About STRATA

How it is built

• One simulation in two places. Movement, weapons and the map are a deterministic TypeScript simulation that runs on the server and in your browser. Your client predicts your own movement and reconciles with the server, so the controls respond instantly.
• An authoritative 60 Hz server with a compact binary protocol over WebSocket. Other players are interpolated smoothly, and hits are checked against where targets were at the moment you fired.
• A map built from shapes. The island is made of signed-distance-field primitives, turned into collision lines and painted pixel by pixel in Web Workers: grass, snow, rock strata, back walls and depth shading.
• Crisp pixels at any zoom. The world is drawn into a low-resolution art-pixel image with PixiJS and scaled up with a sharp-bilinear filter, so scrolling stays smooth while every pixel stays square.
• Soldiers animated in code. Characters are cut-out rigs with procedural walking, foot placement and two-bone IK. When they die they become physics ragdolls that carry the force of the killing shot.
• Sound made at startup. Every sound effect is synthesized with Web Audio when the game loads, and the music reacts to how intense the fight is.
• A server in your browser. The match server also runs inside a Web Worker, which is how offline matches against bots work.

Art direction

"Quiet world, loud play": the sky, mesas and terrain keep low contrast and muted colour, so soldiers, guns and loot stand out at a glance. Terrain uses five-step colour ramps per material, the backdrop recedes into fog, and soldiers and loot get a single outline and rim light.

Credits

• Fonts: Silkscreen by Jason Kottke and Pixelify Sans by Stefie Justprince, both under the SIL Open Font License.
• Rendering: PixiJS. Ragdoll physics: Rapier.

Facts