🏎️ Procedural Racer

An arcade car-racing game where every race is a brand-new world. It combines two systems:

1. Procedural generation — a seeded random number generator builds a unique closed-loop race track (random points → relaxed → smoothed with a Catmull-Rom spline), then picks a biome (meadow / desert / snow / night) and scatters matching scenery (trees, cacti, snowy pines). Same seed = same world, so tracks are shareable and replayable.
2. Vehicle physics — a top-down car model with engine force, drag, speed-scaled steering, and a tire-grip model that splits velocity into forward vs. lateral components. Killing most of the lateral velocity is grip — reduce it and you get real understeer/oversteer, plus a handbrake drift with skid marks.

Race 3 laps against the clock and chase your best lap time.

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▶️ How to run locally

The game is a single self-contained index.html — no build step, no dependencies needed to play.

Option 1 — just open the file (fastest)

Double-click index.html, or open it in your browser:

# Windows
start index.html

That's it. Everything (graphics, physics, procedural generation) runs in the browser.

Option 2 — local web server (recommended for phones / sharing)

Opening a raw file won't load on another device. Serve the folder over your network:

# from inside the ProceduralRacer/ folder
python -m http.server 8000

Then visit:

• On this PC: http://localhost:8000
• On your phone (same Wi-Fi): http://<your-PC-IP>:8000 (find the IP with ipconfig on Windows)

Any static server works (npx serve, VS Code Live Server, etc.).

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🎮 Controls

Keyboard

Key	Action
W / ↑	Throttle
S / ↓	Brake / reverse
A D / ← →	Steer
Space	Handbrake (drift)

Touch (phones / tablets — controls appear automatically)

• On-screen ‹ › steer buttons, ▲ gas, ⟂ brake, and a DRIFT pad.
• Multi-touch: hold gas + steer + drift at the same time.
• Steering toggle (top of screen): switch between 🎮 Touch steer (default) and 📱 Tilt steer, which uses the phone's accelerometer. Tilt mode calibrates to however you're holding the device the moment you enable it.

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🔁 Tracks & seeds

• ↻ New Race — generate a fresh random track + biome.
• ⟲ Restart — replay the current track from the start line.
• Type a seed (a number or any word) in the seed box, then New Race, to load a specific reproducible world. Share the seed and a friend gets the exact same track.

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🧪 Running the test (optional, dev only)

A headless smoke test confirms there are no JS errors and that the track, physics, checkpoints, biome, and seed-determinism all work. It uses Puppeteer (a real Chromium engine):

npm install     # installs Puppeteer (downloads Chromium, one-time)
node test.mjs

Expected output:

PASS — no JS errors; track, car, checkpoints, and biome all valid.

node_modules/ is git-ignored — it's only needed for the test, not to play.

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📁 Files

File	Purpose
index.html	The entire game (rendering, physics, procedural generation, input)
test.mjs	Headless Puppeteer smoke test
package.json	Dev dependency (Puppeteer) for the test
.gitignore	Ignores node_modules/, caches, OS/editor cruft

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🛠️ Tech

Plain HTML5 <canvas> + vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no assets — all graphics are drawn procedurally at runtime.