v0.2.7 is now live at slingshotspeeders.com

Patch Notes & Improvements

• MapMaker Orbit Updates: MapMaker can keep more than one orbit circle. A second one used to collapse into a small hold circle. It now stays an orbit, including one placed farther from the body.
• Checkpoint Navigation: The direction mark under a checkpoint line is a short chevron tucked under the line.
• UI & Numbering: Each checkpoint and ring shows its place as a faint number, so the one after the blinking checkpoint is the next number.
• Mobile Controls: On a phone, a finger scrolls Home and the MapMaker list. A short tap still presses the card. A tab that sits in the MENU band can be tapped.

Skins & Shop Changes

• New Skins: Medivac sits with Plague as a time-limited Brick skin. Foliage is a Brick skin and Crimson is a Twin skin. Brick's stock picture is the new hull.
• Shop Shelf Availability: Brick, Halo, and Twin skins stay on the pax shop shelf, even before you own that hull.
• Automatic Hull Unlocks: Buying a skin whose hull you do not own buys that hull too.

Season Zero Ending & Rewards

Season Zero ends 1 November 2026. About a week left.

• Season Zero Reward: Standings winners declared.
• Data Archiving: When it ends, this season's data is archived. The archive stays public. The look at that record lives on its own, apart from the live season.
• Fresh Start: The next season starts fresh. One map is there at the start. Every other map has to be made in the new season. Season Zero maps do not come with you.

Season Zero ends 1 November 2026.

Fly one signed-in run and Season Zero is yours. It paints Brick. It is not in the shop. A guest flight does not count. A flight on or after 1 November does not earn it.

If you already flew signed in during Season Zero, it is already on the account. Open the shop and equip it.

The skin stays after the season ends.

Play is at https://slingshotspeeders.com/

What changed is what draws the game, and one loading-screen stop that was fixed.

What you will notice

The corner chip says v0.2.6. Season page says the same.

The loading screen no longer gives up before the engine starts. The page used to ask the canvas for WebGL2 itself, then treat an empty reply as "turn on hardware acceleration" and stop. That early request is also the one that used to drop the only context the engine can draw with. The page does not open a context anymore. The engine opens it once, after the canvas is up.

If the picture still dies after that, the view parks instead of drawing over a dead surface. That part is unchanged from the last version.

Bevy 0.20

The client is on Bevy 0.20 (it was 0.19.1) and Rust 1.99.

Last version fixed a hull that could vanish for the rest of a visit after a restart or in MapMake, while the Δv bar and exhaust kept drawing. The renderer was keeping stale draws and could drop a hull whose picture was not ready yet. We were carrying a private copy of Bevy's renderer with that fix in it. Bevy 0.20 includes the fix, so that private copy is gone. The hull is still a mesh, and each paint is still uploaded once and reused.

The seven shaders (force arrows, body glow, exhaust, the idle gate, motes, ring glow, and the coast line) moved to Bevy's new shader language. Same pictures. The old import syntax does not exist in 0.20.

Buttons and hover use Bevy's new UI. A click still counts when you press down, the same as before.

Play at https://slingshotspeeders.com/

I wanted to point this out, because it's easily missed! I didn't even consider doing something like this but it makes a lot of sense! Farther out from the body you move slower, and the slower you move the less thrust you need to change your direction. Pardon me as I go steal the idea for my own delta-V run...

Flying

• Your ship and the HUD are up during the 3-2-1. You can arm the afterburner, kill rotation, and the rest before the clock hits zero, and see the hull sitting on the pad while you do it. The attempt still starts when the countdown ends.
• Obstacles stay drawn once you play. On a fresh load you could see them on the map card, then they vanished the moment you launched and stayed gone. They stay on the map now.
• The ship picture no longer disappears for the rest of a visit. If the sprite pipeline failed, the hull used to stay invisible until you reloaded. It draws as a mesh, so a bad picture does not blank the ship.
• Gravity field. Settings has a field of arrows under the map that show which way the bodies push the ship. Purple is a pull, orange is a push, and the color eases where both meet. Weak cells stay visible and fade out. Strong cells are longer, wider, and more opaque. The field covers the whole pull and fades at the edge, so it does not end in a hard line. On a map with a moving body the arrows stay planted in the background. 9, LB, and FIELD turn it on and off. The choice stays on this device in MapMake, a flight, and VIEW.
• A hold does not make the ship heavier. Cargo Delivery is off the shelf. Clearing a hold no longer loads extra mass, so the engine pushes the same after a hold.
• Phone emote sends the face you have equipped.

Shop and pax

• Twin is a new hull, 2500 pax. Three Twin skins are in the shop for 1500 pax each: Jungle, Liquid, and Rainbow.
• Halloween section. Plague is a Brick skin there, marked SEASONAL, and it is time limited.
• Daily pax challenges pay ten times as much.
• Lifetime rewards are three. 1000 pax for your first map win, 1500 for your first published map, and 2000 for Apex.
• Dailies are Three Up, New Ground, and Drafted. New Ground is a win on a map that is still marked New. A daily only counts when that run's tape uploads with it.

Standings and records

• Your first signed-in win on a map is a vote. Weight is unique wins, times a slow-growing log of the record time, times a slow-growing log of the record delta-v. Flying it again does not add another vote. Guests do not vote. The pilot who published the map does not count, and their run does not set the record used for weight. A map many pilots have finished can outweigh a longer map only a few have finished. That is on purpose: taking the time to win is you saying the map should count.
• Your mark on a map is your best score divided by that map's record, from 0 to 1. A fast map's huge score and a long map's tiny score land on the same scale. Skip a heavy map and that zero hurts more. The FAQ has a search box, and this is written out there.
• A published map stays New until two other signed-in pilots finish it. Then it is Live and enters the rating.
• Your own runs no longer set the record on maps you made.
• Forecast calls close when that window's racing starts, so every call is in before anyone flies. A Forecast pays the fastest pilot who entered. A run from someone who did not enter does not decide it.
• An event is a 48 hour window on one map. The fastest verified time wins. There is no signup grid.
• A run longer than 20 minutes is not scored. Watch can still play it. Replays that are not on a board are kept for 30 days. A tape is kept for every win. A crash or quit is kept only when you spent delta-v and flew at least five seconds. A quit ends the tape on that tick, so Watch does not keep flying after you leave.
• The win card says VERIFYING until the server logs the run. A kick after a logged win keeps the card.

Home

• Home has a Search tab beside Tutorial. Type a map name. Search closes when you open a map, so keys fly the ship. PLAY from Search hides the field while you type your name. The menu opens over the search field.
• The menu is GAME and the site. PLAY is off the game menu. It only reloaded the page. MENU site pages and your name open in a new tab, so the game stays loaded.
• On a phone held upright, the tagline sits above the home tabs.

MapMake

• A body can switch off or on when you clear a stage, and at more than one stage. The trajectory line updates when a body switches. Force arrows hide that body's pull while it is off, so the HUD does not draw a pull the body is not emitting.
• FIELD arrows stay put while you drag or resize a body, and they update in place. They also stay the same size when a body moves on another part of the map.
• MapMake warns when two bodies sit on top of each other.
• LENGTH is the full gold line. WAY is one direction or both. VISITS works on a gate, an orbit, and a hold. Order is numbered dots. An orbit placed after five holds stays an orbit. A hazard kills on the drawn bar.

Watch, VIEW, and reconnect

• VIEW draws every stored run line on that map, including older ones. Where lines overlap they keep a steady stack.
• Watch names the map. The trajectory line stays on the flown path after a burn. On a MapMake map, the ship, its name, and the trajectory line stay drawn at every zoom. Replays and Recent runs show a MapMake map by its name.
• Recent runs is wider, so the time stamp fits. The pilot sits under PILOT. Time and delta-v stay readable past 100.
• Reconnect clears the previous room, so a dropped match does not keep its roster.
• Joining Multiplayer Test puts the orbiting body on the sky the other pilot is flying.

Also

• Win cards, replay banners, and MapMake labels no longer show broken symbols.
• Usage charts scale to the week's low and high. Usage keeps the all-time total across the week, and maps played is its own chart.
• How to play opens with Keyboard.
• Roadmap adds Discord, and Sign in with Apple.
• If the picture dies, the view parks instead of drawing over a dead surface. LibreWolf keeps the picture.
• The chip in the corner says v0.2.5.

Play: https://slingshotspeeders.com/

https://slingshotspeeders.com/

Also checkpoints are resizable as seen in the video. I'll make a proper post about the v0.2.5 in the near future, still a couple tweaks should be made.

The main feature is going to be the ability for gravity bodies to appear/disappear based on trigger conditions. So the idea is to have it so you get pulled into a gravity body, are about to run into it, and once you get close, it disappears and you keep flying.

This will be a core fundamental version of the idea of adding "booster pads" or something, which I won't be adding. Rather keeping it core to the fundamentals of push and pull force emitters. Probably by this weekend. Hardest part will be getting it into the map making system and making map win conditions a trigger. Several bug fixes also coming along.

v0.2.4 is live

The first orbital racing game. Free in the browser.

https://slingshotspeeders.com/

Gravity field

Settings has Gravity field. A dense grid of arrows under the map shows which way the bodies push the ship. Orange is a push. Purple is a pull. Where both meet, the color eases between them. Weak cells stay visible and fade. A strong cell is longer, wider, and more opaque. The arrows cover the full pull and fade out at the edge. On a map with a moving body, they stay planted. 9, LB, and FIELD turn them on and off. The choice stays on this device in MapMake, a flight, and VIEW.

Home

Search sits beside Tutorial. Type a map name. The field closes when you open a map, so keys fly the ship. Dailies are Three Up, New Ground, and Drafted. On a phone held upright, the tagline sits above the home tabs. EMOTE sends the face you have equipped.

The menu is GAME and the site. Site pages and your name open in a new tab, so the game stays loaded. PLAY is off the game menu. It only reloaded the page.

Tapes and watch

A tape is kept for every win. A crash or quit is kept only when you spent Δv and flew at least five seconds. A quit ends the tape on that tick. Watch does not keep flying after you leave. Watch names the map and keeps the trajectory line on the flown path after a burn.

VIEW draws every stored run line on that map. Overlapping lines keep a steady stack.

An event is a 48 hour window on one map. The fastest verified time wins. There is no signup grid. Joining Multiplayer Test puts the orbiting body on the sky the other pilot is flying.

MapMake

LENGTH is the full gold line. WAY is one direction or both. VISITS works on a gate, an orbit, and a hold. Order is numbered dots. A hazard kills on the drawn bar. An orbit placed after five holds stays an orbit.

Cargo Delivery is off the shelf. A hold no longer loads extra mass, so the engine pushes the same after a hold.

Also

Usage keeps the all-time total across the week. Maps played is its own chart. The FAQ leads with account, MapMake, pax, how maps are weighted, and cloud hosting. Roadmap is Sign in with Apple. The chip in the corner says v0.2.4.

Full notes: https://slingshotspeeders.com/changelog How to play: https://slingshotspeeders.com/how

It will help you see what I see, the 3d visual representation of gravity in 2 dimensions, where the pull looks like a dip and the push looks like a peak, and you are like a ball rolling along the plane. Then next I'm going to do a 3d visualization of the gravity forces on a 3d plane.