• minor: command-line flag added: --fuel
• minor: save code changed: src/orrery/missions.hpp

Verification

Verified before publication; this tag points at the exact commit that was verified, and the downloads below were built from it.

• Saves: every save fixture 0.6.0 shipped with is unchanged, every save format has one, and the game's save tests load each of them.
• CI checks on this exact commit, all green: Data, ephemeris tests, render smoke test, Web build and smoke test (headless Chromium).
• Packaging dry run: every download was built from this commit and checked before the tag was made.

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drafted by Claude on behalf of Daniel Stephenson

What's Changed

• Show a glide: --altitude KM, the glide image, and the target arrow kept above the HUD by @dmccoystephenson in #31
• Add a release workflow that builds Windows and Linux downloads by @dmccoystephenson in #30
• Number the mission records format; freeze two records files 0.6.0 wrote by @dmccoystephenson in #32
• Fuel: a tank the drive burns, refuelling on landing, and a tow when it runs dry by @dmccoystephenson in #33
• Add a ?bench mode to the browser page: a scripted frame-rate run by @dmccoystephenson in #34
• README: eleven missions in test_missions, and describe test_records by @dmccoystephenson in #35
• Load the browser page behind Strata's loading shell by @dmccoystephenson in #36
• RELEASING: the browser deploy is gated on ARCADE_ENABLED by @dmccoystephenson in #37
• Move Strata to v0.7.0 (web kit 1.1 loader) by @dmccoystephenson in #38
• Test the catalogue's queries: find, date range, osculating orbits, poles and frames by @dmccoystephenson in #39
• HUD axial tilt: measure from the spin pole so Venus and Uranus read 177° and 98° by @dmccoystephenson in #41
• chore: release 0.7.0 by @dmccoystephenson in #42

Full Changelog: 0.6.0...0.7.0