Every coastline begins as a function.
Landscapes are evaluated from mathematical fields in a fragment shader. Orbital positions are solved on the CPU and rendered by the same WebGL engine. There are no downloaded meshes, image textures, or external libraries. The six islands are authored terrain fields. The six fictional orbital systems use a numerical solution of Kepler’s equation, not an N-body gravity simulation. No external textures, models, fonts, or libraries are needed.
Orbit: drag to turn, wheel or pinch to approach, right-drag or Shift-drag to pan. Explore: drag to look, W/A/S/D to fly, Q/E to descend/rise, Shift to move faster. Touch or hold the on-screen arrows for movement. Flight has no collision detection; passing through a surface is allowed.
Capture world saves a PNG at the current rendering resolution with a caption. A recipe records the world, seed, sliders, light, time, and camera as JSON. Load it to restore that view. The equations panel exports the current world’s complete fragment shader and the field guide.
Islands gives you six coastline families with independent morphology controls. Orbital systems gives you circular, eccentric, inclined, period-ratio, binary, and moon variations. Scrub Epoch to inspect a moment; the play button resumes it. Paths can be hidden. Top view looks down the reference plane; tilted orbits remain tilted. “Discover a variation” changes both parameters and seed within the documented ranges.
Some primitive fields are exact signed distances. Terrain and implicit ring boundaries use practical distance estimators. Ray marching has finite steps and resolution; thin structures can alias. This explorer does not export meshes. Normals and height contours are surface diagnostics, not simulated physics.
Light detail is recommended on slower devices. Balanced and Fine add soft shadows and longer ray marches. “Pause” stops world time; automatic Orbit is independent. Motion begins paused when your operating system requests reduced motion. The application never makes network requests.
NASA JPL — Keplerian orbital positionsNASA — orbits and Kepler’s lawsMDN — the WebGL 2 rendering interface