A sword made of field
Feedback from the studio director, verbatim spirit: the game doesn't feel like a game yet — you don't even hold a weapon. Fair. Fixed. And in the most RACTR way possible.
No mesh. The weapon is a field solution.
Your sword is not a 3D model. It's part of the same world as the planet — blade, guard, grip, and pommel described by pure math, lit by the same sun, drawn by the same light. It glints steel in daylight, and the edge carries a faint shimmer that flares when you swing — because in this engine, even your weapon is made of the field. Wind-up, diagonal slash, settle: every attack, first person, with a little camera weight behind it. And because it lives in the engine itself, the browser build gets the exact same sword for free.
The animations were there all along
The character libraries shipped with Right_Hand_Sword_Slash, Hit_Reaction, Dead, and dying_backwards in every race — unused. One animation-override system later: creatures swing when they strike you, flinch when your blade lands, and fall when they die — online, corpses linger playing their death clip instead of blinking out of existence. Damage numbers float off every hit (crits flare bigger), your camera rocks when something connects, and J opens a proper quest journal. It finally plays like the games that raised us.
The browser build was rendering at 8×8. Yes, really.
The "it's blurry" report turned out to be spectacular: on some loads the canvas reported a zero size during startup, the render target clamped to its 8-pixel minimum, and CSS stretched those 64 pixels across your entire retina display. The fix reads the true viewport straight from the DOM every frame and rebuilds the render target to match — up to 1920×1080 of actual rendered pixels, aspect-correct, with the atmosphere's scattering finally switched on (the tab had been living in permanent night). ractr.com/play is now pin-sharp, sunlit, and holds a sword.
Engine v0.15.0, shipped as alpha 3 — same 24-stage bot verification green, all four physics gates green, 33 unit tests green. One more thing: the game has a name, and it's the engine's name. RACTR.