a terminal-based tribute to Elite, by Float64

You are an independent commander with a leased freighter, a handful of credits, and a procedurally generated galaxy to make a living in. Dock at stations to trade commodities, refit your ship, take on delivery and bounty contracts, and build a combat reputation - or fly out into the black and get yourself killed by pirates. Full 3D flight, first-person: no yaw, roll then pitch to turn, throttle sets a cruising speed (and holds past zero into a slower reverse) rather than free thrust, and wireframe ships and a rotating station to fly into, just like the original.

https://float64co.github.io/Leet/

Or open index.html yourself in a browser (a Pyodide-powered build - first load fetches the Python runtime, ~12 MB, cached after). Progress saves to that browser via localStorage (Save Commander Log at a station) - it isn't synced anywhere else, and clearing the browser's site data for this page will lose it.

python3 leet.py

No dependencies beyond the Python standard library. Needs a real terminal (curses) - at least 92x30.

Flight: mouse aim - hold the left button and drag (Seek Cursor), or hands-free with no button held (Auto Seek Cursor, the default); C toggles between the two. Left/Right roll, Up/Down pitch, ,/. throttle down/up (holds past zero into a slower reverse), Space fires the laser, M fires a missile at the locked target, Tab cycles the target lock, E fires an ECM burst, D requests docking, G opens the galaxy map, Q/Esc/Backspace backs out of a menu or opens the pause menu, ? shows the full in-game help overlay.

Docked at a station: Up/Down and Enter navigate the menus (Market, Shipyard, Outfitting, Bulletin Board contracts, Commander Status, Refuel & Repair); Q/Esc/Backspace backs out.

python3 build_web.py

Inlines web_curses.py (an in-browser curses shim), leet.py itself (untouched), and web_bridge.py (glue) into template.html -> index.html, the whole game as one self-contained, ship-anywhere file. Re-run after changing any of those three files:

python3 -m py_compile leet.py web_curses.py web_bridge.py
python3 build_web.py

leet.py here is a plain copy of the standalone game (same file this project's terminal build uses) - if you change the canonical copy elsewhere, copy it back in here before rebuilding.

Two things this build carries that this project's other Pyodide ports (Terminal, TDFIF) don't need, because they're single-file games with mouse-drag-select and no save system, while L.E.E.T. is a single-file game with continuous mouse-driven flight and a save/continue system:

• Continuous mouse position. web_curses.py's Screen.push_mouse() coalesces consecutive, still-unconsumed pure-motion reports into the latest one instead of queueing every single browser mousemove event, so fast mouse movement can't outrun the game's own tick rate and build up an input backlog. A press or release is never coalesced away.
• Save persistence. Game.save() / App._load_save() in leet.py are completely unmodified - they still just call open() on leet.SAVE_PATH - but Pyodide's virtual filesystem is in-memory only and doesn't survive a page reload. web_bridge.py exposes web_read_save() for the JS side to mirror that file out to localStorage after every write, and template.html seeds it back into the virtual filesystem (via a SEED_SAVE_TEXT global, set before the bridge script runs) at the next boot, before the splash screen's "does a save exist" check ever runs.

Also unlike those two, this build does not speed up the tick rate (WEB_TICK_SPEEDUP = 1.0 in web_bridge.py): L.E.E.T.'s flight physics

• throttle easing, mouse-turn momentum spin-up/coast, laser tracer duration, missile speed - are all tuned in real-world time against TICK_MS, not just an animation-smoothness knob, so scaling the tick rate would scale gameplay speed and balance right along with it. 1:1 keeps the browser build feeling identical to the standalone one.