I took a little break from working on macros and ended up falling back into one of my older projects instead: The Rift.

This game originally started life as Rift Exchange, a fairly simple browser-based space trading game. The basic idea was buying cargo in one system, hauling it somewhere else, selling it for a profit, and gradually building yourself up.

It has wandered pretty far from that original idea.

Over time I've added corporations, freight contracts, mining and salvage, shipbuilding, equipment, industry, NPC traffic, combat, frontier claims, player structures, exploration, and a much larger persistent universe. At this point calling it Rift Exchange almost undersells what the project has turned into, so for now I'm just calling the game The Rift.

And over the last few days, it finally started looking more like the game I've had in my head.

A Much Bigger Rift

The universe has grown from the original handful of systems into a 60-system star map, with different regions, security levels, routes, resources, and increasingly remote frontier space.

The Star Chart is now focused entirely on that larger strategic view: where you are, where you're going, which systems connect, and what route you're planning through the Rift.

But one of the biggest changes is what happens when you actually enter a system.

Instead of treating an entire solar system like a single menu location, the game now has a separate System Space layer.

A system can physically contain its star, Rift gates, stations, asteroid and mineral fields, salvage sites, anomalies, distress signals, outposts, and eventually other ships moving around you.

Your ship has an actual position in that space rather than simply being considered "at Ironwake" or "at Echelon Port."

Flying Somewhere Actually Means Flying There

This has changed navigation quite a bit.

Rift gates now physically exist inside System Space and correspond to the routes shown on the Star Chart. If you want to travel from one system to another, you first have to reach the correct outbound gate.

For example, a gate leading to Hollow Crown is literally the Hollow Crown Gate.

When you cross the Rift, you emerge at the reciprocal gate in the destination system rather than magically appearing in the middle of the system.

Stations are becoming physical locations too. You approach them, dock, use their services, and undock back into local space.

It's a relatively simple change conceptually, but it makes the universe feel considerably more like a place instead of a collection of menus.

Building the Foundation

The movement system itself is also being rebuilt around real local coordinates.

The server doesn't try to simulate every ship sixty times per second. Instead, ships receive movement orders with a starting position, destination, speed, and timestamps. The browser can animate that movement smoothly while the server remains authoritative about where the vessel actually is.

That same system is being used as the foundation for things like:

approaching stations and gates intercepting other vessels evading pursuit NPC traffic multi-system autopilot physical combat ranges later on

The idea is to keep the game lightweight enough to remain a browser game while still making the universe feel persistent and physical.

Still Very Much a Work in Progress

There's plenty left to do.

The new System Space layer is only now becoming properly playable, NPC fleet behavior still needs to make fuller use of it, and combat will eventually need to evolve around actual range, movement, pursuit, and ship systems.

But this is probably the first time I've looked at The Rift and felt like the pieces are starting to belong to the same game.

What started as a little space-market experiment has somehow turned into a persistent browser-based space game.

I'm okay with that.

Actually, I think I like it better this way.