Documentation / Controls / Game modes

Game modes

GAME MODES, on the start screen and in the pause menu, opens a list of the flights that are played rather than flown. Choosing one - with the keys or with a click - lays out its world and opens its first stage; choosing FREE FLIGHT puts the world and the settings you chose back. The one being played is marked, the panel closes behind whatever is chosen, and Esc or BACK leaves without changing anything.

A mode brings its own world with it, so the ENVIRONMENT setting is not consulted while one is being played. The worlds the modes are flown over are deliberately thin - what a mode asks the pilot to read is the objective, not the scenery around it.

A mode is three or four stages long, and every stage gets harder at exactly the thing its mode is about. A stage that is flown out is held on screen for a beat and then the next one is laid out; a crash puts the stage back to its beginning rather than ending the run. The card along the bottom of the screen says what is being played, what it wants, and how far through it you are - along the top of it on a phone held sideways, where the bottom is the pads and the band between them is the readouts.

The clock

Every stage is timed, and the card carries both the clock and the best that stage of that mode has ever been flown in:

TIME 0:42.1  ·  BEST 0:38.4

The clock runs from the moment a stage is laid out to the moment its objective is met, so neither the beat a finished stage is held on screen for nor a pause halfway down the course is part of the time. A stage started again - by a crash, by R, or from the pause menu - is timed from nothing, so what is recorded is the attempt that finished rather than everything done on the way there. A stage nobody has flown out reads -:--.- as its best.

When a stage is flown out, the card gives its objective line up for a beat and reports what the attempt came to - NEW BEST when it took the board, STAGE TIME when it did not. Best times are kept per stage per mode in localStorage, so a course already flown is something to beat rather than something to repeat. A browser that refuses storage costs the board its memory and nothing else: the flight goes on and the clock still runs.

Runway Landing

RUNWAY LANDING opens in the air over open country with one strip cut into it. The first stage puts the strip under the nose over flat ground; each one after it opens further out, further off the line back to it, over a shorter strip, in higher country - until the last opens with the runway behind your shoulder in ground you have to read to reach it. A landing counts when it is soft enough and square enough to be one, which is the same rule the rest of the game uses.

The help on the approach

The ground gets harder stage by stage, and the help goes as it does. The first stage is given the whole of it: a bar across the threshold you are landing over, and an extended centreline running back down the approach as a line of marks between you and the strip. The second stage keeps the bar and loses the line. By the last there is neither, and the strip is where you work out it is.

Both are laid off the same end of the runway the stage opens you out from, so the marks lead to the threshold you are actually flying at rather than to the far end of the pavement. The lead-in runs 3200 units back down the approach in eight marks, each standing clear of whatever ground it is laid over - so it climbs a rise and drops into a dip rather than burying itself.

What a landing came to

A landing is not over at the touchdown. The stage's clock stops there - the time is the one the approach was flown in - but the card waits until the aircraft has rolled to a stop before saying anything, so what you read it against is the strip you are sitting on rather than the one going past the window. A pilot who touches down and leaves the throttle open is waited on for ten seconds and then told anyway.

What it says is the four things that make a landing good or bad, and the score they come to together:

LANDING  ·  85
DOWN THE STRIP  2001 ft
OFF THE CENTRELINE  59 ft
SINK RATE  830 ft/min
OFF THE STRIP  4°

The LANDED banner comes off the middle of the screen as this goes up. The two were on screen for exactly the same moment, and the first line here names the landing and reads the score off it, which is everything the banner said and four lines more - so the banner is the one that gives way rather than being drawn over the top of the card.

The readouts stand down with it on a machine flown from the glass, and for the same reason. The card is bounded there to the part of the column the readouts are not using, which holds what it says in flight and not five lines more - and an aircraft stopped on a strip reads zero knots, zero feet a minute and the strip's own elevation, so of the two wanting that column it is the readouts with nothing to say. They come back the moment the breakdown does, which includes a screen cleared with Tab while the aircraft is still sitting there. On a screen wide enough that the card has gone by the readouts rather than been bounded under them - 680 pixels across and up, and tall enough to keep them in their own corner - they never stand down at all, because there is nothing there for them to stand down for. A screen short enough to put both of them in the middle lane between the pads is back to one column whatever its width, and there they stand down again.

Each of the four is marked on its own reading: full marks for dead on, falling straight to nothing at the limit it is allowed. The aim is a fifth of the way down the strip from the threshold, and a third of the strip either side of that aiming point is worth nothing at all - so landing on the numbers and landing halfway down are not the same landing. Off the centreline is measured against the half width, the sink rate against the landing limit of 18 units/s, and the heading against the 25 degrees a landing is allowed to be off the strip. DOWN THE STRIP goes negative for a touchdown short of the threshold, which is an undershoot and reads as one. The four marks averaged and put out of a hundred are the score.

Flying through Loops

FLYING THROUGH LOOPS opens lined up on the first gate of a course laid across a shallow valley. The gate the course is waiting on is lit green, the ones still to come are amber, and the ones behind you are dim. Only the gate the course is up to counts: the objective is the course in order, so flying back through one already behind you, or skipping ahead to one further on, is not progress. Each stage lays more gates, tighter, closer together, on a course that bends more.

Gates laid over

The first stage is round hoops, upright, and flying through one is a matter of getting to it. Every stage after it lays its gates over, and closes them up one way across while it does: a gate is wider along its span than it is tall, so the angle it was laid at is an angle you have to match. A course past the first stage is flown wings-with-the-gate rather than upright all the way down it.

Closing the gate up is what makes the bank mean anything. A circle turned about its own axis is the same circle, so a hoop that has to be flown at the angle it was laid at has to be narrower one way across than the other. By the last stage a gate is a little over half as tall as it is wide and can lie a whole radian over, either way - a course banked one way only would be a course flown with one wing down from end to end.

Seeing the whole course

The whole course is drawn on the minimap the moment the stage is laid out, in the same three colours the hoops are drawn in. It is on screen before you have flown anything, so the first gate is not the only one you have ever seen and which way the course runs is something to read rather than to remember. A gate past the edge of the square the chart covers is held hollow at that edge.

Finding the next gate

While the gate the course is waiting on is more than 35 degrees off the nose - far enough off to be nowhere on the screen whatever shape the window is - the card points at it:

↑ LOOP 3  ·  045°  ·  4200 ft

An arrow for which way to turn, the compass bearing to fly, and how far there is to go, on whichever scale the altimeter is set to. It goes away the moment the gate is in front of you, because a gate on the screen is already pointing at itself. It is the last line written on the card, so it is also the first to go on a narrow screen with the pads out and less than five rows of room: the chart in the corner is drawing the same gate, held hollow at its own edge once the ground shown has been left behind.

A gate gone past

Cross a gate's plane outside the hoop, going the way the course runs, and the card says so for a few seconds:

LOOP 3 MISSED  ·  COME ROUND

Nothing about the run moves: the course is still waiting on that gate, which is what lets it be flown again. What the miss buys is being told, rather than circling a course that has quietly stopped counting. Turning round and coming back through the plane on the way to lining the gate up again is the turn rather than a second miss - only the direction the course runs counts. Flying a loop backwards, on the other hand, is still flying it: a loop is a loop from both sides.

Dead Stick

DEAD STICK opens over the same open country a landing is practised over, with one difference that is the whole mode: there is no engine. The lever is dead from the first frame and stays dead, so the height you open with is the only height you are going to have, and the strip is far enough off that reaching it is a glide to be planned rather than a descent to be flown.

How a glide flies

With nothing pulling, the nose sets the airspeed instead of the throttle. Put the nose down and you buy speed with the height you had left to spend; hold it up and you give the speed back. The lever still moves under Shift and Ctrl - there is simply nothing on the end of it, and the throttle readout stays at 0%.

A level nose glides about twelve times as far over the ground as it falls, and a little nose-up does better than that - which is the thing the mode is about finding. Better than that again is close to the stall, so the far end of the glide is a knife edge rather than a free ride. A dive reaches less, and steeply: the speed it buys is bought with the ground you had left to cover. Whatever attitude you hold, a glide always comes down. Pulling the nose up buys a slower descent rather than height: the nose counts for no more height than the airspeed can pay for, so no attitude the aircraft can be held in climbs on a dead engine. The one thing that holds height is speed rather than attitude - at or above cruise the wing cancels gravity outright, so a level nose holds until that speed is gone, which with nothing pulling is a matter of seconds.

The level off is not a way round that. Space trims a climb out and holds the altitude you were at, and it needs an engine to do it - with the lever dead it is refused, the nose is left where you put it, and the glide carries on down. Holding a glide on the trim would be a dead stick that never lands, which is the one thing the mode is built on not happening. An engine that dies under a hold already in force hands the aircraft straight back for the same reason.

The stages

Four stages, and what changes is how much of the glide you are given. HIGH KEY opens with the strip ahead and well below, comfortably inside a level glide, with the threshold bar and the lead-in both drawn. OFF THE LINE puts the strip off to one side, so the turn is part of the glide, and keeps the bar alone. ABEAM and BEHIND YOU are given neither, open lower, further out, over a shorter strip, and want the nose held where the glide is best rather than merely pointed at the runway.

A glide that falls short ends the way any arrival on ground the aircraft cannot use ends, and the stage starts again from the top with the height back.

Cargo Run

CARGO RUN is landings strung together into a route: land at one strip, then at the next, on the fuel the run is given. The world carries a strip per stop rather than the single strip every other mode is flown over, and they are laid a stated distance apart, so a later stage is a longer route rather than a busier field.

The budget

The budget only spends while the engine is open. The burn is the lever setting itself, so a wide open throttle costs a second of budget per second, half open costs half of that, and a closed throttle costs nothing at all. Height traded for a glide is fuel not spent - which is what makes the route worth planning rather than merely flying, and why a run flown with the lever eased back reaches a strip the same budget flown flat out does not.

What is left is written where the time to beat usually goes, because on a route it is the number you are racing:

TIME 1:12.4  ·  FUEL 68%

Spend the last of it and the engine stops. The stage does not: the rest of the route is flown as a dead stick, which is either the end of the attempt or the best landing you ever make. A stage started again gets its budget back with it.

The legs

Only the strip the route is up to counts, which is the same rule a course of loops is flown under and for the same reason: the objective is the order as much as the arrivals. Landing back at the strip you have left is somewhere to be rather than progress, and so is skipping ahead to one further on. Which leg you are on is on the card, and the strip it ends at is pointed out the way a gate is:

→ LEG 2  ·  073°  ·  13780 ft

Unlike a gate, that line stays up while the strip is straight ahead. A gate is a lit hoop and points at itself; a strip is a grey mark on grey country several miles off, and a pilot looking straight at one has no way of knowing it. The help on the approach moves to the strip you are flying at next, so the lead-in never points back at the one behind you.

The route is drawn on the chart the way a course of loops is: every strip of it in the order you land at them, the leg you are flying marked green and the ones behind you dim, with a strip past the edge of the square held hollow at that edge. It is there from the moment the stage is laid out, so how far the route runs and which way it turns is something to read before you take off.

Each arrival is read off the way any landing is, and the breakdown stays up until you are airborne again - after which it is describing a landing you have left behind. Only the last leg finishes the stage.

Search and Rescue

SEARCH AND RESCUE is flown over back country: rough, wooded ground with no strip anywhere in it. Somewhere out in it is a marker, and what you are given to find it with is a bearing and a distance from where you started:

MARKER  ·  287°  ·  22300 ft

That line is the whole of the briefing. It carries no arrow, because there is nothing pointing: it is read off the start rather than off the aircraft, so it says the same thing however far you have flown and whichever way you have turned. Fly the bearing, hold it, and know when you have gone far enough. Nothing swings round to the marker as you get near it.

Where the marker stands is marked on the chart, green the way a gate being waited on is, and held hollow at the edge of the square once it lies past the ground the chart covers - which on a long leg is most of the flight. That is the same place the briefing points to rather than a second opinion about it, and it is what a short screen leaves you when it takes the briefing line off the card.

The marker itself is a mast with a lit head on top, tall enough to stand clear of the trees, with a ring laid on the ground around it at the distance that counts as beside it. The ring follows the country rather than lying flat across it, so what it shows you is the ground you are about to land on.

Setting down

Then get down beside it. There is nothing prepared to arrive on - a search that ended at a runway would be a search with the answer written on it - so the flat piece you find is the flat piece you found. The stage is flown out when the aircraft is on the ground, stopped, and inside the ring, in one piece. Rolling through the ring at flying speed is a pass over it, and a wreck beside the marker is not a rescue.

Three stages, each a longer leg out, off the heading you open on, into rougher country, with a tighter ring at the end of it.

Traffic Pattern

TRAFFIC PATTERN is the one mode that is not about arriving. Every other landing mode asks what the touchdown came to and nothing at all about the flying that got there; this one reads the aircraft against the leg of the circuit it is on every frame, and marks each leg on how near the heading and the height it was held. The landing is still scored, and it is a fifth of the circuit rather than the whole of it.

It is also the one mode that opens on the ground. Every other stage opens in the air because a takeoff is the part nobody is being scored on - here the takeoff is the first leg of the thing being scored, so the aircraft is sitting on the threshold with the lever closed when the stage is laid out.

The five legs

A circuit is five legs flown in order, each one ending at the turn onto the next:

The turn onto the downwind belongs to the climb out rather than standing as a crosswind leg of its own, which is what leaves the downwind exactly parallel to the strip. The downwind is the leg that is genuinely about holding a heading, and a leg laid diagonally would be asking you to hold a number nothing on the ground explains.

The circuit is a left-hand one - the field is off your left shoulder on the climb out - and it is laid off the strip rather than placed world by world, so the same pattern at any strip in any world is the circuit that strip would be flown.

Each turn is drawn in the world as a mast standing up to the height its leg wants, lit green when it is the one you are flying to and dim once it is behind you. The whole circuit is on the chart from the moment the stage is laid out, so the shape is something to read before you open the throttle.

Holding a leg

While you are on a leg the card says what it is asking for:

DOWNWIND  ·  1328 FT  ·  270°

The height is read off a ramp between the two ends of the leg rather than as one number for the whole of it. A leg whose ends are at the same height - the downwind - is a height to hold; a leg whose ends differ is a climb or a descent to fly at a steady rate. That is what lets one reading serve all five without any of them needing a rule of its own.

Both errors are measured against time rather than against frames, so what a leg comes to does not depend on how fast the machine drawing it is. At the turn the leg is closed and marked, and the card says what it came to for a few seconds:

DOWNWIND  ·  HELD 92

Each of the two readings gets full marks for dead on and falls straight to nothing at the miss the stage allows - 320 feet and 25 degrees by default, drawn in stage by stage. The two averaged and put out of a hundred are the leg's mark.

A leg crossed in a single frame has no time on it to have held badly, and reads as flown. A leg flown to its turn is marked there and stays marked: what happens after the turn belongs to the next leg and is held against that one's height and heading instead.

Finishing the circuit

The last leg is the one a turn cannot close. Final ends at the threshold, and an aircraft crosses that threshold on every go-around it flies - so the circuit is finished by the landing rather than by the crossing, and a landing made anywhere earlier in the pattern finishes nothing. Go round again as often as you like; the stage ends when you are down off a final.

Four stages. WIDE CIRCUIT is a big pattern over flat ground with room to settle on each leg. STANDARD draws it in to the usual shape over rising ground. CLOSE IN flies it lower with little room between one turn and the next, and SHORT FIELD is a short strip, a tight pattern, and nothing given away on any leg.

Canyon Run

CANYON RUN is the length of a corridor flown under a ceiling and between two walls, cut by cut. The corridor is laid across deep country cut by canyons, and it is laid rather than found: the generator draws its canyons wherever the noise puts them, so a run that went looking for one would be a run whose difficulty was whatever the seed handed it.

Each cut is drawn as a post at either wall and a beam across the top of them at the ceiling. The opening you fly at is bounded on three sides by something drawn, and on the fourth by the ground - which needs no drawing, being already the thing that ends a flight. The ceiling is held a declared height over whatever is underneath, so it follows the country rather than lying flat across it.

What counts as through

A cut counts when the aircraft crosses it inside the walls and under the beam. Climbing over the top is not a way through - it is the one way the mode could be cheated, and the only thing it guards against. There is no floor to the cut, so a low pass is still a pass.

Reach a cut over the lid or wide of a wall and the card says which it was:

CUT 4  ·  OVER THE TOP

Nothing about the run moves. The cut is still the one you are on, which is what lets it be flown again - coming back down and coming back in are different corrections, so you are told which one you need. Turning round and crossing the plane on the way back is the turn rather than a second fault, exactly as it is for a gate gone past.

Only the cut the run is up to counts, and the run opens halfway between the floor and the lid of the first one, a full spacing back from it and lined up on it. The whole corridor is on the chart from the start, and the cut you are flying to is lit green in the world the way a gate is.

Four stages, and both the things the mode is about move together: OPEN REACH is a wide cut with plenty of air over it, NARROWS brings the walls in and the ceiling down, THE RIM is low enough that the rim is above you the whole way, and THE SLOT is a cut barely wider than the turn it asks for, with a lid on it.

Photo Survey

PHOTO SURVEY is the mode that asks a question of the camera. Every other objective is met by being somewhere - through the gate, down on the strip, stopped beside the marker. This one is met by being somewhere and saying so: F2 is the report, and the mode's whole question is whether the aircraft was where the brief asked when it was pressed.

The photograph is taken either way. The camera belongs to the pilot, and a mode that swallowed a picture for being of the wrong thing would be a mode that broke it - what the survey decides is only whether it counted.

The window

Three readings, all at once:

A landmark photographed from directly overhead at four thousand feet is a photograph of a roof, and the brief asked for an elevation - which is why there are three readings rather than one. The card has room for two of them:

MILL TOWN  ·  2100 FT  ·  160°

The range is the one of the three that is a place, and a place can be drawn - so it is laid round the landmark as a pair of circles on the ground, the near edge and the far edge of the band, and read off the ground instead of off a row that has no room for it. Each landmark also stands on a mast, lit green while it is the one the survey is waiting on.

A shot that missed

Take one from outside the window and the card says the first thing that was wrong with it:

MILL TOWN  ·  TOO FAR OUT

One fault rather than all of them - a line that lists three is a line nobody reads in the second it is up, and a pilot who fixes the first comes round and is told the second. The range is reported first, then the height, then WRONG SIDE for a shot taken from the wrong bearing. The survey stays on that landmark until it is caught.

The list is worked in the order it is written, the way a course of loops is flown in the order it was laid. A list that could be worked in any order would want a chart lighting all of it at once and a card naming none of it, and the instruments the rest of the game is read on say one thing at a time on purpose.

Three stages over mixed country with something to look at in it - town, forest, water and standing rock. SHORT LIST is three landmarks close in with a wide window on each; LONGER LIST is five, further apart, with the windows drawn in; FULL LIST is six out to the far country, each caught one way only.

Opening a stage directly

The panel opens a mode where the pilot is meant to start it, and the stages after that are reached by flying the ones before them. A mode can also be asked for on the address the page is opened at, at whichever stage you name:

http://localhost:8080/index.html?mode=cargo-run&stage=2

The number is the one on the card, so STAGE 2 OF 3 is stage=2. The stage is laid out on the first frame with nothing flown before it: its own world, its own seed, its own start, and the clock at nothing.

A request that cannot be met - a mode nothing answers to, a stage past the last one, a stage that is not a number - opens nothing and writes the reason to the browser console. It does not open the nearest stage instead: something checking the page would then be reading a stage it did not ask for with no way to tell.

That is what this is for. A route's stages stand thousands of units of flying apart, and a landing cannot be handed to the page from outside, so before this the later stages of CARGO RUN could only be reached by flying every leg of every stage ahead of them - which put them out of reach of anything automated.