A Tribes 2 tech demo for the browser. Katabatic from the original heightmap, skiing and jetting with the T2 armor numbers, base assets and vehicles, and bots on an authoritative Node server.

Status: all seven demo milestones shipped; gameplay and T2 fidelity still have open work. See the current issue list and continuation notes. See docs/superpowers/specs/ for the design and docs/superpowers/plans/ for what each milestone shipped.

pnpm install
pnpm dev

assets/out/ (the converted Tribes 2 data) is committed to the repo, so a clean checkout does not need pnpm assets:fetch or pnpm assets:build first. pnpm dev runs scripts/dev.ts, which starts dev:server and dev:client together.

Open http://127.0.0.1:5173, click to capture the mouse, and ski.

pnpm dev

This starts the authoritative server on ws://127.0.0.1:7777 with 31 idle bots and the Vite client on http://127.0.0.1:5173. Open http://127.0.0.1:5173/?server=ws://127.0.0.1:7777 to join. Without the ?server= parameter the client runs the single-player path from milestone 1.

Run the halves separately with pnpm dev:server and pnpm dev:client. The server takes --bots N and --port N. The installed CLI is clans-server --bots 31 --port 7777.

Press F1 in a networked session for ping, snapshot bytes per second, packet loss estimate, prediction error, entity count, the active projectile count, and the most recent kill-feed event. The same F1 panel's lil-gui god-mode checkbox makes the local player invulnerable. Networked, it toggles server-side via a God message; single-player, it zeroes damage locally every tick.

Three armors are playable: Light, Medium, Heavy, each with its own speed, weapon slots, and ammo caps. Walk onto a powered inventory station to switch armor or equip a Repair Pack.

Each team's base runs on power: at least one living generator keeps that team's stations, sensors, base turrets, and force fields online. Destroy both of a team's generators and everything else on that team goes dark — an unpowered station refuses a loadout change, an unpowered turret stops firing, and an unpowered force field stops blocking. A Repair Pack beam heals a damaged player, base asset, or friendly turret within 10 m. Equip it at an inventory station, aim at your turret, and hold R. Friendly turret wrecks can be restored after enough repair; walls block the beam. Destroyed vehicles and other base assets cannot be revived.

Base turrets (Plasma and AA barrels on the large turret base, plus the smaller Sentry Turret) acquire targets within range and terrain line of sight. Interior walls block projectiles, but turret acquisition still needs interior occlusion (see the issue list). Katabatic's eleven interior buildings render and block movement and projectiles through a per-instance collision grid built once at load, not brute-force triangle checks. Press C for a top-down commander map showing your team's base status and any enemy contacts inside your team's sensor coverage (see Command circuit below for issuing orders from that map). See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-05-clans-tribes2-browser-demo-design.md for exactly how power, shields, and sensor coverage work.

Inventory stations show an optional E prompt; vehicle stations activate on contact without one. Popup menus release the mouse cursor; close them with their Close button or Escape, then click the game to resume mouse look.

Each team's vehicle pad spawns a Shrike (a fast, armed flyer) or a Wildcat (a hovering ground scout) once its team has power. Walk onto the small control station beside the pad to open the spawn menu. Press 1 for a Shrike or 2 for a Wildcat, or click its button. The control station uses the original model and the pad's authored attachment position. Picking a vehicle replaces whatever the pad already hosts. The pad animates during a 6.5-second fabrication sequence; the vehicle appears after 4.8 seconds, its wings unfold, and you are automatically teleported into it. Walk up to an unoccupied vehicle to board it automatically — your own weapons go silent, the camera moves to the Shrike's authored cockpit eye (the Wildcat retains a chase camera). WASD/mouse control the vehicle, with damped steering and A/D lateral thrust on the Shrike. The Shrike hovers without spending jet energy. Holding jet without WASD provides upward thrust; combining jet with WASD boosts the current heading. The flight controller is a demo adaptation using T2 force values, not a port of Torque's rigid-body solver. The Shrike's twin-barrel blaster fires from your own fire button. Both vehicles take collision, ground-impact, and weapon damage against a shielded energy pool, and explode past their damage cap, ejecting the pilot. Each team's AA barrel turret now finds and fires on enemy vehicles in range with line of sight. Press E again to dismount; leave boarding range before walking back to board again. The vehicle HUD shows shield energy and hull health separately. Collision damage depends on speed into the surface, so a fast glancing scrape does not count as a head-on crash. Destruction produces an expanding explosion and sound.

Katabatic on foot, with the corner HUD and original weapon model:

Vehicle fabrication using the original pad animation:

The Shrike cockpit, with its nose visible and flight instruments below:

Press C to open the commander map. Click a location, then press 1 (Attack), 2 (Defend), or 3 (Repair) to issue an order to your team's bots at that location. A new order replaces whatever order your team already has; there is no order queue, and an order expires on its own after 90 seconds if it isn't replaced first. Bots read the active order off the server and prioritize it over their own default behavior.

Weapon fire, explosions, footsteps, jetting, ski onset, flag cues, station activation, and generator/station/vehicle loops use original Tribes 2 recordings from audio.vl2. The asset pipeline copies the mirror's browser-compatible M4A versions; Web Audio decodes and caches them. Ambient loops follow the original profiles' audible ranges and stop when unpowered, destroyed, or out of range. This is still a simplified mix: explosion and footstep variants, full directional acoustics, and continuous weapon-loop timing are not yet complete.

The HUD uses original GUI bitmaps for its compass, weapon icons, reticles, and vehicle instruments. Layout is adapted for browser resolutions. See the reference audit for original screenshots and source assets; inventory/preferences menus remain simplified.

Press V to open a voice-bind quick-chat menu. Digit keys 1-9 send one of nine preset lines (target/flag calls, thanks, repair, incoming, yes/no, and praise). Each selection plays its original Bot1 voice-pack recording and is broadcast to every other client in the match. The nine menu entries are a compact selection from the original voice tree.

A client-only build deploys to GitHub Pages at https://strml.github.io/clans/ on every push to main (.github/workflows/deploy-pages.yml, building apps/demo). GitHub Pages only serves static files, so the hosted page has no server behind it — it shows a "bring your own server" prompt until you append ?server=ws://your-host:7777 pointing at a Clans server you're running yourself (pnpm dev:server, or pnpm dev for both halves) and that your browser can reach.

The Pages site is served over HTTPS. A browser blocks a plain ws:// connection from an HTTPS page as mixed content unless the target is a secure context on its own — in practice, ws://127.0.0.1:7777 or ws://localhost:7777 works, but a remote host needs wss:// (put a TLS-terminating proxy in front of your server) or the connection will never open. If the demo can't reach the server you gave it, it shows a "couldn't connect" message rather than staying silently blank.

Airborne movement preserves horizontal momentum below the armor's speed-resistance threshold. Jumping and vertical jet thrust do not apply an extra horizontal drag term. Movement keys add directional thrust while jetting, preserving existing sideways momentum. Releasing ski on landing restores normal running control, which can brake speeds above the run cap. Energy recharges even while jetting: light armor provides about 3.5 seconds of continuous thrust from full energy. Capacity and drain use the T2 script values; jet steering strength is explicit demo tuning. Energy Packs are not implemented.

All five first-person weapons use their original textured models and authored grip points. Authored activation, disc spin/reload, Chaingun spin/flash, Mortar recoil and Blaster flash sequences now follow the simulated weapon states. DTS visibility tracks are restored from the exported metadata. Animated texture sequences still display their first frame, including the Laser Rifle’s indicator lights; its exported model has no mechanical firing clip. Self-illuminating surfaces retain their texture colors without scene lighting, and additive glows retain their original blending instead of rendering as solid white faces. Imported structures and vehicles retain their GLB materials and geometry. Source power/destruction visibility is supported for structures, and turret joints now track targets and play authored firing sequences. Other mechanical animation coverage remains incomplete. Failed shape loads retain a neutral fallback and report the asset URL in the browser console. If a vehicle GLB is unavailable, the procedural vehicle remains usable; the legacy STL fallback has no GLB converter.

Spawn areas are sampled for clear outdoor ground, shared by the local game and server for joining players, bots, and respawns. The selection checks slopes, terrain cut-outs, headroom, and space to walk; mission sphere centers are not used as player transforms.

The asset build resolves original diffuse textures from each GLB's resource_path, packages 86 texture files locally, and preserves baked interior lightmaps. Animated texture lists currently display their first frame. packages/assets/src/texture-sources.json records the original source paths. These textures add approximately 7 MB to the assets.

pnpm test          # unit tests (Vitest)
pnpm e2e           # browser tests (Playwright, needs `pnpm exec playwright install chromium` once)
pnpm lint          # ESLint and Prettier
pnpm typecheck     # tsc -b
pnpm assets:build  # regenerate assets/out from the T2 data files (downloads them on first run)

• packages/sim: the game simulation. Pure TypeScript, no DOM or Node imports, so it runs in the browser today and on the server. Health, fall damage, respawn, four weapons plus grenades, a projectile store, CTF flags and scoring, base objects and per-team power, turrets with terrain line of sight, a uniform-grid interior collider, the Repair Pack beam, and the Shrike/Wildcat vehicles (flight/hover physics, mount/dismount, shielded damage, destruction, ejection) all live here.
• packages/assets: build-time pipeline that turns Tribes 2 data files into assets/out/, including the interior/base-object/turret/vehicle .glb shapes (with an STL-then-procedural fallback chain for the vehicles) and their extracted collision triangles.
• packages/client: Three.js renderer, input, projectile/explosion/laser-beam/flag/base-object/turret/interior/vehicle rendering, the station loadout menu, the vehicle pad spawn menu, the commander map, a sample-based Web Audio engine, the HUD, debug overlay.
• packages/protocol: binary wire format. Message schemas (including Event, God, Loadout, VehicleSpawn, CommandOrder, and VoiceBind), full and delta snapshots with projectiles/flags/base-objects/turrets/vehicles/scores/active team orders sent in full each tick, a world hash for tests.
• packages/server: Node, ws, 32 ms catch-up tick loop, per-client input sessions, snapshots delta-compressed against the client's last acked snapshot, lag-compensated hit detection for the Chaingun and Laser Rifle, respawn, CTF, base-object/turret/interior/vehicle loading, and a per-team command-order board (Attack/Defend/Repair, one active order per team, no queue).
• packages/bots: server-side bot AI, read-only over the sim's exported API. A coarse waypoint graph (Dijkstra, seeded from spawn points, flag stands, and base objects) for navigation; perception that spots a living, unmounted enemy in line of sight and skips a low-health/low-energy retreat to a friendly station; combat that leads targets by projectile speed and prefers the Chaingun close, the Spinfusor/Mortar at range; CTF role assignment (Attacker/Defender) and a per-tick brain that chases or returns the flag, escorts a carrying teammate, heals at a station, mounts a nearby vehicle when nothing else is more urgent, and prioritizes a commander's active Attack/Defend/Repair order over its own default behavior. The server keeps both teams filled toward 16 a side by adding or removing bots on join/leave, never touching a human's seat; a debug-overlay row shows each team's bot count and idle/attack/defend split.

Every gameplay number (armor mass, jet force, speed caps) is copied from the T2 base scripts and cited in the spec, except a handful of documented "ours" values where a script constant had no direct equivalent under this codebase's own physics model (each one commented at its definition and called out in the milestone's own PR). If a number looks wrong, check the script before changing it.

See NOTICE.md. Tribes 2 belongs to its rights holders. This is a non-commercial fan project.